OAKLAND, California - In a recent speech
to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, US Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared, "The enemy is
so much better at communicating. I wish we were
better at countering that, because the constant
drumbeat of things they say - all of which are not
true - is harmful."
Later, during a
question-and-answer session at Fallon Naval Air
Station in Nevada, Rumsfeld complained about
terrorist groups
that
have "media committees" that "manipulate the
media".
"What bothers me the most is how
clever the enemy is," he said. "They are actively
manipulating the media in this country ... They
can lie with impunity."
During the
three-plus years since the United States invaded
Iraq, the administration of President George W
Bush has repeatedly criticized the media for
reporting only the "bad" news from Iraq. Bush
himself has frequently maintained that the
consequences of the media's preoccupation with
negative stories demoralizes the troops on the
ground, and undercuts support for the war at home.
There were few complaints from the
administration at the beginning of the war when
embedded and compliant media filed mostly positive
reports.
In their new book titled The
Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in
Iraq (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006), which was to go
on sale on Thursday, co-authors John Stauber and
Sheldon Rampton assert that television reporters
"actually underplayed rather than overplayed the
negative" in their reporting from Iraq, while
"newspaper coverage during the subsequent
occupation has also been sanitized".
Stauber and Rampton cite a study by
researchers at George Washington University that
analyzed 1,820 stories on the five main US
television networks, as well as the Arab satellite
channel Al-Jazeera, and found that "all of the
American media largely shied away from showing
visuals of coalition, Iraqi military, or civilian
casualties. Despite advanced technologies offering
reporters the chance to transmit the reality of
war in real time, reporters chose instead to
present a largely bloodless conflict to viewers
even when they did broadcast during firefights."
Print journalists didn't perform much
better. A May 2005 review by Los Angeles Times
writer James Rainey of the coverage of a six-month
period - when 559 US and other Western allies died
in Iraq - by six major US newspapers and two
popular newsmagazines found that "readers of the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Los Angeles Times,
New York Times, St Louis Post-Dispatch, and
Washington Post did not see a single picture of a
dead serviceman".
"Rumsfeld's complaints
are an interesting twist of the truth, since the
reality is that the US has spent hundreds of
millions of dollars on media campaigns that have
been spectacularly ineffective," Rampton said in a
telephone interview. "That the enemy has been more
effective in communicating its message to the
world is not so much a reflection of their media
savvy as it is on the ineffective message of the
United States.
"You can't expect a better
messaging strategy to compensate for the fact that
the underlining policy is based on falsehoods and
deliberate deception," Rampton said.
As
the occupation of Iraq proved unmanageable and the
total number of dead and wounded US military
personnel mounted, stories about the revamping of
schoolhouses and the building of soccer fields
were given a back seat by the media.
With
things continuing to spiral out of control in
Iraq, the Bush administration has once again
decided that it's a public relations problem; a
question of propaganda, not policy. Around the
same time that Rumsfeld was on the road railing
about anti-war appeasers and confused critics who
were enabling terrorism and how much better the
terrorists were at handling the media, the
Washington Post reported that "US military leaders
in Baghdad have put out for bid a two-year,
[US]$20 million public relations contract that
calls for extensive monitoring of US and Middle
Eastern media in an effort to promote more
positive coverage of news from Iraq".
According to the Post's Walter Pincus, the
"contract calls for assembling a database of
selected news stories and assessing their tone as
part of a program to provide 'public relations
products' that would improve coverage of the
military command's performance, according to a
statement-of-work attached to the proposal".
Pincus pointed out that the proposal
"calls in part for extensive monitoring and
analysis of Iraqi, Middle Eastern and American
media, [and] is designed to help the coalition
forces understand ]the communications
environment'. Its goal is to 'develop
communication strategies and tactics, identify
opportunities, and execute events ... to
effectively communicate Iraqi government and
coalition's goals, and build support among our
strategic audiences in achieving these goals',"
according to a statement publicly available
through the FBO Daily's website.
"From
what I've seen, the thing about this proposal that
most concerns me is the component calling for the
monitoring of the media, especially when
journalists will be rated as to how favorable they
are toward US policy objectives," Rampton pointed
out.
"Monitoring journalists and
maintaining a database of their stories raises a
number of serious questions: Who knows where that
database will wind up in two years or five years
from now? What kind of retribution might be
exacted against those reporters whose work is seen
as unfavorable to US policy?"
The Bush
administration's new maneuver appears to be deja
vu. As early as September 2003, less than six
months after the invasion of Iraq, it determined
that the best way to sell its policy was to make
its highest-ranking officials - including the
president - available for safe media
opportunities.
Bush gave the Fox News
Channel a 30-minute interview and a 20-minute
on-camera tour of the White House while
then-national security adviser and current
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared on
the American Broadcasting Co's Nightline
and gave interviews to Fox Television's Brit Hume,
Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity.
A later
campaign was aimed at sidestepping the national
media entirely by dispatching administration
spokespeople to talk only to local news outlets.
Another campaign had the administration hiring the
Lincoln Group, a high-powered public relations
firm, to plant positive stories in the Iraqi news
media and to pay friendly Iraqi journalists
monthly stipends.
"In the first chapter of
The Best War Ever, we discuss the failures
of recent attempts by the US to plant stories in
the Iraq media," Rampton noted. "You can't throw
money at a messaging problem and expect to be
effective when the people you are trying to
persuade are deeply outraged at what you are
doing."
Over the course of the war and the
occupation of Iraq, even the parameters of what
constitutes "good" news has changed dramatically.
Early on, the "good" news consisted of reports on
the rebuilding of schools and hospitals, the
delivery of new fire trucks to a small town, or
the opening of soccer field for Iraqi children.
These days, the "good" news has more to do
with whether Iraqi troops have the stuff necessary
to militarily confront sectarian militias, whether
attacks by insurgents have dropped from 50 a day
to 25, whether daily Iraqi civilian deaths are in
the dozens instead of the hundreds, and whether
the situation has descended into a full-blown
civil war or whether a civil war is still in the
offing.
To paraphrase bluesman Albert
King's song "Born Under a Bad Sign", "If it wasn't
for bad news, there would be no news at all."
Bill Berkowitz is a longtime
observer of the conservative movement. His
WorkingForChange column "Conservative Watch"
documents the strategies, players, institutions,
victories and defeats of the US right wing.
