Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GLOBAL 'WAR' ON TERROR (GWOT) Years 1 and 2, ie 9/11-2003
Words of Mass Deception from ABC A view of the propaganda machine that brought the acronym WMD to a global audience. How were the arguments justifying war against Iraq sold to the public, and what opportunities did the media have to get behind the spin? Sheldon Rampton, from the US Center for Media and Democracy, is the author of a new book that analyses how the propaganda campaign was initiated and implemented, and he joins The Media Report to analyse how a controversial war was marketed to a sceptical public. The Media Report: 17 July 2003 - Words of Mass Deception [This is the print version of story  ]
Mick O'Regan: Hello, and welcome to the program, where this week it's a case of believing half of what you see and nothing of what you hear, as the public relations tail wags the political dog. & Mick O'Regan: Few areas of human activity are as loaded with symbolism as politics and war. Both involve battling across shifting terrains, physical, emotional and intellectual, and in both the rules are often open to interpretation. In the aftermath of the war in Iraq, there is now sustained criticism of the quality of the information that informed the political decisions to go to war. The Australian government seems convinced that a lot of people have 'moved on', and at any rate, the successful removal of the dictator, Saddam Hussein is in itself adequate justification for the military operation. But to many other people, the failure of the coalition forces to find the weapons of mass destruction, which originally validated the war, plus the details of falsified intelligence, has left too many questions unanswered. One critic, the former United Nations Weapons Inspecting boss, Richard Butler, summed up the problem when he spoke to Tony Jones on ABC Television's Lateline program earlier this week. Richard Butler: The Prime Minister stood in the Australian parliament and said to the parliament and the people that Iraq has, (and I quote him) 'mammoth' weapons of mass destruction. The place has been invaded and occupied and they've not been found. Now one of the key points that he made to support Australia's participation in the invasion of Iraq was that they were seeking to make nuclear weapons. The Niger uranium acquisition story. That's been shown to be completely wrong. John Howard now says that doesn't matter. It's perfectly clear that Iraq was interested in making nuclear weapons, but what is not clear is that this particular claim that was the justification for going to war, was right. In fact everyone knows that it was wrong. The Niger uranium issue was based on a forged document. The British have had to accept that, the Americans have had to accept it, President George W. Bush's popularity rating has declined by 20 percentage points. But our Prime Minister says 'Oh well, I believed it at the time, so it doesn't matter'. Exactly what he did with children overboard. He said, 'I believed it at the time, and it doesn't matter.' Mick O'Regan: The former UN weapons inspector, Richard Butler, speaking on Lateline on Tuesday evening this week. The disinformation that's surrounded the war in Iraq is now a major political issue for the British and American governments, as Richard Butler identified. However the people who put the arguments for war into the public debate aren't necessarily elected politicians who are ultimately accountable at the ballot box. In fact some of the people guiding public information are more likely to describe themselves as 'information warriors', or 'perception managers', people who carefully control the flow and direction of information. Their role in the war in Iraq has been analysed in a new book, to be published next week. It's called 'Weapons of Mass Deception' and one of its authors is an American journalist called Sheldon Rampton. He runs an organisation called PR Watch, which is devoted to analysing and exposing the public relations industry. Sheldon Rampton spoke to me from his home in Wisconsin in the United States, and began by detailing how the public relations firms worked to get the arguments for war taken up by the mainstream media. Sheldon Rampton: Well the first thing they did was a very serious effort to ensure uniformity of message. The White House established an outfit called the Office of Global Communications whose job was to formulate the daily message points that were then sent out by email to embassies around the world, as well as to the Prime Ministers of Australia and the UK, and other sympathetic countries, to ensure that everyone spoke simultaneously and said the same thing. That's the sort of standard public relations tactic for ensuring that your message gets heard. But it has a dark side, because when they do things that way, it has the effect of effectively silencing alternative points of view, and in this case we've seen quite a bit of evidence that the various governments involved did in fact squelch the dissenting viewpoints of people within their own intelligence agencies, for example. Mick O'Regan: Now that's become a major issue in Australia, as I know it also has in the United States, that the nature of the information provided by the intelligence agencies was to quote the British example, 'sexed up', that the political operatives took from the information what they wanted, in order to maximise the political message they were hoping to achieve. But it occurs to me that that probably is normal practice in intelligence isn't it? Isn't there always a sort of politicisation of intelligence? Sheldon Rampton: Well there shouldn't be. What you hope is that they form certain decisions on the basis of realistic intelligence assessment, and then perhaps they try to market those to the public. But in this case, the pressures were so great I think that they made the mistake of believing their own propaganda, even when it is not true, and have made some serious mistakes of judgement that are going to come back, and are already coming back to haunt us. Mick O'Regan: Now one of the things that you comment upon in your book is the significance of language, that the words selected in order to push this campaign to justify the war against Iraq were crucial. Can you elaborate on why language was so important? Sheldon Rampton: Well language of course is a prism through which we see the world. To give one example: take the phrase 'weapons of mass destruction', which has become one of the three pillars of the Bush Administration's arguments for why war was necessary with Iraq. If you look at the US government's own documents referring to our own weapons of mass destruction, for example nuclear weapons, they are referred to by a very different phrase: 'the nuclear deterrent'. If we were to talk about Saddam Hussein having a chemical or a biological deterrent, it would have a very different impact on the people who hear a phrase like that. Likewise phrases like 'the coalition of the willing', or 'the axis of evil', all have the effect of influencing our perception of the realities. Bring up a phrase like 'axis of evil', it evokes memories from the Second World War, of the axis powers versus the allies, and suggests that the countries involved in the so-called axis of evil are part of some united conspiracy against which reasonable nations have a duty to take action. Mick O'Regan: So in that selection of language, what occurs to me as you speak is that there's an effective link, if you like, that what public relations operatives are trying to do is to use key words that will draw some sort of emotional response from the public. Is that how you understand the selling of the war in Iraq? Sheldon Rampton: Public relations and marketing in general are much more aimed at influencing people's emotions than their rational thinking. And they especially like to appeal to the primitive emotions, that's why you see pictures of pretty girls in bikinis used to sell automobiles, or beer, or what have you, and likewise the goal of any good marketer is to engage the emotions of the target audience, rather than their intellect. The reason being, that oftentimes the marketer is engaged in trying to persuade people to do things that may not be in their best interests, and it's always easier to influence people when you appeal to something sub-cortical than if you're trying to appeal to them to do something that may not be in their own interest. Mick O'Regan: Now the other interesting area that you cover in your book is the significance of lobby groups, or think tanks, and you commented in the lead-up to, and during the war itself, many commentators and experts from a growing number of US-based think tanks were not only very prominent in the US media, but globally as well. Can I get you to explain your view of the significance of those think tanks, who they were, and how their operation actually added to the global justification for the conflict. Sheldon Rampton: The think tanks in question oftentimes have close ties to the military industrial establishment of the United States, or to the government. Sometimes they are staffed by former members or former Administrations, and they deliver an essentially very politicised message when they deliver analyses on television about the conditions inside Iraq or the rationale for going to war, or the prospects for going to war. The people who are noticeably absent from television are actual academics, researchers whose careers are built around legitimate study of conditions in Iraq and the Middle East. And so instead you get a highly politicised message, delivered by someone who is identified to the public as an adjunct Senior Fellow at the such-and-such think tank, and it all sounds very deep and profound, and the person sounds like he has excellent qualifications, but in fact the guy is a political operative. Mick O'Regan: Well the other area of course are those explicit public relations executives who've taken on major work for the US government or agencies of the US government, such as the CIA or the Pentagon. Now one of the most prominent of these is a fellow called John Rendon, and the Rendon group became quite prominent in the aftermath of the first war in the Gulf, back in the early '90s, where I think from memory and from your book, one of the incidents that's pointed out is that thousands of Kuwaitis when the American and allied forces came in to liberate Kuwait, thousands of Kuwaitis had small, hand-held American flags and this fellow John Rendon speaking to a group of Air Force cadets posed the question, 'Did anyone ever wonder how all those Kuwaitis got those flags?' and yet it turns out of course that his company had organised that distribution. Now Rendon calls himself an information warrior or a perception manager; can I get you to talk about John Rendon and the work of people like that and their companies, and how important they were in the most recent conflict in Iraq? Sheldon Rampton: Their job is to orchestrate the images that the public sees. Obviously when footage is shot of Kuwaitis waving American flags, the target audience of those images are American citizens. The message being sent is that the people of Kuwait are greeting the American soldiers as liberators. We had a very similar incident in the recent war, when with the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue, which was broadcast over and over again in the United States as something comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall, where masses of Iraqis were supposedly coming out into the streets to express their joy at being liberated, in reality that whole event was very carefully stage-managed, and if you look closely at the footage from that day, you can see that it was actually a very small crowd, and that the square where that toppling of Saddam's statue occurred was in fact ringed with American tanks that had moved in there first before they let in a small crowd to engage in the statue toppling ceremony. The effect of those messages is mostly aimed at rallying public support back home for the war. But the Rendon Group in particular has also played another role that's very important in shaping US foreign policy. In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, the rent-a-group was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency to create a group that they named. They named it the Iraqi National Congress, named it after the African National Congress, for the purpose of being an anti-Saddam opposition group inside Iraq, and the remarkable thing to me as I explained in the book, is that the Iraqi National Congress and its head, Ahmed Chalabi, actually became one of the main sources for intelligence information that was trusted and believed by people like Donald Rumsfeld, and others within the Bush Administration. So they ended up actually taking their cues and gathering their information about what their prospects were inside Iraq from someone who was actually the head of a public relations operation created by their own PR firm. That's really a classic example of people in power believing their own propaganda. .. Mick O'Regan: So, continuing my conversation with Sheldon Rampton, I asked him does a major operation like the conflict in Iraq provide a testing ground for public relations, allowing for the development of new strategies and techniques for implementing information campaigns? Sheldon Rampton: One of the fascinating things to me about the public relations industry, and one of the reasons that I was interested in writing this book in fact, is the public relations industry has always grown side by side with military propaganda. The people who founded a public relations industry, the man who today is known as The Father of Public Relations, is a guy named Edward Bernaise, and he got his start doing propaganda on behalf of the Administration of Woodrow Wilson to support US entry into the First World War. A lot of the techniques that have been developed to encourage us to buy everything from automobiles to slap, have been developed initially by people whose job was to figure out how to influence the thinking of populations during wartime, and I think that's contributed greatly to the development of a propaganda model of communications that affected us in a lot of ways that aren't directly related, or are not seen to be directly related to wars. Mick O'Regan: To turn to the post war scenario in which we now find ourselves, what does the PR movement do now? Is it a question of trying to dampen down information about the aftermath of the war, in the sense that rather than building it up and making it a point of public debate, the reverse now comes into operation, that there's a sort of closure on this debate, in the hope that the public moves on to something else? Sheldon Rampton: Well that's certainly part of it. That's why you had George Bush for example, several times say that the people who are raising these concerns are trying to 'rewrite history'. It's an interesting definition of history when you say that events that happened just a few months ago are already history. And what he's really saying is that he wants the debate to end on this stuff. But I think they're going to have a hard time doing that, because the thing that's really driving the debate is not the fact that some of the information they presented to the public was false, what's really going to drive the debate I think is the mess we're in now, the continuing occupation, the continuing trickle of casualties, the frustrations of soldiers who are in the field and look like they're not going to be able to come home to their families any time soon, that's all having a significant effect on both their morale and on public opinion in the States. So that I think is going to drive the debate as much as the question about specific dodgy dossiers and 'sexed up' information. But the other thing, your question about how this is being spun currently, one of the things that I think is noticeable about what they're doing is that they are trying to reframe the debate away from the question of what they said was true into the question of whether they behaved honourably and believed in what they said. This has been very noticeable for example, in Alastair Campbell's remarks, and his demands for an apology from the BBC. He's not defending himself by saying that yes, there were weapons of mass destruction, he's not defending himself by saying yes, we now know that Iraq could have mobilised chemical and biological weapons on 45 minutes. What he's saying is I believed it at the time. When he does that, he's creating a very high standard of proof that anyone has to meet before they can declare that he did anything wrong, because of course no-one but Alistair Campbell himself knows what he was thinking in his heart of hearts at the moment that the dodgy dossier and so forth were developed. Mick O'Regan: So you get a movement from a notion of public accountability to one of almost private credibility, which of course can never be tested. Sheldon Rampton: Exactly. And it's not a fair thing for a public official to expect of us. What we have a right to expect from our leaders is not that they tell us they felt sincere in their heart of hearts, what we have a right to expect from them is good leadership and actions taken on the basis of facts rather than fantasy. And it really doesn't matter I think in the end, whether they actually believe their own propaganda or not. It doesn't matter whether they were sincere, what matters is whether they're providing good leadership. Mick O'Regan: Now another interesting aspect of your book is that you consider the TV coverage, and we're dealing here with North American TV coverage, and you say that nearly 70% of Americans were getting most of their information about the war in Iraq from all the news cable channels, and only 18% relied on the traditional nightly news. How significant was that shift towards cable news in terms of the ability of the public relations industry to influence that area of broadcasting? Sheldon Rampton: It's significant, because there's a very different culture within the cable networks and those within the traditional networks, and there's even another step removed from the culture of journalism that you see in the print media. The cable networks in the United States are all about ratings, they're all about emotions, there are programs that spend most of their time simply arguing and trying to out-shout people over things, rather than engaging in any serious journalism or investigation or analysis. It's very inexpensive journalism, if you want to call it that, to produce, and again, it lends itself very well to emotional appeals and appeals to a sort of hyper-nationalistic emotionalism on the part of people who support the war. In a chapter of the book entitled 'The Air War', we examine for example, the role that Bill O'Reilly, who has a show on Fox News played, and he had a guest on and we quote a transcript from the interview he did. The guest was actually the son of a man who died when the towers were hit by planes on September 11, and O'Reilly spent the entire interview interrupting this guest, literally telling him to shut up, and finally ordering his staff to cut off the guy's microphone because he simply didn't want to allow the guy to have a say. What's really happening when you see that kind of thing on television is obviously not an attempt to present a balanced debate about different people's points of view, it's not even an opportunity for the opposite side to express his point of view, since they literally cut off his microphone. What it really is, is a way of entertaining the audience, in much the same way that a wrestling show or a sports event entertains them, by giving them the opportunity to watch someone get beat up. And that sort of journalism is driving the political agenda because it's the primary source for a lot of people's information. I think it's very dangerous. Mick O'Regan: Sheldon Rampton, the head of the American non-government organisation, PR Watch, and co-author of a new book called 'Weapons of Mass Deception'. It's published by Hodder Headline. & Mick O'Regan: Now to another new book which we'll consider on the program this week, which looks at the dynamic relationship between media and politics, but this time from the point of view of Australian history. Titled 'Party Games: Australian politicians and the media from war to dismissal', the book details the historical connection between the Fourth Estate and the political elite, and pinpoints the beginning of political PR in Australia. When I spoke to the author, Dr Bridget Griffen-Foley, from Macquarie University in Sydney, I began by asking her to explain the importance of the Liberal party's decision in the late 1940s to appoint a prominent press gallery journalist as its first Director of Public Relations. Bridget Griffen-Foley: Menzies was well aware, and quite envious of the role that Don Rogers had played in cultivating the support of the press gallery for Curtin's wartime Prime Ministership. Menzies was very fortunate to acquire as a public relations officer in the late 1940s, a journalist called Edgar Holt, who had significant contacts in the journalistic world obviously, but he was also someone who was very interested in television as a weapon for political campaigning. Holt came in after the 1949 election, which was an election in which the Liberal party had run a very centralised campaign that had made very good use of radio, and had had the support of significant sections of the media, particularly the Murdoch and the Packer press. So Holt coming in on the back of that, was very interested in television, he was also quite interested in political polling. So you had by the 1950s, quite a sophisticated public relations machine within the Liberal party, even though there was a feeling there that it should always have been assigned more money. But it was certainly more advanced than that of the ALP during these very difficult years in terms of the leadership within the ALP and the problems with the role of the movement. Mick O'Regan: From the vantage point of the 21st century, it's impossible to imagine political coverage without television, but in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, this of course was something very novel. Now I was very intrigued to realise that an American television producer was actually brought out by the Liberal party, a man I think called Hayes Gordon, who came and took seminars, basically taught Liberal politicians how to maximise the advantage that television might provide them. Can you explain or detail Hayes Gordon's role? Bridget Griffen-Foley: The Liberal party was quite fortunate. Not only did it have someone like Edgar Holt, who was very interested in the potential of television for political campaigning, but the Liberals also had the support of media dynasties, and I'm thinking particularly of Frank Packer's TCN, GTV Nine group, so they actually offered the Liberal party some help in training politicians for television performances. Hayes Gordon was someone who did run some workshops for the Liberal party in the lead-up to the 1958 campaign, and Ken G. Hall, of Cinesound fame, was also lent to the Liberals and did offer some fairly specific advice during this period as well. This of course was contrasted with the ALP, which wasn't, in the early stages, making very effective use of television at all, it was really quite tardy in recognising its potential. Mick O'Regan: Bridget, by the 1970s, everything really had changed, and the Liberals' early advantage with television if you like, was sort of lost I suppose in the form of Billy McMahon, whose monotonic voice and his deafness, contributed to his lacklustre television performances, and he was also facing now, an invigorated Labor party led by Gough Whitlam, who was a good media performer. By the time of the '70s, had television become the primary vehicle for media campaigning in politics, or was there still an emphasis on print? Bridget Griffen-Foley: I think there was an emphasis on both. McMahon was about as good on television as Caldwell was, and that's not very. Whitlam was someone who was a very accomplished parliamentary performer, and someone who did project well on television as well, and he was someone quite capable of projecting a vigorous, modern image for the ALP. The Liberal party, which had done so well earlier on in making use of television, was now running a really old-fashioned campaign. There's stories of the Ash Street headquarters having little old ladies stuffing envelopes with 'Not Yet' brochures. Television was now a very important weapon, and this was also reflected in the press gallery as well. Television was well represented in there, some politicians would actually have two separate press conferences, one for the print media and one for the electronic media, so that the times would help in terms of getting good news coverage. So there was a sort of play-off during this period. Obviously the parties wanted good editorial support in terms of press coverage, but they were also very anxious, or certainly the ALP was, to exploit the potential of television. Mick O'Regan: Now Bridget, as we move into the '70s and towards the end of the period covered by your book, one of the things I would be interested in asking you about is that rapport that existed between political leaders and individual journalists, because I was quite intrigued to realise the extent to which John Curtin, during the Second World War, had taken the leading press gallery journalist into his confidence, and in a way subtly reinforced the message he wanted to get out by sharing things off the record, that he knew would actually filter through into the public domain. Was that same sort of rapport between leading journalists and leading politicians evident in the 1970s? Bridget Griffen-Foley: There was certainly still an element of that, and even today we do still have very significant correspondents, what Margaret Simons calls 'God correspondents', and I'm thinking of Paul Kelly, Alan Ramsay, Michelle Gratton, Laurie Oakes, and they are obviously people who are very good at obtaining leaks, and politicians often come to them, or get their staffers to 'leak' stories and angles to them, but the press gallery has changed, it's a much bigger beast than it was in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s. I say in the book that in the 1930s the press gallery consisted of barely more than half a dozen members, and Canberra was such a small town at that stage, that the journalists almost lived just as the politicians did, out of parliament house. So as the size of the gallery has changed, there's probably less opportunities for this very, very close, incestuous relationship between the correspondents and the politicians. Mick O'Regan: Dr Bridget Griffen-Foley from Macquarie University in Sydney. The book is called 'Party Games: Australians politicians and the media from war to dismissal', and it's published by Text Publishing. & Mick O'Regan: And that's The Media Report for this week. But history, politics and the media will get another airing on Radio National on the weekend. On Sunday afternoon at 1.30 in The Europeans, Gary Bryson will consider the new prince of the European media, Silvio Berlusconi. Now the Italian Prime Minister, who's got eyes on the job of Italian President apparently, is currently the Chairman of the European Union, and he has a phenomenal hunger for media, money, football and power, all of which will be canvassed in The Europeans when Gary Bryson talks to the distinguished European historian, Professor Paul Ginsborg. So that's on The Europeans on Radio National at 1.30 on Sunday. Don't miss it if you have a taste for things media. My thanks to the production team this morning, of Andrew Davies and Peter McMurray. Guests on this program: Sheldon Rampton Editor PR Watch Dr Bridget Griffen-Foley Historian, Macquarie University, Sydney Publications: Party Games: Australian Politicians and the media from war to dismissal Author: Dr Bridget Griffen-Foley Publisher: Text Publishing Weapons of Mass Deception Author: Sheldon Rampton, John Stauber Publisher: Hodder Headline Presenter: Mick O'Regan Producer: Andrew Davies © 2003 Australian Broadcasting Corporation |