Page 216 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

the movements and communications of the journalists covering it.
Technology has already overtaken the traditional concepts of war
reporting’ (Ibid., p.150). This prediction has turned out to be wrong.
In the next section we consider a succession of conflicts, culminating
in the Gulf War of 1991, which demonstrate that the control of
media coverage of military conflict for political purposes has
increased, rather than decreased, since the Falklands War. The
success of the Thatcher government in controlling media images of
the Falklands War was not an anachronism, but the beginning of a
trend.

The Gulf and other wars

For the US government of Ronald Reagan, still smarting from the
perceived mistakes of the Vietnam War, British media policy in the
Falklands provided important lessons in how to manage public
opinion in times of military conflict. In sharp contrast to the relative
ease with which media organisations gained access to the fighting in
Vietnam, when US forces invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada
in 1983, and the central American republic of Panama in 1989,
journalists were almost entirely excluded from covering the action.
In the first instance, internal disputes within an avowedly
Marxist regime gave the Reagan administration the opportunity
to remove what had been a thorn in its side for some time. On the
pretext of protecting the security of Grenada’s neighbours, and
the lives of American students on the island, and with much public
relations emphasis on the presence of Cuban troops there (who
turned out to be mainly construction workers), US marines landed
and quickly installed a regime favourable to the US. Since no
journalists were permitted to accompany the troops, official
accounts of what was happening and why went unchallenged.
The deaths of civilians, including those killed during the bombing
of a hospital, were passed off by the military as regrettable
mistakes, and generally represented as such by the media, both
within the United States and abroad.
Just as victory in the Falklands had rescued the Thatcher
government from potential electoral failure in 1983, the ‘success’ of
the Grenadan operation substantially boosted Ronald Reagan’s
popularity in the run-up to the 1984 presidential election, which he
won by a landslide. It also appeared to confirm the value of retaining
strict control of the media in military conflict situations, as opposed
to allowing journalists to roam freely around the war zone, seeing

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