Page 213 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

No non-British journalists were included in the pool, a fact cited
by some observers in attempting to explain the frequently critical
attitudes of the international community to the British position in
the dispute (Harris, 1983). Although the international community
in the end tolerated Mrs Thatcher’s military solution to the crisis,
support was rarely wholehearted, and had the conflict been more
protracted and bloody than it eventually turned out to be this could
have become a serious political problem for the UK government.
Had foreign journalists been involved in the media contingent, it has
been argued, coverage of the British position might have been more
sympathetic.
The military authorities’ reluctance to include journalists, even
British, in the task force was an illustration of the impact of the
Vietnam experience on Western attitudes to military public relations.
In 1977 the Ministry of Defence had prepared a secret paper on
‘Public Relations Planning in Emergency Operations’ which stated
that ‘for planning purposes it is anticipated that twelve places should
be available to the media, divided equally between ITN, the BBC
and the press… The press should be asked to give an undertaking
that copy and photographs will be pooled’ (quoted in Harris, 1983,
p.149). The Falklands conflict saw this policy being applied for the
first time although, as noted, the intervention of Ingham secured the
availability of 28, as opposed to 12 places.
When the pool had been assembled and the task force departed
on the long journey to the Falklands, the military’s unease with the
journalists was further reflected in a general lack of co-operation,
even obstruction, in the latter’s efforts to produce material for their
organisations back in Britain. While all the journalists accepted the
legitimacy of censorship on security criteria, it soon became clear
that they were also under pressure not to report things which could
be construed as ‘damaging’ to the morale of the troops, and that
could show the forces in a negative light to the public as a whole
(such as brawls between soldiers on board ship).
When the task force reached the islands and the conflict proper
began, reports were censored on grounds of taste and tone (the
deletion of expletives, for example, or what were regarded by the
military as potentially morale-damaging accounts of British
setbacks). Most notoriously, television pictures were prevented from
being shown—on the grounds that satellite facilities were
unavailable—for several weeks after being taken. Robert Harris’s
study of the media’s role in the conflict notes that ‘without satellite
facilities, film from the task force simply had to be put on the next

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