Page 214 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

ship heading back to Ascension [the military base where facilities
were available for television transmission]. In an age of supposedly
instant communication, what were perhaps the most eagerly awaited
television pictures in the world travelled homewards at a steady 25
knots’ (1983, p.59).
Back in London Ministry of Defence briefings, conducted by the
department’s deputy chief of public relations, Ian MacDonald, were
minimalistic in the extreme, often failing to clarify important
information such as the name of a sinking battleship, or details of
casualties. Off the record briefings were not provided, preventing
journalists from producing reports which, if they did not reveal very
much of a specific nature, would at least have enabled the country as
a whole to know what was happening. One observer suggests that
the government’s ‘closed’ information policy on the Falklands was
counter-productive, in this respect:

the failure to brief the media off the record led to all sorts
of difficulties. Unable to check on a number of facts and
lacking any form of in-confidence briefing, the media
reported all they saw and heard. Worse still they
speculated. The result was a mass of information about
ship movements, the composition of the task force,
weapons capabilities and continuous comment about the
various options open to the task force.
(Alan Hooper, quoted in Adams, 1986, p.8)

Official reticence in this respect led to the famous observation
by Peter Snow on BBC’s Newsnight programme, ‘if the British are
to be believed’. This in turn led the government, and Margaret
3
Thatcher in particular, to mount a campaign of political pressure
on the BBC, targeted against its ‘impartiality’ in coverage of the
conflict. As the Glasgow University Media Group showed in their
study of war reporting, the impartiality of television news was
debatable (1985). Coverage in general was normally deferential
to, and supportive of, dubious official claims of military success.
The war was sanitised for television viewers, and the non-military
possibilities of a resolution to the conflict marginalised. Criticism
of the government’s policy, as in the infamous Panorama special of
4
May 11, 1982, was rare. For the government, however, all this
amounted to a kind of subversion, as if the BBC should have
accepted that on this issue the government’s interests and views
were synonymous with those of ‘the nation’.

197