Hotel Warriors Covering the Gulf War Author:John J. Fialka John J. Fialka's Hotel Warriors is based on his own experiences as a reporter and those of over a hundred fellow journalists who covered the Gulf War. The book is a candid and sometimes alarming account of what it was like reporting - and living - the war. It describes the "delays, denials, and deformation of media coverage," wrote Elizabeth Poc... more »hoda in The Nation. Fialka describes the media as an indigestible lump fed into a military media-handling system that was woefully short of resources and teetering on the verge of collapse.
In the Civil War, accounts of the Battle of Bull Run reached New York in 24 hours; stories of the Gulf war took three to four days - sometimes two weeks - just to get from the battlefield to nearby press headquarters at the Dhahran International Hotel before being transmitted around the world.
When one reporter discovered that her courier, the Army driver assigned to bring her videotape back from the front, couldn't read maps, she became convinced that there was little or no chance of her war stories getting back in time to be aired. "I came back to Dhahran absolutely heartbroken, but there I was on television constantly. There was every incentive in this war to be a hotel warrior."
The public's view of what worked and what didn't in the Gulf War will drive major federal budget decisions for years to come. But this was a war where the military controlled most of the evidence, and the Army commanders' paranoid fear of the media helped bury one of the most positive Army stories since World War II. Fialka's engaging book blames the media as well as the military and offers a tour into the labyrinth where the media and the Pentagon are pinned down in a kind of static battle to see how the next war will be covered.« less