Looking back at the first day of the Contemporary PR Issues class, I can’t stop thinking about BBC’s video documentary called “War Spin: The Correspondent” and subtitled “The war you don’t see”. This documentary is generally about how the USA and UK governments used PR strategies and the media to justify why they waged war against Iraq as well as to get positive coverage of the same.
And one thing has sunk in my mind. Granted, the war might have been won and Saddam Hussein was ousted but the skepticism behind the invasion will hardly be erased in many people’s minds as the propaganda used will leave a more lasting impact than the “peace-keeping mission” everybody was meant to believe was the intention of the war.
It also just interests me to note how “embedded” reporters travelling with Coalition forces were managed and how sometimes they highlighted in television reports that they were under strict control and unable to say some things as well. Maybe such control was an understandable and even desirable aspect from a military perspective. It is even more interesting to note that many embedded journalists developed a sympathetic viewpoint for the Coalition perspective by being with them so much, which, as the documentary also suggested, was what the Coalition would want.
It is an open secret that military control of information and other techniques have often been employed in times of war to help present a certain picture as part of a propaganda battle and certainly the Iraq war was one such example.
One just can’t fathom how about 100 cameras were embedded across the field; how the world opinion was shaped; how sticking issues were kept off; how a message would be owned and the practitioners would stick to it and how they would simply cope with bad news- certain rules of spinning.
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| One of the embedded journalists |
It was therefore of little surprise that the following were noted in the documentary:
· Embedded journalists allowed the military to maximize imagery while providing minimal insight into real issues;
· Central command (where all military press briefings were held) was the main center from which to:
· -Filter manage and drip-feed journalists with what they wanted to provide;
· -Gloss over set-backs while dwelling on successes;
· -Limit the facts and context;
· Even feed lies to journalists
· -Use spin in various ways, such as making it seems as though reports are coming from troops on the ground, which Central Command can then confirm, so as to appeal real
· -Carefully plan the range of topics that could be discussed with reporters, and what to avoid
As to justify the existence of propaganda, at the same central command, during media briefings, many things were not tolerated such as follow-ups on difficult issues. One journalist even claimed to be threatened by some of the official media managers there to stop asking certain questions, with the threat of not being able to attend. Eventually, this began to frustrate journalists as they were just given little information, perhaps suggesting that you can only control the media, spin information and use propaganda to an extent.
Tracing propaganda and its relation to PR and war
Propaganda can be loosely defined as a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda. Harold Laswell (1971) defined propaganda as "the control of opinion by significant symbols, or, so to speak, more concretely and less accurately by stories, rumours, reports, pictures, and other forms of social communication. There is a need for a word which means the making of a deliberately one-sided statement to a mass audience. Edward Bernays (1928) defined modern propaganda as "a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea, or group. He also defined public relations as "the attempt by information, persuasion and adjustment, to engineer public support for an activity, cause, movement, or institution". It's easy to see how both of Bernays' definitions convey a similar theme.
It is therefore clear that the relationship of these terms revolves around issues of spinning; calls for debates about ethical standards; and there is evident control of messages. The strategy remains to initiate the individual from information recipient to information seeker through reinforcement, and then from information seeker to opinion leader through indoctrination.
From the definitions, it is also evident that both are used as effective communication tools - PR and propaganda are supposed to position themselves at opposite ends of the spectrum. However, in recent past, governments have aggressively used PR techniques to reach the same results that propaganda achieved during the First and Second World War. The Iraq War and the Jessica Lynch's story are only two of many such examples.
The Private Jessica Lynch story
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| Jessica Lynch rescued |
The US media splashed this story [about the “rescue” of Private Jessica Lynch] in April. Lynch was one of a group of 10 US soldiers captured by Iraqi troops. According to the approved narrative, she had been ambushed on 23 March and captured after firing at the Iraqis until her ammunition ran out. She had been hit by a bullet, stabbed, tied up, and taken to a hospital in Nasiriyah where she was beaten by an Iraqi officer. A week later US Special Forces freed her in a surprise operation: despite resistance from her guards, they broke into the hospital, rescued her and flew her by helicopter to Kuwait.
That evening, President Bush, from the White House, announced her rescue to the nation. Eight days later the Pentagon supplied the media with a video made during the mission, with scenes up to the standards of the best action movies….After the war ended on 9 April, journalists — particularly from The New York Times, the Toronto Star, El Pais and the BBC — went to Nasiriyah to find the truth. They were surprised by what they found. According to their interviews with Iraqi doctors who had looked after Lynch (and confirmed by US doctors who had later examined her), her wounds, a fractured arm and leg and a dislocated ankle, were not due to bullets but to an accident in the lorry in which she had travelled. She had not been maltreated. On the contrary, the Iraqi doctors had done everything possible to look after her.
Dr Anmar Uday told the BBC’s John Kampfner: “It was like in a Hollywood film. There were no Iraqi soldiers, but the American Special Forces were using their weapons. They fired at random and we heard explosions. They were shouting Go! Go! Go! The attack on the hospital was a kind of show, or an action film with Sylvester Stallone…
Funny it may sound but my opinion is certainly the US government would have done better to salvage this flawed story.
The following video shows life in Iraq after the war.
Anup Shah, Iraq War Media Reporting, Journalism and Propaganda, Global Issues, Updated: August 01, 2007
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