Page 218 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 197

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBALISED WORLD
Independent, who broke away from the pool system and attempted, with
varying degrees of success, to gain unsupervised access to stories, the vast
majority of journalists present at the scene were subject to the ‘protection’
of the military.
While the journalists were thus constrained from moving freely around
the war zone and reporting what they saw there, the Allies fed the media
with a diet of information which, on the one hand, sanitised the conflict for
domestic consumption and on the other contributed to the ongoing psycho-
logical battle against Saddam and the Iraqis.
In Dhahran, where the allies were preparing their military offensive, a
Joint Information Bureau was established to supply journalists with material.
When hostilities began, this amounted largely to video film of aircraft
undertaking aerial strikes against Iraqi targets. The material appeared to
demonstrate the success of the Allies’ military tactics, while avoiding cover-
age of Iraqi casualties. As many observers have noted, the media war had the
appearance of a computer game. Visuals were often accompanied by exag-
gerated claims of success in bombing raids, taking out Iraqi missiles and
so on.
The Gulf War was, of course, a spectacularly successful military operation
from the Allies’ point of view, presenting an awesome demonstration of the
destructive power of modern technology and resulting in very few allied
casualties. The conflict, unlike that in Vietnam, was quick and clean, by the
standards of the military, serving to justify the restricted information policy
which accompanied it. As John Macarthur and other observers have pointed
out, however, if we as citizens are to ‘take seriously the concept of informed
consent in a democracy’ (1992, p. 150) do we not have the right to expect a
fuller, more complete picture of an event of such importance as the Gulf
conflict?
Those who argue that we do have such a right criticised the Western
media – and those of Britain and the US in particular – for so meekly
embracing the pool system, the sanitised information and disinformation
coming out of Dhahran and Riyadh, and the frequent censorship of
journalistic material which occurred, as in the Falklands, for reasons of ‘taste
and tone’ rather than military security. The media, it is argued, should have
applied its Fourth Estate, watchdog role to the event with more vigour, giving
citizens a genuine opportunity to judge the rights and wrongs of Allied
policy, and the appropriateness of the military response to the Iraqi invasion
of Kuwait. Thankfully, the argument continues, Allied casualties were not on
the scale of Vietnam, but if they had been, or if the conflict had sucked in
Israel, Syria and the other Arab states, would we have been able to give or
withhold our ‘informed consent’?
The media’s general acceptance of the military’s close management and
control of their newsgathering was a product, first, of straightforward
commercial criteria. The experience of the early 1980s conflicts discussed

197