Page 229 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

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
with, even obstruction of, journalists’ 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 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
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 or
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:

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