Page 215 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 194

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
but they certainly helped to revive the political fortunes of the Thatcher
government, which went on to win landslide general election victories in
1983 and 1987. In this sense, the conflict – and media reportage of it – had
major political ramifications.
Harris also notes that ‘the Falklands conflict may well prove the last war
in which the armed forces are completely able to control the movements and
communications of the journalists covering it. Technology has already
overtaken the traditional concepts of war reporting’ (ibid., p. 150). In the
next section we consider a succession of conflicts, culminating in the 2003
invasion of Iraq and its subsequent occupation by a US-led ‘coalition of the
willing’, which demonstrate that the control of media coverage of military
conflict for political purposes has increased, rather than decreased, since the
Falklands War. The success of the Thatcher government in controlling media
images of the Falklands War was not an anachronism but the beginning of a
trend.

The Gulf and other wars
For the US government of Ronald Reagan, still smarting from the perceived
mistakes of the Vietnam War, British media policy in the Falklands provided
important lessons in how to manage public opinion in times of military
conflict. In sharp contrast to the relative ease with which media organisa-
tions gained access to the fighting in Vietnam, when US forces invaded the
Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983 and the central American republic of
Panama in 1989, journalists were almost entirely excluded from covering the
action.
In the first instance, internal disputes within an avowedly Marxist regime
gave the Reagan administration the opportunity to remove what had been a
thorn in its side for some time. On the pretext of protecting the security of
Grenada’s neighbours and the lives of American students on the island, and
with much public relations emphasis on the presence of Cuban troops there
(who turned out to be mainly construction workers), US marines landed and
quickly installed a regime favourable to the US. Since no journalists were
permitted to accompany the troops, official accounts of what was happening
and why went unchallenged. The deaths of civilians, including those killed
during the bombing of a hospital, were passed off by the military as
regrettable mistakes and generally represented as such by the media, both
within the US and abroad.
Just as victory in the Falklands had rescued the Thatcher government
from potential electoral failure in 1983, the ‘success’ of the Grenadan
operation substantially boosted Ronald Reagan’s popularity in the run-up to
the 1984 presidential election, which he won by a landslide. It also appeared
to confirm the value of retaining strict control of the media in military
conflict situations, as opposed to allowing journalists to roam freely around

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