Page 232 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

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 US 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 and reporting what they liked. Consequently, George
Bush’s first military crisis as President, the invasion of Panama, was
characterised by the same approach to information management.
When US troops entered Panama in search of the fugitive
dictator Manuel Noriega, they too were free of the constraining
influence of the independent media. Martha Gellhorn’s account of
the events in Panama reveals the extent of civilian casualties in the
effort to apprehend Noriega and suggests that many of them were
unnecessary (1990). At the time, American and international public
opinion was simply not told of these facts, being encouraged to
believe that the operation had been relatively bloodless. When
the true nature of the invasion began to emerge, media and public
attention had moved on to other matters.
Like the Falklands War for Britain, the invasions of Grenada and
Panama were, from the US military’s point of view, relatively minor

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