Hotel Warriors-The Business of Covering War

The business of Covering War is chapter one in Hotel Warriors by, John Fialka. It was interesting to see how news coverage of the war took place. It is important to note that much of what the army accomplished is missions was not widely covered by the journalists partly because the army had a distrust of the media that dated back to the Vietnam conflict. The marines who were far fewer in number and accomplishments achieved far more media coverage than the army because they had better public relation skills. It is also important to know that there was far more journalists covering the gulf war than there had previously ever been during a war. Getting the story out first was the main goal of the journalists but the spread of information was delayed or sometimes never reached its destination which was various television programs and newspapers so that when information reached its destination it was often outdated, and had no use. I was amazed by the amount of information, tapes and photos video footage that went unused because it was outdated by the time it reached its destination. For the large part the American public was oblivious to what was going on in the battlefield because of poor technology available to the journalist to transmit their stories, where as the British press were able to transmit their information in a rapid manner because they had support of the British Army.