The Messaging Strategy of the Iraq War: Is It the PR or the Policy?

By Bill Berkowitz
Created Sep 16 2006 - 9:20am
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 [1]" (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 d