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In a recent speech to the Veterans of
Foreign Wars, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared
that, "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 U.S. invaded Iraq, the George W. Bush administration
has repeatedly criticised the media for reporting only the "bad"
news from Iraq. President Bush has frequently maintained that
the consequences of the media's preoccupation with negative stories
demoralises 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 an 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 goes on sale 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 sanitised."
Stauber and Rampton cite a
study by researchers at George Washington University that analysed
1,820 stories on five U.S. television networks: ABC, CBS, NBC,
CNN, and Fox News, 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 U.S.
and Western allies died in Iraq -- by six major U.S. 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 United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on
media campaigns that have been spectacularly ineffective,"
Rampton told IPS 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 U.S. military
personnel mounted, stories about the revamping of schoolhouses
and the building of soccer fields were given a backseat 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 that were
enabling terrorism, and how much better the terrorists were in
handling the media, the Washington Post reported that "U.S.
military leaders in Baghdad have put out for bid a two-year,
20-million-dollar public relations contract that calls for extensive
monitoring of U.S. 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 programme
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
Web site.
"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 favourable they are toward U.S. 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
unfavourable to U.S. policy?"
The administration's new maneuvre
appears to be déjà vu all over again. 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.
President 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 Advisor
and current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared on ABC's
"Nightline" and gave interviews to Fox television's
Brit Hume and Bill O'Reilly and to conservative radio talk show
host Sean Hannity.
A later campaign was aimed
at sidestepping the mainstream media entirely by dispatching
administration spokespersons 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 U.S. 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 occupation of Iraq, even the parametres 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 U.S. Right.
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
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Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
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