15:53.

BBC WORLD SERVICE: SPINNING TO WIN (11 AUGUST 2003)







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Robin Lustig: In times of war, it's not only soldiers who go into battle; so
too do journalists and politicians.



""What we wish to secure is Argentine withdrawal. We've tried for eight
weeks through the Security Council...''



""The difference between interviewing somebody in the safety of the
Pentagon and being caught in an ambush with a bunch of teenagers is immense.''




""It's a helluva thing having some reporter sitting on your right-hand side
as a forward commander when you're making decisions about life and death.''



In this episode of the BBC's Spinning to Win, I'll be looking at what
happens when war is over … in Iraq and elsewhere. Is spinning to win the peace
even more difficult than spinning to win the war? What lessons should we learn
as politicians, soldiers and journalists look back at conflict and examine the
role that they played.



""Our aim is to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and make our world
more secure. The justice of our cause lies in the liberation of the Iraqi
people and to them we say, we will liberate you; the day of your freedom draws
near.''



Professor John McRae: That's the tone, rather like a preacher, giving lots of
pauses for the emotive message to sink in.



Robin Lustig: Professor John McRae is an expert on the art of political
rhetoric at the University of Nottingham. He says the tone as well as the
language that politicians like Tony Blair use is all part of the message they
spin.



Professor John McRae: He's playing this wholly on emotion. And you notice that
when he talks about the weapons of mass destruction there … sideline: of
course we're doing something about weapons of mass destruction … but the
emotive words like "liberation' and "liberty, freedom, justice of our cause',
he's trying to establish a congregation that believes in what he's saying. So
this is a tone of promise, it's a tone of faith, it's almost a preacher's
tone.



""American army is moving at will across whole swathes of Baghdad. This is
just one of the many...''



Robin Lustig: Less than two weeks later, it looked as if Tony Blair's promise
of liberation for the Iraqi people had been delivered.



""...taking place across the whole of the Iraqi capital today.''



""The welcome here has been pretty good. Everybody's helped us out, been
friendly so...''



Then in front of the lenses of the world's television cameras, a giant
statue of Saddam Hussein was brought crashing down.



""The symbolism of this moment just can't be over-estimated. It's just,
with all the...''



Lindsey Hilsum: It was a staged event. The Americans clearly decided that it
was a good thing to do because it would be on prime time television and it
would symbolise the moment when they removed Saddam Hussein.



Robin Lustig: Lindsey Hilsum reported from Baghdad throughout the war for
Britain's Channel Four TV network.



Lindsey Hilsum: But it was not a mass popular thing amongst Iraqis to pull the
statue down. The Iraqis were defacing pictures of Saddam Hussein and so on but
that statue was for American consumption.



""The truth is nobody believes a word now that the Prime Minister...''



Jean Seaton: Wars are about as risky as politics go.



Robin Lustig: Jean Seaton, professor of media history at Westminster
University.



""The truth is some people resent the fact it was right to go to conflict;
we won the conflict...''



Jean Seaton: They really really really sear politicians' futures and of course
sometimes they go well. So the Falklands war left Mrs Thatcher who had been
the most unpopular prime minister since the Second World War, winning the
Falklands war gave her the head of steam and made her popular.

The Iraq war has had a rather different effect, I think probably on this
government.

So you can't, as you go into a war, even if you come out of it fairly well,
know how it's going to play out in terms of politics. And wars are of course
always fabulously political.



Robin Lustig: The political risks became clear within weeks of the end of the
war. Where were the weapons of mass destruction which both President Bush and
Prime Minister Blair had spoken of so often before the war? If it had been
relatively easy to persuade people before the conflict that they did exist, it
became evermore difficult after the war, with tens of thousands of US and
British troops in Iraq and still no sign of the weapons of mass destruction.
The government and their spin doctors had to defend themselves against
accusations that they'd exaggerated or even invented the threat.



""The fact is in the end, in the end, there had been many claims made about
the Iraq conflict … that hundreds of thousands of people were going to die,
that it was going to be my Vietnam, that the Middle East was going to be in
flames and this latest one, that weapons of mass destruction were a complete
invention by the British government.''



Philip Knightley is the author of The First Casualty, a history of war
reporting. He says politicians always claim that wars are necessary in order
to deal with a looming crisis.



Philip Knightley: I believe in certain cases, a crisis can be invented and I
suspect that it will emerge, maybe not in the immediate future but sooner or
later, that the crisis over Iraq, namely the weapons of mass destruction that
had to be destroyed before they were used to destroy us, was an invented
crisis.

We have this man who's very dangerous, he has weapons of mass destruction
and if we don't move soon, he can release these weapons of mass destruction
orders within 45 minutes.



Robin Lustig: When the BBC reported that a senior British official who'd been
involved in preparing a dossier on the Iraqi threat was claiming that the
45-minute warning had been inserted on the insistence of Downing Street, it
led to a major row between the British government and the BBC.

The man who was the main source for the report, a former weapons inspector,
Dr David Kelly, apparently committed suicide after having been publicly
identified and then questioned by a committee of MPs. There's now a judicial
inquiry into the circumstances surrounding his death.

Over the past few years, voters in many countries have come to understand
that governments do tailor their message for political effect and that's true
in times of war, as much as in times of peace.

Professor Greg Philo of Glasgow University who is an expert on public
attitudes says that scepticism in Britain about government claims began during
the 1991 Iraq war.



Professor Greg Philo: Towards the end of the war, there was a huge amount of
criticism of the policy and the way in which it had been sold. So there was an
exposing after the war of outright false information which had been sold or
given to the public.

Now after that, you have a generation of journalists come along who are
much much more critical and the second Gulf War comes along, you see
journalists virtually as you're going along, as you're watching it, sort of
putting down spin doctors and saying ""well, this is from a spin doctor, you
know, we don't know whether to believe it or not'' and who were quite openly
critical on camera. And of course that affects public belief.



Robin Lustig: So is it now much more difficult to mislead people about the
nature of a crisis or the threat posed by a foreign government? If voters are
more sophisticated and if journalists are learning how to tell when a story is
being spun, is propaganda a dying art?

Jamie Shea, director of communications at Nato, had the job of persuading
people that military action in Kosovo in 1999 was justified. He says people
now know too much to be taken in.



Jamie Shea: I believe that propaganda is not something that anybody really
today can get away with because propaganda has always relied upon exploiting
people's ignorance. They believe your truth because they had no other truth to
be confronted with but in the globalised world of today with real time
communications, real time satellite and cable TV, 24-hour-a-day news channels,
embedded reporters who are up in the frontline seeing the action as it takes
place, the idea that you can monopolise the truth, it no longer applies as it
perhaps did in the First World War or the Second World War. So you can only
win the argument by proving that your arguments had more validity than the
arguments of your opponents and that therefore ultimately the cost of inaction
are going to be greater than the cost of action. So you have to win the
intellectual argument as a vital part of winning the military campaign.



Robin Lustig: But propaganda is not necessarily the same as spin. Propaganda
is based on a lie; spin builds on and perhaps sometimes exaggerates the truth.


But the writer and BBC broadcaster Nick Rankin thinks that can be a
dangerous distinction to make.



Nick Rankin: It's too facile to say that all propaganda is lies. All I'm
saying is that it is directed towards an end of persuasion. But then, most
journalism is directed towards an end of persuasion. Most journalism is
propaganda but people are not honest enough to accept it. It doesn't mean it's
lies at all. Every columnist is a propagandist. I mean, I think we just have
to be more frank about it. Everything is spun.

I say, give me character, give me opinion, give me passion. You
get passion, you get propaganda.



Robin Lustig: Not all journalists would accept that analysis but most would
accept that even in times of war, many media bosses have to keep an eye on the
finances as well as on the journalism. Most television companies and most
newspapers are run as commercial concerns and reporting wars is a very
expensive business.

So the public relations analyst Sheldon Rampton says that some American
journalists find that they have to accept the official version of events for
commercial reasons.



Sheldon Rampton: They have bosses and higher-ups to answer to and those bosses
and higher-ups in turn have advertisers and other powerful institutions that
they answer to.



Philip Knightley: I think media bosses have come to learn that in wartime,
their best interest lie in supporting the government of the day no matter what
political stance that government might have.



Robin Lustig: Philip Knightley, the historian of war reporting.



Philip Knightley: And that this also of course is quite good for readership
and viewing figures and all that. I mean, the amount of money spent in
arranging the coverage of the recent Iraq war was enormous. I mean, budgets
that were undreamt of in peacetime were suddenly conjured out of the blue …
$50 million for CNN over and above their normal budget and something like
eight times the normal budget for the BBC … because people expect that the
media of the day will cover the war and the government expects the media of
the day to cover that war in a way that enhances national policy.



Robin Lustig: Many journalists admit that there are questions that they find
it difficult to ask during a war while troops are fighting and dying but which
they then do try to ask once the war is over. That's why the work of
government media managers doesn't stop when the fighting stops. And it's why
more questions are being asked now about weapons of mass destruction and the
alleged links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda that weren't asked while the
war in Iraq was being fought.

You're listening to Spinning to Win from the BBC World Service. I'm Robin
Lustig.

Television pictures can convey the drama and immediacy of war but the
newspaper reporter George Wilson says that even in the days when he was
reporting from Vietnam, TV could distort the true picture.



George Wilson: I thought that the TV by its very nature was then and is now an
unfair medium because you can have, you know, one, a truck catching on fire
and one dead body and it fills up the TV screen and the impact on the people
in the living room, especially if they suspect that it may be their son lying
there, is tremendous. And it puts the war all out of proportion. So TV by its
very nature is an unfair medium but having said that, it has immense impact.



Robin Lustig: Some critics of modern war reporting argue that it tends to
sanitise war, that it concentrates on the technology, the missiles and the
laser-guided bombs rather than on the casualties that they cause. How many
pictures of the dead and the wounded did American or British television
networks show during the recent war in Iraq? Not many.

The BBC's Gavin Hewitt acknowledges that by seeking to avoid causing
distress to viewers, broadcasters can risk painting an inaccurate picture.



Gavin Hewitt: To me, the biggest issue in terms of reporting of the war … were
we able to get across the number, both of civilians and also of Iraqi soldiers
who were actually killed in this war and I had a concern as to whether we
sanitised it in terms of what we showed and I certainly know that I on
occasions said to my cameraman, ""you know, let's go wide here because we
don't want to show things that will upset people'' and I wonder slightly
whether therefore the historical record is not as accurate as it should be in
terms of what happened particularly on the way into Baghdad.



Robin Lustig: The Arabic satellite TV network Al Jazeera showed many more
pictures of the dead and the dying than did their American and British
counterparts. And the network's news editor, Ibrahim Halal, insists that
because so little of what really happens in war is available to broadcasters,
they must not then impose their own filters.



Ibrahim Halal: We haven't got more than 10 per cent of the reality because it
was a very sophisticated and advanced war. How can we imagine that we are
going to filter this 10 per cent of the reality? It's really unfair to start
filtering the shots and bit of information we have got because we need to be
more comprehensive actually. We need to cooperate together to know better
about this war.



Robin Lustig: Once a war is over, the politicians want to declare victory, the
soldiers want to come home. But if there's no surrender, no formal armistice,
how do you know when it is over?



Sheldon Rampton: The problem for this war in particular is that no one knows
how it's going to end.



Robin Lustig: The public relations analyst, Sheldon Rampton.



Sheldon Rampton: We did have a closing ceremony for the war already, when
George Bush flew in to that aircraft carrier and boasted that he'd flown the
plane himself and then gave a stirring speech to assembled troops.



""Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.''

""We're pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime who will be held to
account for their crimes. We've begun the search for hidden chemical and
biological weapons and we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they
establish a government of, by and for the Iraqi people.''



And as far as the public is concerned, and the media for that matter, that
means that the war is already over.

And yet the troops are still in Iraq and there's a steadily mounting death
toll of casualties and there's still quite a large backlog of problems related
to the aftermath of the war.



Robin Lustig: But if the war hasn't really ended, why did the media give the
impression that it has?

Professor Jean Seaton of Westminster University.



Jean Seaton: The media only seem to be able to sustain interest and are only
interested in crisis and short, sharp events. But the kind of long-term
things, we need to understand about the difficulties of installing a new
political regime, of peacekeeping in very dangerous circumstances, those
long-term things, the media doesn't have the attention for and therefore the
public doesn't have the attention for.



Robin Lustig: Politicians often say that winning the peace is just as
important as winning the war. But consolidating peace is a lot more complex
and a lot less pictorial than fighting a war. So is it true that once the
shooting stops, the cameras are packed away and the journalists go home?

Jonathan Baker, foreign news editor at the BBC, says no, not even many
weeks after the bulk of the fighting is over.



Jonathan Baker: We still now have maintained a very substantial journalistic
presence in Baghdad and in the countries around the region. We are still
devoting an awful lot of resources to discussing the post-war situation,
reconstruction, the difficulties that people are having. So to that extent, as
a story, it still retains enormous prominence and we're still putting a lot of
effort into reporting it because it's now moved into a new phase. It may not
be a war anymore but it's still a very important story and the involvement of
the coalition forces in Iraq may last for a year or two.

In crude terms, a story lasts and stays at the top of the bulletins until
it's knocked off by something else and even when it is knocked off by
something else, when there is a major event like the killing of the military
policeman, for example, then it goes back to the top again. But this remains a
really important story for us and will continue to be so for many months to
come, I would have thought.



Robin Lustig: But if the journalists keep on working, so did the media
managers, the spin doctors. It's important to governments to convince voters
that a war has achieved its aim; in the case of Iraq, that it got rid of a
hated tyrant and ushered in a bright new era for the people of that country.

Lindsey Hilsum of Channel Four News.



Lindsey Hilsum: I think that the American-run provisional government in Iraq
now has two major prongs to its media strategy. One is to say that basically
everything is all right; and the second is to say that nothing worked before.
Both of these things are untrue.

The Americans swept away all the systems that made Iraq the most terrifying
repressive state but they also swept away everything that made it work. So
people are no longer living in fear that they will be imprisoned by the Baath
Party but also, people don't get their pensions anymore. There used to be a
system for things like that.

I had a long conversation with a man in the provisional authority who told
me in all seriousness that there was no reason for Iraqis in Baghdad to
complain about the garbage not being collected because the garbage had never
been collected under Saddam Hussein.

I saw the garbage being collected under Saddam Hussein. Of course, there
was garbage collection in Baghdad. Everyone would have died of cholera years
ago if there hadn't been garbage collection in Baghdad. But I think that man,
he believed what he said. They believe it was so terrible, that everything was
so terrible, that however disorganised and so on they are now, it must be
better.



Robin Lustig: And that is the key message that politicians want to get across,
once a war is over. Things are so much better now than they were before, they
say, whether it's in Iraq or Afghanistan or Kosovo, that the war was worth
fighting. But if they spin that message, if they say it's true when it's not,
what example do they set to the people who are meant to be taking over to run
the country in peacetime?

Scarlett McGuire has been involved in post-war democracy programmes in
Kosovo and she has seen the dangers.



Scarlett McGuire: The whole point about democracy is that you don't just put
down dictates. You have to persuade people to vote for you. And what my
experience was was that these politicians had no idea of the process of going
out to the people, persuading the people and getting the people to vote for
you.

Interestingly enough, I met the man who was supposed to be the Prime
Minister's spokesperson to talk to him about how to do it and when I said a
spin doctor, the whole room went, ""No!'' I mean, they really don't want that
bit of the West but, you know, it is important that you talk to them about how
to communicate with people through the radio, through the television, through
public meetings because that's what a democracy is about, it's about
communicating with people to persuade them to vote for you.



Robin Lustig: Soldiers have known for centuries that every war is different.
Journalists and politicians know that too. Yet after every war, they ask:
""What should we have done differently? What will we do differently next
time?''

After the Iraq war, politicians, soldiers and journalists are all asking:
""What worked best for us?'' and specifically, ""Did that process of embedding
war correspondents with frontline troops work as we wanted it to?''

Jonathan Baker at the BBC doesn't think there is a clear answer.



Jonathan Baker: Had there been any serious reversals in the units with which
they were embedded, I think the relationship would have been put under
considerable strain. And I think that's one of the interesting things about
judging this whole embedding exercise, in that it was never really put to the
test because on the whole, this was a highly successful military campaign
which invaded an entire country within three or four weeks.



Robin Lustig: And the verdict of the veteran American war reporter George
Wilson.



George Wilson: When all's said and done, we are in a war for men's minds.
Nobody is after territory anymore. There's no arrows on the map, there's no
burning by Christmas. Things aren't simple like they were in World War Two.
This is total warfare and propaganda is a big part of it.



""We knew that Saddam Hussein was a practised liar. We want to make truth
an issue in this military campaign.''



Robin Lustig: Brian Whitman of the Pentagon has had his wish come true but
perhaps not quite in the way he intended.

Most voters in both America and Britain think that the war in Iraq was
worth fighting but according to opinion polls on both sides of the Atlantic,
they also think that their governments exaggerated the scale of the threat
posed by Saddam Hussein. And now after the apparent suicide of the British
weapons inspector, Dr David Kelly, there are serious questions to be asked
about how the public were prepared for war. Spinning to win a war is one
thing, spinning to win the peace may turn out to be a great deal more
difficult.



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