Page 220 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

sense, many of the ‘hot’ wars of the post-war decades were rooted
in underlying tensions between East and West, capitalism and
Soviet-style socialism. There were also wars rooted in colonialist
hangovers, such as the 1982 Falklands conflict; national liberation
struggles, such as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; and the
expansionist ambitions of maverick national leaders, such as the
Gulf War of 1991.
In the days before the emergence of modern electronic media,
military conflicts were covered by press correspondents, whose
dispatches sent from the front lines inevitably lagged behind events
by weeks and even months. By the time the public got to hear about
a battle being fought in its name in a foreign country, it was in
all probability over. Nevertheless, the exposure given to war by
newspapers, limited as it was, meant that governments had to
formulate strategies for managing domestic opinion. Thus, during
the First World War, governments engaged in intensive propaganda
campaigns to convince their populations of the inhumanity and
immorality of the other side’s soldiers (Knightley, 1975). As the
speed and efficiency of international communication channels
improved in the twentieth century, news became more contem-
poraneous with the events being reported, and the importance of
public opinion increased. By the 1980s, one military expert could
observe of modern conflict that ‘what really matters is its effect
on public opinion at home and around the world’ (Hooper, 1982,
p. 215).
In military conflict, as in the less violent forms of conflict which
normally comprise the domestic political process, public opinion is
a factor which cannot be ignored. When Western television viewers
can watch on their evening news bulletins as Iraqi missiles fall
on Tel Aviv, or US cruise missiles weave their contour-guided
path through downtown Baghdad; when military casualties and
atrocities against civilians in Bosnia or Burundi are reported almost
as soon as they occur; and when one side’s victories or defeats
cannot be hidden from the eyes and cameras of the thousands of
correspondents present in the modern conflict zone, those who
wage war know that they must include the impact of media
coverage on public opinion in their calculations. In liberal demo-
cratic countries like Britain and the US, a supportive public opinion
is just as important in the pursuit of military conflict as well-
resourced armies.
In some conflicts, of course, governments can take such support
for granted. During the Second World War it was not necessary to

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