Iraq War: Managing the media

The papers published by Army War College's Center for Strategic Leadership (CSL) are not official Pentagon position papers.  The service colleges maintain a high standard for academic scholarship, which means among other things that they do not enforce orthodoxy or conformity.  The debate over major aspects of American military policies and practices is far more vigorous there than many of our blowhard civilian superpatriots could even imagine.

This particular paper on which I'm focusing here is looking specifically at the experience of the "embedded media" program in the Iraq War.  In this case, what caught my attention is the extent to which it does reflect what seems to be the conventional thinking about managing the media within the military.

Leveraging the Media: The Embedded Media Program in Operation Iraqi Freedom by Colonel Glenn T. Starnes US Marine Corps, July 2004 , Center for Strategic Leadership, Army War College Web site (*.pdf file).

The mislearned lessons of the Vietnam War

There was a great deal of discussion, within the military and without, about the role that the media, especially television, played in turning public opinion against the Vietnam War.  The conventional wisdom, accepted by many who were active in the movement against the Vietnam War or who feel an affinity for it today, as well as by the public generally, is also the conventional wisdom for the military: that television coverage of violence was a key factor in turning US public opinion agains the war.

This is obviously a complex issue, and one that is difficult to quantify.  My own view is that this perspective is fundamentally mistaken.  Modern means of communication does accelerate responses to news events, but it hasn't changed the fundamental politics of war.

To state my disagreement with the conventional wisdom briefly, what most Americans likely took from the television coverage of the Vietnam War at the time was a series of images of brave American soldiers dealing with difficult and dangerous war situations.  And during the American Civil War, to take one of many pre-television examples, civilians could and did see battlefields littered with thousands of bodies, live and up close.  Yet in that conflict, both sides held out for four years.  Whether communicated by TV, newspapers or eyewitness experience, casualties as such are only one factor in whether the public supports a war.

The military brass, not just the Pentagon's civilian managers but the uniformed leadership as well, lost a lot in public confidence during the Vietnam War.  It was common then to speak about the "crisis of confidence" in various institutions, including the military.  A large reason that happened was the Gen. Westmoreland and various other generals, corporals and public-information officials would get in front of the press, make a lot of happy-talk about how many kills had recently been accomplished and the number of battles won, and then predict confidently that the tide was turning against the enemy.  After another round of escalation, the same characters or their replacements would come out and sing the same tune, and the cycle would repeat, again and again.  Eventually, a lot of people just stopped beliving it.

If the military had focused on that reality, they might have come up with lesson on public-affairs operations that went something like this:  Candor and openness are important.  While specific information on troop movements and genuine military secrets have to be strictly guarded, the military should try to make the maximum amount of information available to soldiers' families, to the press and to the general public.  Bad news can only be hidden for a limited time.  The military leadership's credibility in the first few weeks of a conflict will be high.  But to retain that credibility over a period of months or years in a protracted conflict, establishing a track record of openness and credibility is critical.

The lessons they learned instead focused much more on how to control information for maximum favorable short-term public-relations effect.  Starnes' paper reflects a number of the common assumptions that became part of the conventional wisdom among military public-affairs specialists.  Although his focus is discussing the particular program of "imbedded media," my focus in looking at the paper is more on the underlying assumptions that show through, and which largely reflect the dysfunctional lessons about media management that became all too common in today'smilitary.

The media as a "strategic" resource

In his opening paragraph, Starnes cites an article by Margaret Belknap (The CNN Effect: Strategic Enabler or Operational Risk? Parameters Autumn 2002) and endorses her view, which he summarizes as:

Inaccurate or deceitful reporting of military actions could drastically affect the will and support of the American people, which is the strategic center of gravity for the United States (US). Loss of public support for a war could also affect the decision-making process at the strategic level.1 Essentially, Ms Belknap echoed the sentiment of many others who recommend the military cease holding the press at arm’s length. Instead, the military should embrace the press and leverage the media’s technology and worldwide reach to further strategic goals.

But despite the seeming acknowledgment of the danger of the possible consequences of "inaccurate or deceitful reporting," in fact the general approach that Starnes assumes the military should take in dealing with the press almost inevitably leads to just such distortions - and to all the negative consequences that can flow from them.

Starnes is quite enthusiastic about the Embedded Media Program, which he describes gushingly as "an extremely radical public affairs plan."  Extremely radical it is not.  But it's notable that he defines it not as a method of facilitating professional combat reporting by the independent media, but as a "public affairs plan," a PR operation.  The "strategic" role for the media he embraces in his praise of the imbed program is that they should serve as the public relations arm of the Pentagon.  He doesn't put it quite that bluntly.  But the meaning is clear.

Starnes makes an important observation about the background of the military's current view of media relations:

Much of the senior/career level leadership (officer and enlisted) of today’s military remains scarred by Vietnam and its aftermath. A whole generation of military leaders believe the US lost the war in Vietnam because the media turned public opinion against the soldierin the field. This belief in a media betrayal shaped the military’s view of the media and the ethics of reporters during the past two decades. Many Americans (both military and civilian) agree with the worries expressed by General Colin Powell during the planning for the first Gulf War. In 1990 he felt that instantaneous battlefield reporting via television would bring home the horrors of war, along with graphic scenes of combat and death. Reporters and cameras recording every step in a prolonged offensive ground war would create disillusionment and anti-war sentiment at home. These fears led to the policy of press pools [used during the 1991 Gulf War, which controlled reporters particularly strictly]. [my emphasis]

As I said above, the view that TV coverage of the Vietnam War was in itself instrumental in turning public opinion against the war was also shared by war critics.  But it's an assumption that needs to be examined carefully.  It seems to me to be more mistaken than accurate.

Starnes gives a particularly strong, even ideological, statement of the situation among military officers.  "Betrayal" is a strong word, for instance.  And his twist that military officers think the Vietnam War coverage turned public opinion against the soldier in the field is definitely an ideological interpretation, identifying the "soldier in the field" with the war policy itself. But the attitude he describes is common, and his statement of it shows how many military leaders retreated into various alibis for the very real shortcomings of the military in the Vietnam War.  "The Media" was not the only such excuse.  But it became a common one, and fed into the broader conservative narrative about the mythical Liberal Media.

Reporting as propaganda

Starnes quotes with approval a phrase by Joseph Nye, Jr., decribing the military's management of the media as the "weaponzation of reporters." (From U.S. Power and Strategy After Iraq Foreign Affairs July/Aug 2003.) And Starnes elaborates:

In a sense Mr. Nye is correct. During OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom], the military succeeded in leveraging the media as part of its Information Operations Campaign. The Embedded Media Program was both a propaganda tool for the strategic war effort and an operational counter-propaganda asset. Many readers may cringe when the word ‘propaganda’ is used to define the leveraging of the media. Propaganda is not a dirty word. It is loosely defined as using any form of communication to influence an intended audience via rational or emotional arguments and personal opinion. When applied to military situations, propaganda seeks to gain audience support of military objectives.

But it's important to recognize that here he is not talking about the presentation of information and interpretations to the press and the public by the military as propaganda.  He is talking about the use of reporters from supposed independent press operations in a free society as part of the military's propaganda operation.  I'm not suggesting that anyone should be surprised at this.  I'm suggesting that it's important to understand how this leads to a crude view that the public information functions of the military in time of war is to manipulate the understanding and attitudes of the public in the democracy of which they are a part.

Starnes quotes Dan Rather - yes, the Dan Rather that the Foxists love to trash - as expressing this idea (the quote is from Starnes interpreting comments by Rather):

Dan Rather of CBS News saw another benefit of the Embedded Media Program [in the Iraq War. As with all conflicts for the past 50 years, a small but vocal antiwar movement existed in the United States during OIF. Left to its own devices, this anti-war element could have become extremely vocal. The embed reports, carried 24 hours a-day on the cable news channels and as lead stories within the standard news agencies, focused audiences on the fighting men and women and silenced or smothered national dissent. Everyone, regardless of their opinion on the war, developed a "sense of pride and admiration" for those fighting on the frontlines.

That paragraph unitentionally summarizes much that is wrong with the conventional wisdom about public opinion and war.  (Just in case anyone is confused by the Dan Rather reference: Starnes is quoting Rather with approval here.) 

For one thing, the idea that the imbed program produced the effect he describes of initially silencing and smothering national dissent - not at all generally desirable results in a democracy in the process of making the disastrous mistake the Iraq War was - were due to dapper, patriotic reporters like Dan Rather and the nifty new imbed program is so silly it's hard not to just make fun of it.  Instead, I'll repeat a quotation I've used before, from John Kenneth Galbraith's The Culture of Contentment (1992):

Almost any military venture receives strong popular approval in the short run; the citizenry rallies to the flag and to the forces engaged in combat.  The strategy and technology of the new war evoke admiration and applause.  This reaction is related not to economics or politics but more deeply to anthropology.  As in ancient times, when the drums sound in the distant forest, there is is assured tribal response.  It is the rallying beat of the drums, not the virtue of the cause, that is the vital mobilizing force.

Starnes writes as though the Iraq War were the first war in American history in which the general public "developed a 'sense of pride and admiration' for those fighting on the frontlines."  Military analysts developing strategies for manipulating the media with such a basic misunderstanding of the politics of war are bound to come up with some whoppers.

Galbraith continued after the paragraph quoted:

But this does not last.  It did not as regards the minor adventures in Grenada and Panama, nor as regards the [1991] war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein.  The effect of more widespread wars has been almost uniformly adverse.

World War I, although it evolked the most powerful of patriotic responses at the time, has passed into history largely as a mindless and pointless slaughter. ... [T]he Korean and Vietnam wars, both greatly celebrated in their early months, ended with eventual rejection of the wars themselves and of the administrations responsible.  In the longer run, it cannot be doubted, serious war deeply disturbes the political economy of contentment.

Taken by the illusion of the military's ability to manipulate public opinion through the press, Starnes completely misses that the initial enthusiasm of war never required the particular imbed program used in the Iraq War in previous conflicts.  And that public disturbance about prolonged conflicts also occurred even before television was invented.  Most people who are not Big Pundits or propaganda theorists managed to remember what war means.  Even if most of us still get caught up in the intial war fever the first few weeks.

The Starnes comment that before the Iraq War, there was "a small but vocal antiwar movement" in the US also deserves further comment.  Actually, the large demonstrations against going to war with Iraq were, so far as I'm aware, unprecedented in the US before a conflict actually got underway.  It's true, as historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writes in War and the American Presidency (2004), that the national debate prior to the Iraq War was not of "a quality and seriousness [of those] that preceded most wars in American history."  But that was not because the antiwar movement was small.  It was because the Democrats in Congress, with some exceptions, stumbled all over themselves trying not to criticize Bush's rush to war.  And because our Potemkin press corps, especially the broadcast media, had become seriously dysfunctional.

Losing perspective

Starnes' inability to understand the process of widespread public disillusion with the Iraq War that set it within a month or so of Bush's ridiculous "Mission Accomplished" speech on 05/01/03 on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln is captured in this paragraph:

For all its successful efforts in leveraging the media to achieve information operations objectives during the combat phase of the war in Iraq, the military failed to follow up and ensure success during the Stabilization Phase of the war. With the fall of Baghdad and Saddam’s regime, embedded reporters left the front and returned home to new stories. By the end of April 2003 less than 40 embedded reporters remained in Iraq. With their departure, the military lost the ability to leverage the media. They no longer enjoyed information superiority. With the loss of the embeds, there were too few public affairs officers in the stabilization force to ensure the remaining reporters, now based in Baghdad hotels, covered the good news stories [sic!] (previously observedby embedded reporters). Charged with getting a story to lead the hourly news coverage, the reporters concentrated on sensational stories of ambushes and riots/looting/sabotage [instead of] stories of schools opening, water or power restoration, etc.

Operating with an astonishingly superficial assumptions that the Pentagon can direct public opinion like a convoy of supply trucks, Starnes manages to miss what's staring him in the face.  The political leaders of the country lied about the "weapons of mass destruction" that were the official reason for the war.  The weapons weren't there.  The politicians and propagandists led people to believe that the Iraqis would be happy to have us liberate them with bullets, bombs and torture.  And the military spokesmen with their unrelentingly reassuring declarations about how well things were going fed into the same illusions.  The problem wasn't that reporters were looking for sensational stories; the problem was that the reality of war in Iraq was radically different than the con-job version that the Bush administration sold to the public.

Not too surprisingly, Starnes gives short shrift to the critics of the imbed program that he so approves as implementing successfully his highly dubious ideas about the military managing information to mislead the American public.  This is pretty comical:

Critics of the program believe the embeds allowed themselves to be censored by allowing the military to control their movements and reporting. Since only good stories appeared, the critics reason the military prevented the embeds from telling the whole story. Additionally, these critics suggest that the military staged many of the historic events telecast live. The most referenced photo-op was the pulling down of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad.30 The military and the reporters who embedded with combat units deny any claims of censorship or staged photo-ops. Critics like Mr. Jensen seem to be living in the past, specifically the era following the Vietnam War where the military and the media were at opposite ends of every imaginable spectrum. Journalists of Mr. Jensen’s cut are distrustful of the military and believe uniformed leaders practice lying and misinformation. These critics possess a misconception of wartime journalism.

Critics say that "allowing the militaryto control their movement and reporting" amounts to a type of censorship on the imbedded reporters.  Gosh, how could anyone ever come up with such an idea?

Starnes paragraph just quoted sounds a lot like some of the more clueless public Pentagon spokespeople we've seen the last couple of years.  The famous toppling of the Saddam statue is now well-known to have been an event staged for the US media.  Far more important was the massive rioting in Baghdad that was about to break loose and that by virtually all accounts was a major negative factor at the very beginning of the occupation/counterinsurgency phase of the war.

The last few pages of the report almost read like an alibi under construction.  I can hear it now:  everything would have gone fine, if the reporters had just presented a more upbeat, positive view, and the military should have found a way to make them do that.  Here's a few instances of the it's-The-Media's-fault alibi in preperation:

The embeds provided tactical play-by-play. Their daily or hourly reports reflected the ebb and flow of the operation. Without someone at the Pentagon to put these reports into a strategic context, the media turned inward to poorly informed studio presenters or retired military officers from a past generation. Tactical stories of long supply lines and halted forces were taken out of context and turned into a bad news story. That bad news story was then fanned into a wild fire in a matter of hours. ...

Phil Nesbitt, a media consultant, commented that embedding would have to be the future policy. "The genie is well out of the bottle." I agree with Mr. Nesbitt. The American public wants reality TV. Instant battlefield reporting will be expected. If the military tried to fight a war without embeds, the claims of cover-up and deceit would once again rule the airwaves. [my emphasis] ...

Since the beginning of Phase IV - Stabilization Operations, the relationship between the military and the media has worsened. There are fewer embedded reporters and more unilaterals. The reporters feel they need the freedom to move throughout the city and country to get to the action. The military believes that only the bad news stories are getting told.

Well, the problem of reporters having the strange, inexplicable compulsion to have "the freedom to move throughout the city and country" has been largely solved.  The security situation in Baghdad and the country generally has deteriorated to the point that Western reporters hardly dare to leave their hotel rooms if they're not imbedded with a military unit.  And they worry -with good reason -that they aren't even safe in the hotels.

Starnes says in his concluding paragraph, "The military and the media ovecame many barriers of distrust and antagonism."  For the American public trying to get decent news about the war, it's not at all clear whether that's the good news or the bad news.

But I think I have the way to get Col. Starnes the kind of war reporting he wants.  Next time, don't allow any reporters but those from Fox News to cover the war.  Then it will get all the positive spin the Republican Party wants to give it.  They won't worry about that outdated "reality-based" reporting nonsense, with reporters trying to go out there into the city and the country to get the story.  And they'll realize, "The American public wants reality TV," not this dreary old who-what-when-where-why stuff.