Feud Rekindled p. 22

By: M.L. Stein

Hill and Knowlton exec revives long-simmering dispute of
New York Times op-ed piece that was reprinted by Harper's
A TOP EXECUTIVE of the Hill and Knowlton public relations firm blasted the publisher of Harper's magazine for publishing what he charged was a false and damaging New York Times piece about the testimony of the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter in the so-called incubator atrocity during the Gulf war.
The government of Kuwait was a Hill and Knowlton client during the conflict.
Reviving a long-simmering dispute, Thomas B. Ross, senior vice president and director of media relations at the company, also faulted the Times for allegedly running the op-ed article by John R. MacArthur without attempting to verify its accuracy.
Ross, a former UPI and Chicago Sun-Times newsman, used a forum on public relations' ethics at the recent Kansas City convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) to blast the article as "sloppy reporting," which cost Hill and Knowlton a "grevious loss" of new clients.
MacArthur, contacted by phone, stood by his Jan. 6, 1992, article, which contended that the 15-year-old daughter of Kuwaiti Ambassador Saud Nasir al-Sabah lied when she told the Congressional Human Rights Caucus she had seen Iraqi soldiers take 15 infants from incubators in a Kuwait City hospital and leave them on the floor to die.
The daughter used only the name, "Nayirah" during her testimony. Her relationship to the ambassador was not revealed at the time.
MacArthur stated in the op-ed piece that Nayirah was not even in Kuwait City at the time she said she witnessed the supposed atrocity.The writer said a Hill and Knowlton vice president, Gary Hymel, helped organize the human rights caucus and had a hand in presenting witnesses before it. The Kuwaiti Embassy rebuffed his efforts to interview Nayirah, MacArthur wrote.
Ross declared that published reports after Nayirah's appearance before the caucus substantiated her presence in Kuwait City at the time she claimed. The reports included a statement by the U.S. ambassador to Kuwait, Edward W. Gnehm, who said Embassy officials, citing witnesses, were convinced premature and newborn babies died after having been removed from incubators.
Ross said there was a "reluctance to acknowledge mistakes" by MacArthur and the Times. He added that when he protested the article he was told by Times executive editor Max Frankel and editorial page editor Jack Rosenthal that the Times makes a distinction between the news and editorial pages.
"They saw nothing wrong in not calling us to check the facts in MacArthur's piece," Ross said.
Frankel, through an assistant, said he spoke to Ross concerning only the Times' news coverage of Nayirah's testimony. He said he does not exercise control over the op-ed page. Rosenthal was not available for comment at this writing.
Following MacArthur's article, the Times published a Washington-based story in which the human rights caucus defended Nayirah's concealment of her true identity, saying it was to protect relatives still in Kuwait. Also published by the Times were letters from Rep. Tom Lantos, co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, and Thomas E. Eidson, president and chief executive officer of Hill and Knowlton, headquartered in New York.
Lantos said that Nayirah's testimony was not concocted and that the caucus did not have a "special relationship" with Hill and Knowlton.
Eidson took "strong exception to . . . unjustified attacks on our firm." He acknowledged that Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a Kuwaiti-financed group, was a Hill and Knowlton client but asserted that the connection was consistent with his firm's standards of "ethical and professional behavior."
"It's amazing that they're still trying to rescue themselves," MacArthur said of Hill and Knowlton. "The fact is that Nayirah was lying about the incubator story."
MacArthur, author of the book Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, said he never accused Hill and Knowlton of manufacturing the incubator episode, only "amplifying it."
"Not a single baby was pulled out of a single incubator," MacArthur said.
Furthermore, according to Mac-Arthur, a former newspaperman, all of Nayirah's relatives were out of Kuwait at the time of her testimony, eliminating the need for concealing her identity.
MacArthur attributed Ross's statements and other defenses by Hill and Knowlton officials to its desire to "recoup business losses."
Prior to Ross' AEJMC presentation, the panel's moderator, Susanne A. Roschwalb, a former public relations practitioner who teaches public relations at American University in Washington, commented: "It was not that Hill and Knowlton created Citizens to Free Kuwait as a pseudo organization to represent a cause that is questionable. It is the use of an ambassador's daughter in congressional testimony without identifying her that comes in for censure."