Page 208 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

Disinformation is, of course, a form of military public relations
which has been pursued in many conflicts since the Vietnam War. In
1984 the Reagan administration used the (illusory) threat of Soviet
MiG fighter jets being exported to Nicaragua to prepare US public
opinion for an escalation of military aggression against the Sandinista
government (the escalation never came, but the US media and those
of other countries reported the MiG story as if it was true) (McNair,
1988). The bombing of Tripoli in 1986 was justified by alleged Libyan
involvement in a terrorist bomb attack on US servicemen in Berlin,
even though the US government was aware that the most likely
culprits were in fact the Syrians.
In so far as the escalation of the Vietnam War began with the
Gulf of Tonkin incident the Johnson administration may be seen as
pioneers in the use of this type of political communication. It was,
indeed, an enthusiastic exponent of the whole range of military PR
techniques in its efforts to convince public opinion at home and
abroad of the legitimacy of US policy on Vietnam. The Americans
were hampered, however, by the fact that their ally in Vietnam, the
South Vietnamese government, was hostile to the media. As Mercer
et al. put it

they did not see the need to provide the international news
media with necessary working facilities and were uneasy
with the tradition of granting journalists access to troops
and top civil and military officials. The South Vietnamese
armed forces had no concept of public relations. Their
official military spokespersons were usually difficult to find,
and military communiques appeared well after the event.
(1987, p.221)

The South Vietnamese authorities were not, unlike the Americans,
operating within the context of liberal democracy, and therefore had
no need to concern themselves unduly with matters of public opinion.
The US administration, on the other hand, could not pursue what
had by the late 1960s become a bloody and intense military campaign
without at least the passive consent of the population, who had
routine access to television images of the war. The conflict became,
therefore, the ‘Madison Avenue war’, in which ‘the authorities
attempted to put a gloss on US efforts in the field and promote an
image of progress at the expense of all else’ (Ibid., p.235). The
government embarked on an effort ‘to sell the war through a high-
powered public relations campaign’ (Ibid., p.254).

191