ROME - In an interview with Arabic broadcaster
alJazzera, President George W Bush's National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice said in 2001 that she did not
want US networks to show Osama bin Laden tapes because
"it was not a matter of news, it was a matter of
propaganda".
Which begs the question, is the US
government above propaganda? Well, it is not. As
former Salvadoran guerrilla leader Joaquin Villalobos
put it in an interview with Inter Press Service (IPS),
winning wars is also about winning the minds of people.
Throughout history, propaganda has been used in
warfare to do exactly that; and the US has also
practiced it extensively, but with its own twist, that
of a democracy that has a free press and therefore has
to disguise propaganda better.
It is one of
history's ironies, for example, that former US president
Woodrow Wilson, who was re-elected as a peace candidate
in 1916, soon thereafter led the US willingly into World
War I. That was achieved thanks to propaganda.
Contrary to what Rice's words suggest, two
recent books imply that a more intensive, perhaps more
deceitful, use of propaganda was in place recently. An
embedded, Internet-age propaganda, piggybacking on brand
name credibility. Real-time transmission, real-time
deceit.
It means that if you use CNN or The New
York Times to selectively present segmented realities,
then the effectiveness of propaganda is tremendously
increased by these trademarks.
In their widely
quoted book Weapons of Mass Deception, Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber argued in 2003 that the US
government used the shock of the September 11 attacks to
justify an invasion of Iraq. Bush counter-terrorism
coordinator Richard Clarke further denounces President
George W Bush for using the attacks as a pretext for the
war in his book Against All Enemies published
last March.
For propaganda expert Nancy Snow, in
terms of purpose "not much has changed [since Wilson's
times]. Propaganda is still used more as an antecedent
to war; in other words, if war is the paint, then
propaganda is the paint primer that makes possible the
total devotion of the public to the just cause of the
state in wartime."
Once the masses have chosen
sides, "propaganda is used to reinforce existing
attitudes more than it is used to change attitudes",
Snow, assistant professor at the College of
Communications at California State University told IPS
in an e-mail interview.
"The primary change is
in technology rather than method," says Randall Bytwerk,
a specialist in propaganda and professor of
communication at Calvin College in Grand Rapids,
Michigan. "It is now possible to spread much more
information much faster."
A second change is
that the mass of information has made it more difficult
for citizens to make sense of what is going on, he told
IPS in an e-mail interview. "The result is that, perhaps
even more than in the past, we look for shorthand ways
of making sense of it all."
In their book
Rampton and Stauber also imply that many independent
media cooperated in the deception. Embedded journalism
showed a partial, patriotic image of the "war on
terrorism" during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Almost
600 journalists were "embedded" with US and British
troops in the campaign against Saddam Hussein, reporting
what they saw from the coalition lines.
The "war
on terror" was the starting point for a standardization
of set phrases like "weapons of mass destruction", "axis
of evil", "shock and awe", and "war of liberation".
Simple, repetitious and emotional, so the propagandistic
concept does not get lost in the mist.
To forge
the message, the Pentagon acknowledged hiring a
Washington public relations firm, the Rendon Group. It
was Rendon who provided the US flags for hundreds of
Kuwaitis to wave when US troops entered Kuwait City in
the first Gulf War in 1991, Rampton and Stauber say.
In an article titled "How to Sell a War"
published in the magazine In These Times last August,
the authors suggest that some of the images of the war
in Iraq may have been cooked by public relations
specialists and "perception managers".
While
that could be true, Bytwerk says "such an approach is
usually not necessary, and a bad idea. It is not
necessary because there is usually so much information
that something can be found to fit. It is a bad idea
because, if found out, which it often is, it reduces the
overall credibility."
This war was more "about
not seeing images", contends Snow. "People in the US
didn't see the same war as people outside the US or as
did viewers of alJazeera - it's all about the disparate
perceptions by the news media in the US/Middle East and
Europe." When on April 9, 2003 the statue of Saddam
was finally brought down in Baghdad's Firdos Square, US
media commentators rushed to assign iconic connotations
to the toppling, ranking it alongside the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989 or the protesters opposing tanks at
Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
"Jubilant Iraqis
Swarm the Streets of Capital", Rampton and Stauber
quoted The New York Times as saying. The main papers and
television channels in the US showed the same scene, and
proffered similar comments.
But a BBC photo
sequence of the statue's fall displayed a sparse crowd
of approximately 200 people, they observe; a Reuters
long-shot photo of Firdos Square showed that it was
nearly empty, sealed off by US tanks.
Their
article also cites various examples of slapdash
reporting, including The New York Times' Judith
Miller's, which came under scrutiny since it was
revealed that now out-of-favor Iraqi leader Ahmad
Chalabi was one of her primary sources.
The New
York Times admitted in a May 26 editorial that after
reviewing their Iraq coverage "we have found a number of
instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it
should have been. In some cases, information that was
controversial then, and seems questionable now, was
insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand
unchallenged."
The awkward articles depended at
least in part on information from Iraqi informants,
defectors and exiles set on "regime change" in Iraq,
people whose integrity has come under public debate in
recent weeks, the paper said.
There are many
types of propaganda, and people related to it. There are
"spin doctors" who seek to ensure that others interpret
an event from a particular point of view. The US
Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and
Associated Terms speaks of "perception managers" in
charge of "psychological operations", a concept
originated by the US military that combines "truth
projection", security and deception, designed to "convey
or deny selected information to foreign audiences" and
their leaders to "influence their emotions and objective
reasoning" ultimately resulting in actions favorable to
the originator's objectives.
"We must remember
that in time of war what is said on the enemy's side of
the front is always propaganda, and what is said on our
side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause
of humanity and a crusade for peace," said Walter
Lippmann, former advisor to president Wilson.
Lippmann, a journalist and a renowned expert on
modern mass communications theory, believed that
perception often is more important that reality. Many
followed suit.
There are also differences
between the propaganda deployed in totalitarian regimes,
where the sole source of information is the state, and
in democracies, where the media and other sources,
including non-governmental organizations, can
counterbalance the government propagandistic efforts.
But Bytwerk, author of several books on Nazi and
Marxist propaganda, says that "even Joseph Goebbels lied
rarely. He preferred to mislead by selection or by
ignoring unfavorable information rather than by outright
fabrication. I think fabrication can sometimes be
justified to deceive the enemy, but not to deceive one's
own public."
With satellite and cable
television, and the Internet, both one's own public and
foreign audiences have access to almost the same
information, language being sometimes the sole barrier.
Bytwerk says also one must distinguish between
"incomplete" and "inaccurate". "That is, it is surely a
bad idea for even independent media to publish
information that would reveal military plans or provide
useful information for the 'enemy'. Incompleteness is
probably a good thing at times [of war]," he says.
"On the other hand, inaccurate information is
usually bad for everyone concerned," he adds. "The hard
thing, even for journalists, is to digest the huge
amount of complicated information in a way that is both
accurate and fair. Independent journalists often have
their own biases."
US: Incompleteness or
inaccuracy? The government rationale behind the
invasion was: Saddam had backed the September 11
attacks; he was also hiding weapons of mass destruction;
the Iraqi people would eventually see the US as their
rescuer. Now the bipartisan commission investigating the
September 11 terrorist attacks has reported "no credible
evidence" that al-Qaeda and Iraq cooperated in attacks
against the US. Banned biological, chemical and nuclear
weapons are yet to be found. Questioned by the
commission, Clarke said that Bush was so anxious with
launching a war on Iraq that they missed the growing
terrorist threat from al-Qaeda. But in an April 2003
opinion survey by the Pew Research Center for People and
the Press, 63% of people interviewed said they believed
the war in Iraq would help the war on terrorism.
"You may wonder why it is that a majority of
Americans still link Saddam to 9-11," says Snow. "The
reason for such a belief is because the American people
were repeatedly told by the president and his inner
circle that Saddam's evil alone was enough to be linked
to 9-11 and that given time, he would have used his
weapons against us. With propaganda, you don't need
facts per se, just the best facts put forward. If these
facts make sense to people, then they don't need proof
like one might need in a courtroom."
According
to Snow, the US government succeeded in "driving the
agenda" and "milking the story" (maximizing media
coverage of a particular issue by the careful use of
briefings, leaking pieces of a jigsaw to different
outlets, journalists gradually piece together the story
and their sense of discovery drives the story up the
news agenda).
"That's also very commonly
practiced," she says. "When a country goes off to war,
so goes its media with it. The news media were caught up
in the rally-round-the-flag syndrome. They were forced
to choose a side, and given the choices, whose side did
they logically choose but the US?"
For Snow, the
funny thing is that "the American public succumbed more
to the stupid propaganda tricks than did the rest of the
world. I think we are a gullible public. We wanted to
believe the best about ourselves and it seemed beyond
our capacity to imagine that we would go to war with a
country without a solid reason."
"At the
beginning of the conflict, there was a less critical
examination of the facts because we were a nation still
overcoming the 9-11 syndrome and seeking vengeance," she
says. "You did not have a vigorous public demanding the
truth. If anything, I think we tend to point the finger
too quickly at the news media when the rest of us should
have been putting pressure on the media and the
government to provide us with a well-grounded rationale
for war with Iraq other than that Saddam is evil and
must go. The public accepted Bush's simplistic rationale
and so the media skipped along to the same tune."
While the US government campaign had an impact
on the US public, the "perception management" was a
failure at influencing foreign audiences.
According to Bytwerk, "It is far easier to make
propaganda at home than abroad. One has more credibility
at home, and much more in common with the audience.
Although Nazi propaganda was not completely believed by
Germans, they believed what their government said far
more than the British believed German propaganda, for
example. All things being equal, most people want to
believe they live in a good country."
In spite
of the worldwide sympathy caused by the September 11
attacks, "given the US influence in the world, a fair
percentage of the world's population will be suspicious
no matter what the US does, whether for good or bad
reasons," Bytwerk says. "For example, many people are
quite willing to believe that the US government itself
knew of or planned the September 11 attacks."
Events also conspired to create a public
relations catastrophe.
Iraqis started rallying
to oppose the US military presence; the Shi'ites joined
Sunni Muslims in fighting against the US occupation
(when news reports made us believe that the Shi'ite
majority in Iraq, crushed by Saddam's regime, would
welcome the US troops); then Chalabi, previously tagged
by some "analysts" as the "George Washington of Iraq",
fell into disgrace when it was reported that he had
leaked information to the Iranians. Finally, pictures
from Abu Ghraib prison, showing US soldiers torturing
Iraqi prisoners, created a global outrage.
Both
the Bush administration and al-Qaeda typecast the
struggle for the mindset as a fight between good and
evil. And it looked like US opponents learnt a few
communication tricks, including the well-timed release
of Saddam and bin Laden tapes.
In April, four
Italians were captured in Iraq. The Arabic television
channel al-Arabiya showed three of the hostages (one of
them, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, had already been executed)
apparently in good health. In the footage, the
kidnappers promised to liberate them if the Italians
joined in a demonstration against the presence of
foreign troops in Iraq and against Italian premier
Silvio Berlusconi's stand on Iraq.
"The
kidnappers' message seeks not to influence Iraq but
Italy," said ruling party Forza Italia's leader in the
Senate, Renato Schifani. Through "terror" and "barbaric
behavior" the captors "are trying to manipulate the next
[European] elections" and "divide the country".
On the eve of Bush's visit to Rome and the
European parliament elections, thousands of people
gathered in Rome, headed by the kidnapped soldiers'
relatives to protest against the war.
Snow
thinks they are "not necessarily using propaganda
techniques more successfully, but rather they are waking
up to the reality that if you want to challenge the
status quo, then you need to study and apply similar
techniques of mass persuasion".
Some of the most
effective propaganda campaigns are the prop-docs like
Fahrenheit 9/11, she says. "Michael Moore and
other filmmakers have figured out that in order to try
to beat them, you need to use the same game board
playing pieces. All of the rightwing critics of Moore's
latest film say that he plays loose and fast with the
facts, as if government leaders don't do the same when
it's convenient to them, says Snow.
