four stages in preparing a nation for war:

http://www.globalissues.org/article/157/war-propaganda-and-the-media#globalissues-org

Award-winning investigative journalist, Phillip Knightley, in an article for the British paper, The Guardian also points out four stages in preparing a nation for war:

1. The crisis

The reporting of a crisis which negotiations appear unable to resolve. Politicians, while calling for diplomacy, warn of military retaliation. The media reports this as “We’re on the brink of war”, or “War is inevitable”, etc.

2. The demonisation of the enemy’s leader

Comparing the leader with Hitler is a good start because of the instant images that Hitler’s name provokes.

3. The demonisation of the enemy as individuals

For example, to suggest the enemy is insane.

4. Atrocities

Even making up stories to whip up and strengthen emotional reactions.

Knightley also points to the dilemma that while some stories are known to have been fabrications and outright lies, others may be true. The trouble is, he asks, “how can we tell?” His answer is unfortunately not too reassuring: “The media demands that we trust it but too often that trust has been betrayed.” The difficulty that honest journalists face is also hinted to in another article by Knightley:

One difficulty is that the media have little or no memory. War correspondents have short working lives and there is no tradition or means for passing on their knowledge and experience. The military, on the other hand, is an institution and goes on forever. The military learned a lot from Vietnam and these days plans its media strategy with as much attention as its military strategy.

— Phillip Knightley, Fighting dirty, The Guardian, March 20, 2000

Miren Guiterrez, editor-in-chief of Inter Press Service notes a number of elements of propaganda taking the more recent wars into account, the “War on terror” and the Iraq crisis. Summing up his short but detailed report, he includes the following as propaganda strategies:

• Incompleteness
• Inaccuracy
• Driving the agenda
• Milking the story (maximizing media coverage of a particular issue by the careful use of briefings, leaking pieces of a jigsaw to different outlets, allowing journalists to piece the story together and drive the story up the news agenda, etc.)
• Exploiting that we want to believe the best of ourselves
• Perception Management (in particular by using PR firms)
• Reinforcing existing attitudes
• Simple, repetitious and emotional phrases (e.g. war on terror, axis of evil, weapons of mass destruction, shock and awe, war of liberation, etc)

Military Control of Information

Military control of information during war time is also a major contributing factor to propaganda, especially when the media go along with it without question. The military recognizes the values of media and information control very well.

Information Operations

The military often manipulates the mainstream media, by restricting or managing what information is presented and hence what the public are told. For them it is paramount to control the media. This can involve all manner of activities, from organizing media sessions and daily press briefings, or through providing managed access to war zones, to even planting stories. This has happened throughout the 20th century. Over time then, the way that the media covers conflicts degrades in quality, critique and objectiveness.

“Information is the currency of victory” an August 1996 U.S. Army field manual. From a military’s perspective, information warfare is another front on which a battle must be fought. However, as well as needing to deceive adversaries, in order to maintain public support, information to their own public must no doubt be managed as well. That makes sense from a military perspective. Sometimes the public can be willing to sacrifice detailed knowledge. But that can also lead to unaccountability and when information that is presented has been managed such, propaganda is often the result. Beelman also describes how this Information Operations is used to manage information:

For reporters covering this war [on terrorism], the challenge is not just in getting unfettered and uncensored access to U.S. troops and the battlefield—a long and mostly losing struggle in the past—but in discerning between information and disinformation. That is made all the more difficult by a 24-hour news cycle, advanced technology, and the military’s growing fondness for a discipline it calls “Information Operations.” IO, as it is known, groups together information functions ranging from public affairs (PA, the military spokespersons corps) to military deception and psychological operations, or PSYOP. What this means is that people whose job traditionally has been to talk to the media and divulge truthfully what they are able to tell now work hand-in-glove with those whose job it is to support battlefield operations with information, not all of which may be truthful.

— Maud S. Beelman, The Dangers of Disinformation in the War on Terrorism, Coverage of Terrorism Women and Journalism: International Perspectives, from Nieman Reports Magazine, Winter 2001, Vol. 55, No.4, p.16. (from The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University)

Danny Schechter, also referring to the article above by Beelman, describes Information Operations more bluntly as being “a way of obscuring and sanitizing that negative-sounding term ‘propaganda’ so that our ‘information warriors’ can do their thing with a minimum of public attention as they seek to engineer friendly write ups and cumulative impact.” This, he points out, can be accomplished via several strategies:

                    ·         Overloading the Media»

• This can be done by providing too much information!
• Schechter gives an example of the Kosovo War, where “briefers at NATO’s headquarters in Belgium boasted that this was the key to information control. ‘They would gorge the media with information,’ Beelman writes, quoting one as saying, ‘When you make the media happy, the media will not look for the rest of the story.’”
·         Ideological Appeals»

• A common way to do this is to appeal to patriotism and safeguarding the often unarticulated “national interest”
• Schechter describes, how Condaleezza Rice and other Bush administration officials persuaded the networks to kill bin Laden videos and other Al-Jazeera work during the initial months after the September 11 2001 tragedy. This is nothing new, however, as he points out; “All administrations try to seduce and co-opt the media.” (and of course, this happens all around the world.)
• Schechter describes the ramifications: “It is this ideological conformity and world view that makes it relatively easy for a well-oiled and sophisticated IO propaganda machine to keep the U.S. media in line, with the avid cooperation of the corporate sector, which owns and controls most media outlets. Some of those companies, such as NBC parent General Electric, have long been a core component of that nexus of shared interests that President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. As Noam Chomsky and others have argued, that complex has expanded into a military, industrial and MEDIA complex, in which IO is but one refinement.”
·         Spinning Information»
• Press briefings by military institutions such as NATO, Pentagon etc, where journalist’s questions are answered and information is presented is of course a form of spin. It is the spin that the military will put on it.
• Journalists no doubt expect this, but true to many media propaganda models, seldom are such “official” statements verified and followed up on, especially if from one’s own nation, with whom there is often a lot of trust. A result of this is propaganda and spin becoming the official version.
·         Withholding Information»
• Of course, the military can often hide behind this one!
• Sometimes from a military operational perspective it can be understood why they don’t want to give much (or any) real details. Looked in isolation from other issues, this seems like an understandable and acceptable military strategy.
• Yet, when combined with the other propaganda strategies, it is another way to withhold information.
·         Co-Option And Collusion»
• As Danny Schechter asks on this issue, “why do we in the media go along with this approach time and again? We are not stupid. We are not robots. Too many of us have DIED trying to get this story (and other stories). Ask any journalists and they will tell you that no one tells them what to write or what to do. Yet there is a homogenized flavor and Pentagon echo to much coverage of this war that shames our profession. Why? Is it because reporters buy into the ideology of the mission? Because there are few visible war critics to provide dissenting takes? Or is it because information management has been so effective as to disallow any other legitimate approach? An uncritical stance is part of the problem. Disseminating misinformation often adds up to an inaccurate picture of where we are in this war.”
• Stratfor, a global intelligence consultant comments on the war on terrorism saying that the media have become cheerleaders as “Coverage of the ‘war on terrorism’ has reversed the traditional role between the press and the military.” The problem with this, as they continue, is that “The reversal of roles between media and military creates public expectations that can affect the prosecution of the war.” Or, more bluntly put, the media becomes an effective mouthpiece for propaganda.

Embedded Journalists: An Advantage for the Military

During the short invasion of Iraq in 2003, journalists were “embedded” with various Coalition forces. This was an idea born from the public relations industry, and provided media outlets a detailed and fascinating view for their audiences.

For the military, however, it provided a means to control what large audiences would see, to some extent. Independent journalists would be looked upon more suspiciously. In a way, embedded journalists were unwittingly (sometimes knowingly) making a decision to be biased in their reporting, in favor of the Coalition troops. If an embedded journalist was to report unfavorably on coalition forces they were accompanying they would not get any cooperation.

So, in a sense allowing journalists to get closer meant the military had more chance to try and manage the message.

In U.K., the History Channel broadcasted a documentary on August 21, 2004, titled War Spin: Correspondent. This documentary looked at Coalition media management for the Iraq war and noted numerous things including the following:

• Embedded journalists allowed the military to maximize imagery while providing minimal insight into the real issues;
• Central Command (where all those military press briefings were held) was the main center from which to:
• Filter, manage and drip-feed journalists with what they wanted to provide;
• Gloss over set-backs, while dwelling on successes;
• Limit the facts and context;
• Even feed lies to journalists;
• Use spin in various ways, such as making it seems as though reports are coming from troops on the ground, which Central Command can then confirm, so as to appear real;
• Carefully plan the range of topics that could be discussed with reporters, and what to avoid.

In summary then, the documentary concluded and implied that the media had successfully been designated a mostly controllable role by the military, which would no doubt improve in the future.

For more about the issues of embedded journalism during the Iraq invasion, various propaganda techniques employed, and more, see this web site’s Iraq media section.