Page 228 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

The fundamentally political logic of this approach was reinforced
by the traditional secrecy of the British Civil Service and Defence
Ministry. Military public relations in the Falklands conflict were
handled in the first instance by the navy which, unlike the army in
Northern Ireland, had relatively little experience of information
management. The army’s PR operation in Northern Ireland was
sophisticated and (at least on the surface) ‘open’ to journalistic
requirements (Miller, 1993). The navy, on the other hand, ‘lacked
awareness of the media’s role in war and often appeared [in the
Falklands] oblivious of the political need to win popular support at
home and abroad’ (Mercer et al., 1987, p. 92). Naval PROs’ treat-
ment of the journalists who accompanied the British expeditionary
task force to the Falklands was often dismissive and uncooperative,
to the extent indeed that it frequently came into conflict with the
political requirements of the government, leading to a struggle of
wills between competing public relations departments.
For example, when it was announced that the government would
be dispatching a task force to retake the disputed islands, the naval
authorities decided that no journalists would be permitted to travel
with it. Only the personal intervention of Margaret Thatcher’s press
secretary, Bernard Ingham, and the pressure which he put on her
to recognise the negative publicity a complete ban on journalists
would attract, persuaded the navy to reconsider. In the end,
after heated negotiations between British media organisations, the
government and the military, 28 journalists travelled with the task
force.
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’,

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