Home   >   Features   >   Issues   >   Iraq   >   Article     

The politics of propaganda

April 13 2003
By Denis Muller

Sick to death of the cliche "hearts and minds"? Aren't we all. In this war, propaganda has assumed a place equal to the military action itself. It is not just an adjunct to the military effort, but has a life of its own.

Conventional wisdom says success for the coalition will not be measured by military victory alone: a war of aggression requires moral vindication. As such, the propaganda war has had two concurrent aims: to serve the usual military purposes of strengthening morale on one side and weakening it on the other, and the political purpose of demonstrating moral vindication.

With the military aspect so obviously one-sided, propaganda has focused largely on the political purpose.

In Basra, where the military war was won earliest, we saw footage of British forces sitting down with "community leaders untainted by the regime" to begin the task of civic rebuilding. We do not know the basis for the claim that those community leaders are "untainted". We are asked to take that on trust. Crowds and traffic were back on the streets. The reporters dwelt on how life was returning to normal.

Well, wasn't that news? Of course. In the period of uncertainty before the fall of Baghdad, it also helped sell the messages that coalition forces were indeed welcomed by ordinary Iraqis, did mean what they said in wanting Iraqis to take control of their country, and were prepared to help in the transition to peace. The material from Basra exemplified the challenge for the media in discriminating between news and propaganda.

The cynic says nearly everything is propaganda. Journalists are fond of quoting an aphorism attributed to the English newspaper proprietor Lord Northcliffe: "News is something that somebody somewhere wants suppressed. All else is advertising."

Applied to the war, this would have left them nothing to report. So how should they have made reasonable decisions about what to publish, knowing that nearly everything can be turned into propaganda by someone?

One good principle is to publish about the coalition what you publish about the Iraqis. If you publish images of Iraqi dead, then other things being equal you publish images of coalition dead. Another is to confirm all apparent victories and vindications before publishing these as fact.

It is here that the media have been weakest. Umm Qasr has been taken; no, it hasn't. There has been an uprising in Basra; perhaps not. There is a morgue of tortured Iraqis in Basra; no, it looks like Iranians. Evidence of chemical weapons has been found; not proved. And the big one: Saddam is probably dead; on second thoughts, we really don't know.

Of course, what is propaganda to one side is news to the other. Take the US prisoners of war. In the first week of the war, the US Government asked, successfully, the American networks not to show the TV images of those terrified young soldiers, stripped down to T-shirts, under interrogation for the cameras in what looked like a jail. The Arabic-language TV station al-Jazeera broadcast the pictures to the world, and they were shown widely in Australia. When the outraged Americans attacked al-Jazeera for what they regarded as a breach of the Geneva Conventions, the network shot back that it was simply respecting "the public's right to know" - a mantra of the Western media.

Then take Jessica Lynch, the rescued heroine from Central Casting. How fortunate a glimpse of the Stars and Stripes always seemed to be available whenever she was photographed. How fortunate, too, she was so classically attractive. Here the media really did let their guard down. And at the yellower end of the spectrum, the happy fact of her survival was embroidered with tales of what Jessica did, and what Jessica did next.

Propaganda can be a two-edged sword, however. Nothing illustrated this better than the way al-Jazeera turned Donald Rumsfeld's hubris back on himself. There was the Secretary of Defence making bold statements about the quality of precision bombing. Cut to pictures of bleeding, blinded and limbless Iraqi children, with Rumsfeld's words in subtitles. Western viewers knew what Rumsfeld was saying, but why should Iraqis not have concluded - as they were being invited to do - that he had deliberately targeted defenceless children with his infallible weaponry?

If the West has an equivalent to al-Jazeera, it is Fox. It has adopted as its logo "Operation Iraqi Freedom", the official label for the war. Its tirelessly gung-ho anchor people have habitually referred to the coalition forces as "we" and "us". One, Shepard Smith, went so far as to say: "You're an American before you're a journalist."

But for tirelessness, it has proved impossible to beat Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Iraq's Information Minister. No disquisition on propaganda will ever again be complete without reference to the heroic farce of his daily media briefings. For sheer brazen lying in the face of known, visible and audible fact, he is surely unexcelled.

Denis Muller is a senior research associate in the Centre for Public Policy at the University of Melbourne. He was a journalist for 27 years.



War in Iraq

War's over, now for the tough part

US pans 'rogue state'

PM invited to Bush's ranch

America must not make too many shortcuts in Iraq

Quiet achiever takes the hot seat in Baghdad

Iraq's rebuilding under way

US bans media from protests

Into the regime's death machine

Pentagon resists counting civilian deaths

Australia sends in team of weapons hunters

Anbar command surrenders

New order sought for Iraq

Exotic beasts, fine wine and Bush's daughters

Aussies join hunt for weapons

No plans to attack Syria: Downer

The AgeMost viewed articles
From midnight AEST

  1. Rose makes sure it counts