Page 230 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

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 specu-
lated. 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
4
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
11 May 1982, was rare. For the government, however, all this
5
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’.
Throughout the Falklands conflict there was a fundamental
tension in official information policy. Ministry of Defence advice
issued to journalists on the task force included the recognition
that ‘the essence of successful warfare is secrecy. The essence of
successful journalism is publicity’ (quoted in Harris, 1983, p. 16).
This is not strictly true, however. Publicity, as we noted above, is
now viewed as an instrument of war, particularly by the politicians
who must take responsibility for its execution in a democracy. Thus,
while the military authorities and the Defence Ministry pursued a
policy of non-cooperation with the media, the government as a
whole required media publicity for its symbolic campaign.
Mercer et al. note that ‘from the outset the Prime Minister sought
to rally party, national and international opinion’ (1987, p. 18)
through such displays as the departure of the task force. In the
words of a serving admiral at the time, ‘it was very important to
give tangible evidence of military power to back up the diplomatic

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