192 The media and politics
with the media; there is a large organisation that performs this function.
Within the White House Office a Counselor to the President is Head of Com-
munications and responsible for overseeing the Press Office and the Offices
of Communications, Media Affairs, and Speechwriting. A high-level official
may be in charge of coordinating the strategy of presenting the administra-
tion’s policies, such as Karl Rove when he held the post of Deputy Chief of
Staff for George W. Bush. The White House Press Secretary is the most high-
profile person, responsible for making regular appearances at press confer-
ences. The government’s concern with the media, however, goes far beyond
the straightforward provision of information. There are many ways in which
the news is embellished. Presidential ‘news events’ are carefully staged for
television broadcasts; the official line is distributed to radio, television and
the press in a highly coordinated way; presidential messages are prepared on
tape for distribution to local radio stations with the content adapted to local
circumstances. However, the ‘management’ of the news sometimes, often in
the most critical areas, spills over into deliberate distortion.
The history of the use of deception by American presidents as a means
of advancing, or concealing, their policies is a long one. Eric Alterman has
described some of the examples of official deception, from the lies told by
Franklin Roosevelt over the Yalta conference through John F. Kennedy’s
handling of the Cuban missile crisis, Lyndon B. Johnson’s misrepresentation
of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Ronald Reagan’s role in the Iran–Contra
scandal to George W. Bush and the war on Iraq. A number of Republicans,
notably Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, had linked
Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq to the possession of weapons of mass de-
struction in order to urge ‘regime change’ in that country long before they
became important members of George W. Bush’s administration. After the
events of 11 September 2001 the administration focused upon the existence
of these weapons and the linking of Saddam Hussein with terrorist groups,
as a justification for the use of force in Iraq. Alterman concludes: ‘The case
Bush made to convince the nation to embark on its first ever “preventative”
war was riddled with deception from start to finish.’ Although there was in-
telligence which supported the view that Saddam Hussein did have weapons
of mass destruction, there were also warnings from a number of sources
that this was not so, but such warnings were systematically ignored. Later
attempts to bolster up the allegations, by claiming that the government of
Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium in Africa or that trailers had been
found in Iraq which had been used for the production of biological weapons,
were discredited. In 2006, Paul R. Pillar, a former CIA senior intelligence
analyst responsible for the Near East, asserted that the Bush administra-
tion ‘had used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a
decision already made. It went to war without requesting – and evidently
without being influenced by – any strategic-level intelligence assessments
on any aspect of Iraq.’ The administration used its relationships with news