MediaWatch: February 1991
Table of Contents:
Patriots Prove Media Myopia
The world witnessed a dazzling display of American technological mastery when our Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) related Patriot missiles intercepted Iraq's Scud missiles. This success should cause great embarrassment to those in the media who spent years trying to discredit the centerpiece of Ronald Reagan's military modernization program. According to the conventional wisdom in the media, SDI was a waste of money that would never work.
ABC Pentagon correspondent Bob Zelnick was typical. In March 1989 the Center for Peace and Freedom asked Zelnick to report on former SDI chief Lt. General James Abrahamson's memo urging development of the system. Zelnick responded: "The day you or anyone else believes that you can influence my coverage by what you decide to parcel out is the day that you have lost touch with reality in more ways than in the strategic system you endorse... we have more important things to cover than Abe's seat-of-the- pants judgement about a virtually untested technology, which no one is about to deploy in the foreseeable future."
Zelnick was notably silent after the Patriot's initial successes, as was colleague Ted Koppel, who gave his analysis of SDI on the October 30, 1987 edition of Donahue: "I think that what is being proposed for expenditures on Star Wars, for example, is absolute nonsense."
Time advocated the dismantling of SDI in order to fund more worthwhile causes, like a trip to Mars. On July 24, 1989, Time declared that "if the President comes out strongly for the mission [to Mars] Congress should be able to find a way to fund it. One option: to siphon the money from Star Wars and other questionable defense programs." When the Bush budget, which included defense cuts, was released in January 1990, Time concluded: "Yes, Bush is finally cutting defense. But with a clearer vision of America's responsibilities in the changing world, he could save even more. Research for the Strategic Defense Initiative could be cut from 4.5 billion dollars to 3 billion dollars a year."
In the January 1, 1990 issue of U.S. News & World Report, Senior Editor Harrison Rainie charged that "the [Reagan] Administration spun the nation out of its torpor with such fantasies as supply side economics, the nuclear weapons `window of vulnerability,' and the Strategic Defense Initiative."
Last summer, the media were prepared to bury SDI once and for all. When the Senate cut a billion dollars from the program, NBC's Henry Champ gleefully reported that "Senators today finally turned their backs on a dream of the Reagan era" and let SDI critic John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists conclude: "I think the epitaph of Star Wars is going to be that we spent 20 billion dollars chasing an impossible dream, and we're finally waking up to the reality of the waste of this effort." In an August 13, 1990 article, Time reporter Bruce Van Voorst dismissed any progress in the SDI program: "After seven years of research, it is clear that no anti-missile system can provide the impenetrable shield against incoming missiles that Ronald Reagan envisioned in 1983."
Reporters regularly dismissed SDI by associating the program solely with an "Astrodome" space-based defense (and degrading it with the nickname "Star Wars"). Because the program's highest aims were not immediately attainable, the steps on the way to the ultimate goal, including ground-based missile defenses, were treated as equally far-fetched.
In a June 11 article titled, "Remember Star Wars? Now It's a Program in Search of A Rationale," U.S News reporter Bruce Auster eulogized that "with the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) succumbing to tighter budgets, reduced military tensions, and a dose of technological reality, both the U.S. and the Soviets have an interest in letting Reagan's dream die a quiet death." He asked: "Can Iraqi missiles save SDI?" He answered no, because "shooting down low-tech missiles in the Middle East may prove as difficult as destroying modern Soviet inter-continental missiles in space." Why? "Ground-based tactical ballistic missile defenses like the U.S. Patriot...would use radar to track an incoming missile. That poses a dilemma. Larger radars increase effectiveness, but also make an easier target for radar-seeking missiles and impede mobility...Given the technical challenge of shooting down tactical ballistic missiles in combat, are missile defenses worth-while?" Auster again said no: "If missile defenses are not practical, or affordable, some countries may conclude that the only way to avoid being hit is to hit first."
The media's revisionists may now be arguing that only a small percentage of SDI funding went to land-based theater missile defenses, but reporters spent the 1980s assaulting the entire concept of strategic defense as damaging to the cause of arms control. In retrospect, arms control might have been more dangerous than the "arms race." Time Editor-at-Large Strobe Talbott denigrated the entire modernization effort last February 12: "So far the Administration's position in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) is, in one respect, still mired in the past. It is designed to preserve, in its redundant entirety, Ronald Reagan's so-called strategic modernization program...the kind of military overinsurance the public was willing to pay for a decade ago looks like wretched excess now."
After the invasion of Kuwait, thousands of stories were produced on the impending Gulf war, but none of the three major networks aired a story on the potential of SDI or SDI-related systems to save American or Allied lives in the face of Iraqi missile launches. Only CNN broached the subject with a September 22 report by Alexander Kippen. The story even discussed Iraq's Scud missiles, and concluded: "This may be the first defense budget of the post-Cold War era, but as it becomes easier for Third World countries like Iraq to buy longer-range ballistic missiles, SDI and other controversial holdovers designed for the Cold War are likely to remain on the front line of the defense debate."
Even now that the evidence is in, as some reporters stationed in Saudi Arabia were being protected by the Patriot missile system, journalists continued to denounce SDI. On the January 20 edition of ABC's This Week with David Brinkley, Sam Donaldson complained: "Well, we spent billions of dollars for these Star Wars systems, and I haven't seen a Star Wars system in Iraq, George. I haven't seen a B-2 Bomber in Iraq." Countered George Will: "I'm sorry, Sam. When you see a Patriot shooting down an incoming missile, you are seeing strategic defense, and you are seeing Star Wars technology protecting little old you....And there's more to SDI than the Patriot, as you will learn to your pleasure sooner or later." Donaldson still concluded: "So far there's been about seven billion dollars to SDI and fortunately the Congress is about to cut that off."
