Second Front

The publisher of Harper's magazine here decries what he sees as the Pentagon's efforts to sanitize the Gulf war. First he reviews the Defense Department's technique during Grenada of creating a media pool and ensuring that it arrived after the action, and in Panama of virtually imprisoning the pool on an army base. He then turns to ``Operation Desert Muzzle,'' as he calls it, a ``devastating and immoral victory'' for military censorship and a ``crushing defeat'' for the press and the First Amendment. MacArthur expresses revulsion at the media's timid acquiescence to the Pentagon's tight control of news, combined with its ``out-and-out boosterism and jingoism.'' He criticizes Dan Rather's casual but heartfelt ``salute to our young men and women out there'' as offensive. In a final scene, for which his puzzling metaphor is Nathanael West's Day of the Locust , MacArthur describes how reporters at a postwar Washington banquet fawned over Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf: `` . . . the Fourth Estate bowing to a man who had treated them with contempt.'' The tendency in the media, the author warns in this somewhat shrill treatise, is toward more and more supine, ``suck-up'' coverage of military operations. (June)