Propaganda when Preparing or Justifying War

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

In preparing for or justifying war, additional techniques are often employed, knowingly or unknowingly:

Ottosen identifies several key stages of a military campaign to “soften up” public opinion through the media in preparation for an armed intervention. These are:

The Preliminary Stage—during which the country concerned comes to the news, portrayed as a cause for “mounting concern” because of poverty/dictatorship/anarchy;

The Justification Stage—during which big news is produced to lend urgency to the case for armed intervention to bring about a rapid restitution of “normality”;

The Implementation Stage—when pooling and censorship provide control of coverage;

The Aftermath—during which normality is portrayed as returning to the region, before it once again drops down the news agenda.

O’Kane notes “there is always a dead baby story” and it comes at the key point of the Justification Stage—in the form of a story whose apparent urgency brooks no delay—specifically, no time for cool deliberation or negotiating on peace proposals. Human interest stories … are ideal for engendering this atmosphere.

— The Peace Journalist Option, Poiesis.org, August 1997

(O’Kane’s reference to the dead baby story is about the 1991 Gulf War where a U.S. public relations firm got a Kuwaiti Ambassador’s daughter to pose as a nurse claiming she saw Iraqi troops killing babies in hospitals. The purpose of this was to create arousal and demonize Iraq so war was more acceptable. More information about this is on this site’s Iraq section.)