Page 207 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

maximise the degree of popular support for it. Military public
relations has become an important sector of the opinion
management industry, without an understanding of which no
analysis of modern warfare would be complete. In the rest of this
chapter we examine the pursuit of military public relations in three
conflicts, chosen because of their importance in establishing the
rules of ‘the game’, as it were, and because they have been
extensively researched and written about. We deal, firstly, with the
Vietnam War, often viewed as the ‘first media war’. We then examine
the media management tactics of the British government during
the Falklands conflict. And finally, we consider the experience of
the Gulf War of 1991, in which many of the public relations lessons
of previous conflicts were applied with considerable success by the
United States, Britain, and their allies.

Vietnam

By the 1960s newsgathering technologies had advanced to the point
that relatively ‘live’ coverage of military conflict was possible. There
was still likely to be a gap of a day or two between scenes being shot
and the film flown back to the news organisation’s headquarters,
but by comparison with the Second World War and before, military
events could be reported more or less as they happened. The
availability of such technology meant that the conflict in Vietnam
between communist and anti-communist forces, the latter supported
by the United States, became the first ‘open’ war. So open was it
perceived to be, indeed, that the victory of the North Vietnamese,
and the corresponding humiliation of the US armed forces, was and
continues to be blamed by many Americans on the media which
reported it.
If the conflict in Vietnam became what Mercer et al. call ‘the first
television war’ (1987, p.221), it began in secrecy and disinformation.
During the Kennedy administration troops were sent to South-East
Asia without the knowledge of Congress or the American people,
and their numbers increased incrementally in order to avoid political
controversy. When larger scale involvement was required the Johnson
administration manufactured the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which
a ‘threat’ to US forces became the pretext for stepping up US military
activity. The threat never existed, but the objective of winning
domestic and international consent for a heightened US role in the
conflict was achieved.

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