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
Here is the news: Too much heat... too little light by Peter Preston The propaganda war Here is the news: Too much heat... too little light Wall-to-wall TV, the internet, 24-hour news... Saturation coverage is our only experience of the conflict in Iraq. As the battle for hearts and minds intensifies, is the media helping or hindering our understanding of the war? Peter Preston Sunday March 30, 2003 The Observer There are two interlocking wars here. The first is physical, bombs pouring from the sky, tanks rolling forward; a simple Boy's Own tale of conflict. The other war, emerging ever more starkly as the days pass, is the propaganda war for hearts and minds. Too often last week the link between the two was a stray missile in a market place, wailing Iraqi civilians and bloodied bodies. But that is only one outward and visible symptom of a war going horribly wrong. Where there should be trust, there is suddenly doubt and disbelief. Where there should be hard fact, painstakingly established, there is dodgy speculation and embarrassing error. Where there should be professional understanding, there is recrimination. This media war has swiftly become a fiendishly complex campaign, long on assertion and painfully short on delivery. Too many hearts, too many different minds. Do those hearts belong to Iraqis, required to rise up and cheer their beneficent liberators? Yes, please. And to Americans, clustered at home, following their boys on network television? Yes. And to Tony Blair's divided, doubting countrymen and party? And to a boiling Islamic world; to a disaffected Europe; to a manifestly disunited array of nations; to a massed media hungry for news? Yes, and yes again. But the Iraqis don't rise and cheer. They shake their fists at cameramen or stand sullenly aside. The Islamic world seethes, with regime-rocking demonstrations from Cairo to Jordan. Kofi Annan delivers grim lectures; Jacques Chirac keeps his 90 per cent approval ratings; the poor old BBC is dubbed the 'Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation' by one of its more voluble American critics. And in the US itself, the most hawkish paper of the lot, the Wall Street Journal, concludes that 'the only real antidote to false news is honest news'. Target Rumsfeld. Unfriendly fire in the Pentagon's own backyard. Not even the spin doctors pretend in private that this is going well. Perhaps no professional brand manager would ever try so many spins to so many disparate audiences. Perhaps we shouldn't wonder at the mess. Nevertheless, this is shock stripped of awe. The chosen medium allows no coherent message. The messengers themselves are dazed and confused. In the beginning, a mere 260 hours ago, it seemed a PR masterstroke to have TV correspondents embedded with our invading troops. Their reports riveted instant attention, lending it a raw edge of excitement. You, the viewer, rode into video battle with the marines. Newspaper 'embeds' - trailing behind - had colourful tales to tell, a dramatic improvement on the 1991 Gulf war, where only sand dunes and dessicated briefings appeared on the menu. But a week in, warfare seems to stretch ahead for ever. 'These embedded pieces get to be like shots of vodka,' one senior Fleet Street editor says. 'Drink one and you think it's wonderful. Drink six and you get sick and woozy.' The complaint - from newspaper and TV executives on both sides of the Atlantic - is almost identical. Too much heat and dust, too little light. 'Any large-scale conflict can be viewed through several lenses, with subtly different results', a sombre R. W. Apple tells the readers of the New York Times. 'The correspondent moving forward with a company or a battalion of combat troops will usually get the most vivid picture, with the most telling detail, but it may show little about the overall flux of the battle. Often he or she, lacking the broad view, will be too optimistic or pessimistic'. That's a diplomatic way of putting it. Rumsfeld makes the same point when he says that the 500 embeds scattered around Iraq and the wider Gulf convey only 'slices of war'. But neither of these glosses, however reasonable, reach to the core of what's gone agley. Even in their earliest thinking, Pentagon planners brought the two wars together. They needed and assumed victory in both. Therefore the media war had to be tailored to fit. Powerful media conglomerates were banging on the door, demanding access - more drama than the disappointment of Afghanistan or the sanitised evasions of Desert Storm. There was the explosion of 24-hour news channels. There was the internet, rapidly becoming the prime source for instant news. Could the Pentagon keep this clamour at bay, retreating behind a wall of security and minimal comment? Or did it go with the flow? An easy choice. The politicians and strategic planners were assuming quick triumph. 'We'll be greeted as liberators', said Vice-President Dick Cheney. Iraqis would hail our boys 'like the people of France in the 1940s', according to Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy. Rumsfeld himself was informing press briefings that 'we can go it alone, without Britain' as recently as 12 March. A ring of total confidence. Well-briefed military commentators put the likely duration of the fighting at a single week (as Colonel Mike Dewar, the Daily Express 's battle expert, bravely informed an audience of 90 editors last month). The mood of these pre-war times is precisely caught in a Times lead story only 12 days ago. 'Mass desertions of Iraqi troops and the defection of senior figures from President Saddam Hussein's ruling family circle were gathering pace yesterday as the countdown to war reached its final hours... Even before the first bullet was fired, classified intelligence reports seen by The Times suggest that as many as three quarters of some Iraqi regiments in the area near the northern no-fly zone have fled. Nearly a quarter of Republican Guard, whose loyalty to Saddam has until now been unquestioned, were also said to have deserted.' Those intelligence reports, it prudently added, 'could not be independently verified, but Vice-Admiral Lowell Jacoby, America's most senior intelligence officer and director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, told the Washington Post that there was 'a very real likelihood' that Iraq's military could collapse 'very quickly'. There is absolutely no reason to single out the Times men in Qatar or Washington for special opprobrium. They were two among hundreds being fed similar material and, where embedded, being required to check with higher authority before publishing. They reported faithfully what US intelligence told them would happen. The embeds out in the desert were put there, then, to record a great, heart-warming story of rapid advance: Normandy-style cheering crowds, surrendering or fleeing Republican Guards - and the spectacular demise of Saddam. All in a glorious PR week that would see Baghdad taken, peace protesters silenced, Chirac humiliated and the world made a safer place for triumphal rhetoric. But the slowing of the physical war - and the complete hash of 'intelligence' - has left that strategy in tatters. The 24-hour news channels have seen audiences double in the first week, then begin to subside. Newspaper circulations are following a less exciting pattern - say 2 per cent or so up for the broadsheets before plateauing out, say stagnation or drops for the tabloids. Bush and Blair may vow to go on 'for as long as it takes', but that in no way meets audience expectations, media budgets or the need to fill screentime round the clock. CNN has 'gotten away from taped packages', says Christine Amanpour. 'Keep it moving, keep it moving is what they tell us'. And the inevitable side-effects of immobility are already clear. One - by far the most damaging - is a spreading tide of distrust. Newspapers have begun to chronicle what they call 'official lies'. The Daily Mirror 's catalogue of those - on Friday - totted up a dirty dozen, from the non-defection of Tariq Aziz to the uprising in Basra which didn't quite happen. There are very real problems here. If the Daily Telegraph delivers an eight-column lead story on Wednesday which says 'Bloody uprising in Basra' (and there isn't one) followed by a similarly decisive tale on Thursday headlined 'Saddam sends out his tanks' (and he doesn't), readers are liable to notice. Nobody looks good when Umm Qasr is 'secured' for the ninth time in five days, or when supposedly surrendered Iraqi divisions come roaring back into action. These gaffes, proliferating by the day, are souring relations. The politicians blame 'over-enthusiastic reporters'. The reporters point out that they were fed this stuff by military and intelligence officials - or politicians themselves. How do you make up something like 'advancing columns of Saddam's armour 2,000-vehicles strong' sitting on a sand dune? The writing press, cheesed off by feeling second-best, turns on the TV teams who did so well in the first hours of conflict. ('Poorly sourced rumour elevated to status of major news event' said the headline on a Guardian parody of a BSkyB screen news flash). And both sides, inevitably, turn on the hand that once fed them. Rumsfeld starts to go from hero to zero even to the White House press corps. At first he had all the troops he needed to do the job; now he needs 100,000 more. The Times - like the Guardian - is suddenly sick of ropey intelligence reports. 'Wishful thinking by neo-conservatives who lack first-hand experience of modern Iraq', according to one of their sources. Ted Gup usefully recalls for the Columbia Journalism Review what JFK said when Cuba failed to rally to his Bay of Pigs liberators. 'I don't think intelligence reports are all that hot. Some days I get more out of the New York Times.' The Sun may have no second thoughts, but the chattering classes are whispering behind their hands. 'Plans have been driven by US intelligence', a Whitehall chap tells the Times. ' But we have been aware some time that they rely, perhaps too much, on radio intercepts and satellite photography.' If you want to know what's happening in Basra then, tune to al-Jazeera - or, failing that, attack it. There is one furious row about the Qatar-based TV station showing British PoWs. Lacking all 'taste and decency', according to British briefers, almost as though they were complaining to the Broadcasting Standards Council. There is a second row about whether two more Brits had been killed in action, as the colonel of their Royal Engineers unit told the families, or 'executed', as the Sun, Mail and Tony Blair loudly assert. Thus small spats grow briefly all-consuming. Do we show pictures of dead British boys or only dead Iraqis? Is the Telegraph right to pin everything on Saddam, as in 'Saddam fires on fleeing Basra Iraqis'? (The old boy sure gets around). Media pimple issues replace the big picture. Even grisly events, such as the first accidental bombing of Baghdad market, tend to lose proportion as Robert Fisk goes hyperbolic across two-thirds of an Independent front page.) The Mirror, meanwhile, runs two pages of George Bush 'smirking'. It doesn't bode well for the 'long months' of struggle the briefers are talking about now. In any practical reality, perhaps, the better things in the media war would predominate. The sacrifice of brave reporters such as Terry Lloyd of ITN. The continuing brilliance of brave correspondents such as Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian, Ross Benson of the Mail, Chris Ayres of the Times, and many more besides. Is General Sir Michael Rose right when he tells the Mail we need nine attackers to every defender before we can take Baghdad? Or is General Sir Peter de la Billiere - six pages on - right to doubt Baghdad will ever 'be seized street by bloody street'? It may be that the campaign for hearts and minds will come together, but not yet in the Middle East, where the press is vitriolic, and not yet in Europe, where 91 per cent of Spaniards now oppose their Prime Minister. Not yet, either, in newspaper and TV comment round the globe. (Strange how bombing TV stations tends to raise such hackles!) None of the hearts and none of the minds on that original checklist is secure. You can hope to win the physical war. But the media campaign, built on a flawed assumption that can't be dis-embedded now, will be much tougher - indeed, a senior Minister says, may already be a 'problem'. If, for reporters and their readers, there is one thing worse than the fog of war, it is the queasy perception that those in charge of the shooting match haven't the foggiest idea what's going on. |