News management in times of warA B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZW(as it has done from time immemorial) became
a successful marketing strategy. At the same
time, the American media looked timorously
over their shoulders at the nature of those who
controlled them: who paid the piper called the
tune, and US corporations, counting as they
did most of American media in their business
portfolios, favoured the war.
In the UK the government of Prime Minister
Tony Blair could not expect the media to fall into
line so easily with war plans – until presented
with convincing evidence that war was justifi ed.
Th is evidence came in the form of allegations
of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs)
capable, so Blair claimed, aided and abetted by
Britain’s MI5, of putting the UK in peril within
45 minutes. Th ese, later referred to by critics as
weapons of mass deception, were never found,
but by this time (if not long before) decisions to
invade Iraq had already been made. Th e truth
had been rendered irrelevant.
Once war is underway, action, rarely analysis,
feeds the headlines. Violence sells, as does
compassion for victims. Th ere are heroes (on our
side) to be feted; atrocities to be downsized or
explained away as the inevitable consequences of
war; and, very importantly, there is the need to
support ‘our’ troops in times of combat.
Eventually, despite the eff orts by news manag-
ers to supress it, the truth will out; although
usually too late for anything but recrimination.
President George Bush was re-elected by the
American people in 2004, and Tony Blair was
returned to government, albeit with a reduced
majority, in 2005. In other words, even though
truth eventually made its escape from the
concrete bunker of news management, the
managers, at least in the short-term, had won
the day.
▶Greg McLaughlin, Th e War Correspondent (Pluto
Press, 2002); Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber,
Weapons of Mass Deception: Th e Uses of Propaganda
in Bush’s War on Iraq (Constable & Robinson, 2003);
John Simpson, News from No Man’s Land: Reporting
the World (Pan, 2003); Andrew Hoskins, Television
War: From Vietnam to Iraq (Continuum, 2004); David
Miller, ed., Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media
Distortion in the Attack on Iraq (Pluto, 2004); John
Pilger, ed., Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism
and its Triumphs (Cape, 2004); Mark Connelly and
David Welch, eds, War and the Media (I.B. Tauris,
2005); Judith Sylvester and Suzanne Huff man, eds,
Reporting from the Front: Th e Media and the Military
(Rowman & Littlefi eld, 2005); Andrew Hoskins and
Ben O’Loughlin, War and the Media: Th e Emergence
of Diff used War (Polity Press, 2010); Richard M. Perl-the title of a book by Phillip Knightley, Th e First
Casualty: A History of War Reporting (Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1975). Th is was revised and
updated in 2000, issued by Prion in paperback
(reprinted 2004), with the new title of Th e First
Casualty: Th e War Corespondent as Hero and
Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo; the fi rst
casualty being the truth.
Since the fi rst Iraq War (1999), followed by the
Al-Qaeda attack on New York and the Pentagon,
and the second invasion of Iraq by American and
British forces (2003), the examples of war news
management have been plain to see; and if they
have not been obvious, there have been books,
articles, TV and radio programmes and fi lms to
analyse these for the public.
Knightley bundles with news managament
‘lies, manipulation ... propaganda, spin, distor-
tion, omission, slant and gullibility of the cover-
age of ... war’ and believes ‘the sad truth is that
in the new millennium, government propaganda
prepares its citizens for war so skilfully that it is
quite likely they they do not want the truthful,
objective and balanced reporting that good war
correspondents once did their best to provide’.
Basically, the strategy on the part of the
authorities – governments – in times of war is
to exert control over what the media can and
cannot say about current military action. Th is
can be done by direct censorship of reporting
(as happened during the Falklands War of 1982).
However, as the media have become global
in reach, as media outlets have multiplied, as
internet communication bypasses national
frontiers, censorship has become increasingly
diffi cult to sustain.
A better strategy is to win the media to your
side by providing access to the war situation,
only in strictly regulated ways (see embedded
reporters). Th e aim is propaganda for the
home side, and the home public; yet the more
complex a war situation, the more public opposi-
tion there is to it (as was the case in Britain and
to a lesser extent in the US, concerning the 2003
invasion of Iraq and the military occupation of
Afghanistan), the greater the pressures to win
a ‘good press’. However, support for war can be
created and sustained if the public is starved of
the kind of information and analysis that allows
them to make up their own minds.
In the US, there was a consensus of media
support for the second war in Iraq. Govern-
ment propaganda, supported by the media
themselves, had made the war a prime issue of
patriotism and loyalty; criticize the war, and
you were deemed disloyal to the fl ag. Patriotism