5/12/2002 - Entry #43
Look at me, updating two days in a row. Swanky!
I just read on HBO's website that this Saturday, you lucky Americans get to watch LIVE FROM BAGHDAD!!!!!!. It's the gripping and heartwarming tale of CNN's coverage of the Gulf War....starring Helena Bonham Carter and Michael Keaton. I bet that'll be good.
Doing a little digging, it's not hard to find out what the film covers. A large portion is dedicated to the story of Iraqi soldiers ripping Kuwaiti babies from their incubators during 1990. You know the one. The one that turned out to be entirely fraudulent. Yeah, that one.
The story was launched by the testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in October of 1990. It was repeated in the media, and even by President Bush Senior and countless others, and eventually blossomed into a story involving over 300 Kuwaiti babies. Pretty despicable stuff, right? I mean, it was repeated as fact. Awful stuff.
But what doesn't get mentioned in the film, is that the entire effort was a scam by Hill & Knowlton, a Washington-based US public relations firm (indeed, the largest PR firm in the world at that time), and the girl who testified was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington. Subsequent investigations, including one by Amnesty International, found no evidence for the claims, and they were dismissed as false. No mention is made that Hill & Knowlton vice-president Lauri Fitz-Pegado had coached the girl in what even the Kuwaitis' own investigators later confirmed was false testimony.
But still, "LIVE FROM BAGHDAD!!!!!!!!!" (emphasis added) clearly depicts the story as an Iraqi marketing swindle, who use the poor, defenceless CNN reporters for their own gain. No mention is made of Hill & Knowlton, or of the true identity of the Kuwaiti girl. "Live From Baghdad" is a dramatisation, not a documentary.
At a very tender political moment involving Iraq, you have to wonder what good broadcasting groundless and innacurate dramatisations of events that never happened will do, and if the surprisingly high budget of the film would have been better spent reporting actual facts instead.
Both CNN and HBO are owned by AOL Time Warner.
If you'd like to e-mail HBO and express your concern that their questionable revision of history, you can reach them at general@hbo.com.
Further, if you'd like to know more about Hill & Knowlton's vast media-manipulation campaign in the Gulf War, I recommend John MacArthur's book "The Second Front". You can buy it here should you wish to.
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