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Mass media: Political propaganda and persuasion
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Mass media: Political propaganda and persuasion
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Students of propaganda tend to pay great attention to the III Reich and to the Soviet Union. Certainly, they were notorious cases, which are evidently close to Orwell's nightmare of the Ministry of Truth. It's important, though, not to overlook, in our examination of these exceptional cases, the official propaganda which is directed at us in our pluralistic democracies on a daily basis. In Britain today, with the wide range of newspapers available, our broadcasters' historic commitment to 'impartiality' and wars being short and distant and touching only the professionals, it is easy to believe that propaganda is not an issue. We know, of course, that political parties propagandize, but equally we know when we are watching a party political broadcast or looking at a party's billboard; we know the political bias of the newspaper we are reading; during election campaigns we expect propaganda and treat it with due skepticism.
It's all too easy under normal circumstances to drop our guard and take the news at face value. Some of us may recall the photo-opportunity in which Thatcher was shown picking up litter in a London park and recall the disgust she showed as she called on us all to work to tidy up Britain; rather fewer of us may have seen the refuse collectors spreading the litter before she arrived. Many of us will recall the ecstatic acclaim with which members of the public greeted Blair's entry into number 10; rather fewer of us may be aware that the 'public' allowed into Downing Street on that day were hand-picked Blairites. Most of us will recall Blair's impromptu speech outside his church on the day that Princess Diana was killed, his groping for the right words as his voice cracked with emotion; perhaps many of us also know that the speech was prepared by Alastair Campbell, Blair's spin-doctor-in-chief.
Maybe that's what we expect anyway. Perhaps most of us are well aware that, in this age of infotainment, politics is a mere simulacrum of politics. Few of us would be inclined to expect that news is a mere reflection of reality; the terms 'spin' and 'spin-doctor' are in such widespread use that most of us are aware that official news comes to us ready-spun. However, even if it is the case that we are so media-savvy, I don't think that necessarily means that the propaganda is without effect. For example, the Conservative Party under Thatcher successfully established Labour as the party of managerial incompetence and succeeded in linking in most people's minds the images of the Winter of Discontent of 1978/9 with Labour ineptitude, largely eradicating the memory of the first Winter of Discontent of 1973/4,which took place under a Conservative government. There were without doubt numerous other factors which kept Labour out of power for so long - the party didn't do itself any favours, there were major demographic shifts etc. - but I believe this one set of images (rubbish piled in the streets of London, gravediggers on picket duty, rats scurrying along city gutters) had a powerful and enduring effect.
In what follows, I shall just briefly mention a few of those instances where the governments of our free democracies have succeeded at least for a time in propagandizing as successfully as totalitarian states.
On August 2 and August 4 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin, 43 North Vietnamese torpedoes were aimed at the Maddox, a US electronic surveillance ship, and the Turner Joy in an entirely unprovoked attack. Within days, Congress voted President Johnson almost all the powers he needed to take the US to war, thereby escalating the US's involvement from the provision of 'military advisers' to eleven years of brutal warfare, the humiliation of the United States and rifts in US society which have still not closed.
The transcripts of the tapes of conversations between Johnson and his defence secretary, Robert MacNamara were not released until 1999. From them it is evident that Congress was misled. The CIA's then chief radar analyst made it clear in 1999 that when he had eventually been able to gain access to the radar and meteorological records, several months after the alleged attack, it was evident to him that there could have been no attack. Even, it now transpires, the commander of the Maddox urged caution on MacNamara, since even he was not at all sure that there had been any attack. MacNamara reported at the time that the Maddox had been 30 to 60 miles off the coast, when it is now known that it was a mere eleven and neither MacNamara nor the President many any mention of commando attacks from the Gulf of Tonkin into North Vietnam, behaviour which might at least have been seen as provocative by the North Vietnamese. (source: The Guardian, April 19, 1999)
If you have read through the previous sections, the parallels with the 'border incursions' by the Poles into Nazi Germany will not be lost on you.
We all know that Saddam Hussein's army invaded Kuwait with the intention of occupying it. What we generally don't know is that Saddam pretty soon realized his mistake and the Baghdad press published photos of Iraqi troops withdrawing. What we generally don't know is that Saddam informed both the UN Security Council and King Hussein of Jordan of his intention to withdraw.
We all know that Saddam Hussein was not content merely to annex Kuwait, but was intent on realizing his imperialist ambitions in other countries of the Middle East, classified US satellite photographs showing a massive build-up of troops along the Saudi border. What many of us don't know is that the photographs showed no such thing. Five times Pullitzer Prize nominee, Jean Heller of the St Petersburg Times in Florida, persuaded her employers to buy commercial satellite photographs of the area - no build-up, no troops, no tanks. Eventually Colin Powell, the US commander admitted there had been no such massing of troops, but by then the war was over.
We all know how the invading Iraqis ripped babies from their incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and left them to die. What many of us still don't know is that this horrific story was recounted to Congress, not by a former nursing assistant, as she had claimed, but by the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the US. The story was a complete fabrication by the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, who were paid by the Kuwaitis to improve their image. The truth eventually became known, but by then Congress had held its vote.
We all know that the Gulf War was given greater media coverage than any war ever before. We had twenty-four hour news coverage on some stations, regularly extended news bulletins on others, news which, unlike the Vietnam War, was not a day old, but a couple of hours only, even just a few minutes. But the US authorities had learnt their lesson from Vietnam, in which television reporting of atrocities and photographs of body bags was widely held to have turned public opinion against the war. In the Gulf, the authorities adopted the 'pool system' which had been developed by the British for coverage of the Falklands conflict. There may have been over two thousand journalists in the Gulf, but only a few were selected by the military every day to visit selected positions under carefully controlled conditions, on their return 'pooling' their story with the others who had not been selected.
Consequently, we all know that the Gulf War was virtually bloodless, except perhaps for the unfortunate attack on the Amariya shelter which harboured mainly Baghdad civilians. The enduring images from Vietnam included a naked girl fleeing from a napalmed village, her clothes burned off her, the Saigon police chief shooting a suspect in the head at point-blank range, the body bags loaded into helicopters day after day. From the Gulf War the enduring images are of smart missiles flying towards the air shafts of munitions depots with pinpoint accuracy, images of a noiseless, deathless, harmless video game played out on the other side of the world. We all know of the horrors of Napalm in Vietnam. Where were the images of its use in the clean technowar in the Gulf? Where was the footage of Iraqis whose internal organs imploded as they were carpet bombed with vacuum bombs by B52s, not super-high-tech Cruise missiles? Where were the reports of the bulldozers burying thousands of Iraqi soldiers in their trenches? It can be argued that 'all's fair in love and war' and that it's better to bulldoze Iraqis to death than to risk losing your own men; it can be argued that it's just unfortunate that many of those who were buried by the bulldozers were attempting to surrender at the time. After all, in the heat of battle, it's not easy to make such fine distinctions. Those are not points I wish to take issue with, rather my point is to signal the enormous Gulf between the representation and what we now know to be the reality. And where was the footage of the 'turkey shoot' on the Basra road, as the Iraqis fled in disarray, mostly in cars, lorries and buses, to be picked off at will by allied pilots long after Saddam had agreed to unconditional withdrawal? (source: Maggie O'Kane, Riding the Storm: How to Tell Lies and Win Wars, Channel 4, January 3 1996)
NATO's 1999 attack on Serbia posed significant difficulties for the spin doctors. It was a response to public pressure to 'do something' about the harassment, murder and rape of Kosovans by Serbian police and paramilitaries, footage of which assaulted TV viewers nightly. We have seen how the US prepared the public for war on Iraq, but the Iraqis had at least invaded a sovereign country and there was at least an obvious national interest in protecting Kuwaiti oil supplies for the West. Serbia, however, was itself a sovereign nation whose police were acting within its borders and acting, they claimed, against Kosovan guerrillas, who, as was certainly clear from press and television reports, sought to achieve the independence of Kosovo from Serbia. However cruel and despicable the Serbs' behaviour, any incursion into Serbia over the Kosovan crisis necessarily involved intervention into the internal affairs of a sovereign country. Furthermore, the planned intervention was to be intervention by NATO forces, not the broad international coalition which had fought Iraq with the approval of the UN. Thus, the attack on Serbia was illegal under international law.
The situation was further complicated by the likelihood that an attack by NATO would be deeply offensive to the Russians, who see themselves as Serbia's historical allies and part of the pan-Slavic 'nation' and, however weakened Russia may be militarily it remains a nuclear power and one at the time under highly unstable and capricious leadership.
It also seemed highly unlikely that victory could be achieved primarily by air power, as it had been in the Gulf, especially as the weather was highly unpredictable and could ground NATO's planes for days at a time. There was every likelihood that in Serbia there would have to be an invasion by ground troops, in terrain far different from the flat emptiness of the Iraqi desert, terrain which would provide more than adequate cover for guerrilla fighters who knew it well, as indeed it had been successfully exploited by Yugoslav resistance to the Germans in World War II. American politicians were haunted by the possibility of being drawn into another Vietnam.
Thus, it was vital to NATO to maintain support for the war over what could turn out to be a very lengthy period, with the likelihood of slow progress. Initially media briefings were under the control of Jamie Shea, the NATO spokesman, but, after the potential propaganda disaster of the NATO bombing of a group of Kosovan refugees, Clinton's speech writer, Jonathan Prince and Blair's No. 10 spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, were rapidly drafted in. Prince and Campbell were keen to ensure that all NATO countries, many of which were less than enthusiastic about Anglo-American domination of the organization, were kept on message and to this end invited top French, German and Dutch press officials to join the NATO team, as well as ensuring that there was at least someone readily available from Turkey and other countries in the alliance. A media monitoring service was set up so as to ensure that all NATO spokespersons knew what was being said around the world and Campbell and Prince organized daily calls to Shea to make him aware of the principal lines of questioning at the media briefings and thus work out together a single coherent line.
At the same time as the NATO propaganda machine was running at full tilt, every effort was made to render Serbian propaganda inoperable, to the extent, virtually, of closing down democratic debate on the issue, certainly in both Britain and France. There was no vote taken in either the French or British parliaments and in the British parliament only very few formal statements where MPs had the opportunity to ask questions were made in the House and parliamentary committees were virtually invisible. In the US Clinton has the formal title of Commander-in-Chief, but has to persuade Congress to vote him the necessary funds to wage war. In Britain the decision is the Queen's, which in effect means the government's, which in effect means the Prime Minister's alone. Reportedly, this was not just another example of the Primer Minister's control-freakery, but a deliberate policy to avoid any statement of dissent which might have helped the propaganda campaign of Serb President Milosevic.
The determination to undermine Milosevic's propaganda became uneasily clear in the bombing of Yugoslav TV headquarters. This seemed at the time a strange decision, which appeared to be the culmination of some rather muddled thinking amongst NATO strategists, who had first demanded that Milosevic's state TV broadcast some of 'our' coverage, then changed their minds, then muttered vaguely that it would be nice if it did, then finally obliterated the TV station. In a war during which the military, as in the Gulf War, had been at pains to emphasize their determination to avoid 'collateral damage', targeting military and industrial installations wherever possible and minimizing damage to civilians, even announcing in advance in many cases what targets would be hit and when so that the civilians could evacuate, in such circumstances the attack on the broadcasting centre seemed an odd decision, especially when no convincing explanation was given as to why transmitters were not destroyed instead, as NATO had earlier said they would be. Indeed NATO spokespersons had made it clear that TV broadcasters were not a target. The attack provoked, as was surely entirely predictable, furious discussion about the morality of such an attack amongst the 'western' journalists that NATO was so keen to keep on message . It was immediately condemned by the International Federation of Journalists and the National Union of Journalists and was sharply criticized by the European Broadcasting Union. I am not aware of any influence it had on support for Milosevic within Serbia, but the evidence from the Second World War is certainly that bombing civilians, far from sapping the will for war, merely serves to strengthen it.
It was argued of course by NATO's politicians and media spokespersons that the strike was necessary to prevent Milosevic from continuing to broadcast propaganda to the Serb people, though it was interesting that the attack occurred not so much at a time when Yugoslav TV's output contained too little 'truth', but rather when it contained too much, of an uncomfortable nature, from NATO's point of view, including NATO's accidental bombing of civilians. The attack was said to be justified under international law if the station was broadcasting propaganda and contributing to prolonging the war, intriguing because it was at just this time that Campbell and Blair were strongly voicing their complaints about the BBC's coverage of the war. Whose propaganda, then? Whose truth? If the BBC reporters had been brought to heel by Blair and Campbell, would the BBC then have become a 'legitimate target' for Milosevic? Not long afterwards the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was hit by several cruise missiles. The US claimed that this was a mistaken attack caused by the military strategists unfortunately using outdated maps. Intriguingly, though, it was suggested by a French radio correspondent that, since the destruction of the TV headquarters, television output in Serbia had contained a number of Chinese films. The correspondent harboured a strong suspicion that the broadcasts emanated from the Chinese embassy, that NATO harboured the same suspicion and that the attack was therefore quite deliberate.
After the war, prolonging his criticism of the BBC, Campbell launched an extraordinary attack on 'lazy journalists' of all types, claiming that they were duped by Serb propaganda. He was quoted in the Guardian (Truth and Lies by Alex Thompson, chief correspondent of Channel 4 News, the Guardian, 12/07/99) as saying
A stray bomb that created a hole in the road was news around the world because the Serbs took the cameras there.
- a cheap and morally fraudulent dismissal of an accidental NATO attack on a column of Kosovar refugees, about which NATO spokesmen initially lied. 'Truth is a strength' says Campbell and Thompson agrees with him on that, but points out that the bigger truth is likely to get lost amongst smaller lies:
If Jamie Shea says, 'It is not NATO's policy to target civilians' and NATO then deliberately reduces make-up ladies and cleaners at Belgrade's TV station to pink mist, I think there is a problem. If NATO blathers on incessantly about hitting tanks all over Kosovo and then the massed ranks of ITN on channels 3, 4 and 5 can find only one - repeat one - destroyed tank in the whole of Kosovo, I think there is a problem. If NATO insists it is hitting high-grade targets yet I see six battery-hen units pulverised outside Glogovac, I think there's a problem. If NATO tells us how it has reduced the barracks at Pristina to matchwood, yet even the dogs on the streets know that the place was empty weeks before, then yes, Alastair, I think there's a problem.
Campbell's problem is, of course, that not all journalists considered it their job to 'hold the public's interest on our terms', in other words simply parrot official propaganda, but rather to examine both Serb and NATO propaganda and attempt to verify or disprove either, in many cases at great personal risk, despite Campbell's claim that they were lazy and did not take the risk of witnessing events with their own eyes. No doubt his personal bravery was far greater, forced as he was to field questions from reporters in Brussels. When so many reporters around the world are arrested, expelled, beaten, killed such an attack from a feather-bedded government bureaucrat seems just another extraordinary example of the overweening arrogance of Blair's government.
By the middle of 2000 it had become abundantly clear that the numbers of ethnic Albanians massacred in Kosovo had been greatly exaggerated by NATO. Following the exhumation of bodies from mass graves within Kosovo, it seems likely that the claim of 100,000 dead will be reduced to 3,000. It appears also to be clear that UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook's claims that ethnic Albanian women were being systematically raped in 'rape camps' established by the Serbs were unfounded. Which is, of course, not to say that 3,000 dead is not too many and one rape is not one too many. The mismatch between the claimed figures and what are now believed to be reasonably accurate figures and the unquestioning parroting of the official message by most media organs must surely alarm any responsible citizen of a democracy.
For further comment, see
Lies
and the Laptop Bombardiers by Richard Swift.
Currently, I'm still watching the developments here. However, I should mention that the bombing of Al-Jazeera's Kabul office is an intriguing 'accident' in the light of the bombing in the Kosovo conflict of Yugoslav TV. Qatar-based Al-Jazeera, unlike other media organizations in many Middle and Far Eastern countries, is not an agent of the state, but, just as the BBC and CNN are generally inclined to present a Western perspective on news events and generally to pay more attention to Western countries than to others, so Al-Jazeera tends to present something of a Muslim perspective and has favoured access to Muslim spokespersons, including the Taliban and Al Qaeda. When Bush called on US media organizations not to broadcast video-taped messages from Osama bin Laden on the grounds that they might thereby unwittingly be broadcasting hidden messages, it was difficult to avoid the suspicion that another reason might be that Osama was mentioning uncomfortable truth about US policy in Israel and Palestine. In the chaos of war, clearly, anything can happen and the bombing may simply have been an accident.
Sorry, that's as far as I got .. more to come some time.
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