PR and journalism in the time of war – An uneasy relationship

War is by definition violent, bloody, ugly and gruesome. It’s a PR job to convince the people at home that it’s necessary.  

To do this job it is necessary to work with, and the PR practitioners find themselves in a bit of a catch-22. PR needs journalism to report stories that will make the people at home support the war, but by letting them have information and access to the front, they might lose control and end up with stories the world over damning the war.¨

The images of war

Pictures make the whole difference. They say a picture says more than a thousand words, and it is never truer than in wartime journalism.

There have been war reporting for as long as there has been journalism, but before the invention of the telegraph, the news was often not published until long after the events described, and contained few, if any, photographs.

With the new camera technology and moving images, the Second World War became the first war the people at home could SEE. But as cameras were still big and bulky, most of the images and footage was filmed by the army themselves, used in propaganda reports designed to boost morale at home. War journalists in those days mostly saw themselves as a part of the war effort, and happily kept in line with military policy.

As Hitler’s brutality spread across Europe, PR practitioners in Britain didn’t have a particularly difficult job getting across the message that the war was necessary.

In search of the truth

By the 1960s journalism had changed, and the wartime PR-business had failed to notice. Armed with SLRs and film cameras, independent journalists roamed free in Vietnam, reporting back on a war that was much harder to sell back home.

The journalists themselves were not playing ball anymore with the propaganda efforts. Showing the “true face of the war” was the new goal, and especially photojournalism became a nightmare for the American government.

Apart from maybe the Second World War, the Vietnam War is one of the most visually iconic wars in history. As striking photographs and film of Vietnamese suffering, and American brutality reached the American people, the protests and anti-war movement grew to astronomical hights.

This image, taken photographer by Nick Ut, of a little naked girl running away from a napalm attack won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972.  The girl’s story and new of the horrific burn damages to her back, was spread around the world. For the American administration it was a PR disaster.

Also on the home front was photojournalism a nuisance for the government. Millions of protesters make for striking visuals, and young girls putting flowers into guns is not something you forget easily

Blackout

American trust in war time journalism was none-existent after the war finally ended, and in the subsequent conflict, the invasion of Grenada in 1983, the US government decided that no journalists would be allowed in. “The Grenada Blackout” was seen by many as a direct result of the PR disaster that was the Vietnam war. The Reagan administration claimed that the Grenada invasion was a “special case” where media participation was not “appropriate”. (You can read more here)

This approach might work on the invasion of a small Caribbean island (an invasion that by the way had a lot of support in the US), but as the first Gulf War loomed, the PR machinery had to come up with a new strategy.

Strickt control

By 1991 we had mass media, including live coverage of the bombs raining over the enemy . The war was hailed as a “technological war” where the new weapons were so precise that there would be hardly any civilian loss of life

Still not wanting to lose control over what the media was reporting, they preferred keeping them in warehouses far away from the actual front, feeding them exactly the news they wanted to get out.

This strategy received a lot of criticism, and both the media and the people were suspicious that they were being kept in the dark, not allowed to know the “real truth”.

Embedded journalism

When the Bush-administration was gearing up for the war on Iraq, allegedly saving the world from Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, yet another PR strategy was implemented: Embedded journalism.

The PR people promised journalists full access to the front line, and the freedom to see experience exactly what the soldiers experienced, many journalists felt this was finally a good way of cooperation between the military and the media. The embedded journalists were in addition to those who stayed at the media headquarter, very much in the same style as the 1991 gulf war, being fed carefully selected bits of information.

The very bravest went in to Iraq as independent reporters, without military back-up. And although they undoubtedly got other angles and stories the military would rather be without, the practice is extremely dangerous and many paid with their lives (several as a result of friendly fire), including ITVs Terry Lloyd.

A success?

War is an ethical minefield for PR practitioners. You are required to routinely lie, mislead, keep journalists in check and hide any facts that might swing the public opinion against the war effort.

In many ways embedding journalists have been a PR success. It is obvious that it is hard for journalists to report negative stories of the men they live, sleep and sometimes risk their lives with. They come back with spectacular action shots of war, and it’s often even harder to know what is really going one, while you’re in the middle of it.

Whether it is a brilliant deal for the free press, is another story.

Here's a short, but quite good little documentary on the history of war correspondents: