PR scholars and practitioners have been trying for decades now to show that Public Relations has earned the right to be seen as a real profession now rather than just a tool of persuasion and propaganda.
However, when governments hire PR agencies to help them convince the public that war is the only solution and that war is inevitable. Do the tactics used to rally the public appeal to the individuals rationality or is it mere propaganda?
On BBC two, a documentary called Correspondent: War spin looked at how the US and the UK dealt with media management before and during the war in Iraq and concluded that the military has been successful in controlling what the media had to say about the war by using the following technics:
- Embedding journalists which was one of “the most important public relations innovation of the Iraq War” (Hiebert, 2003). This kind of reporting allowed humanizing the war as it made soldiers look more sympathetic to the audience. It also allowed the military to provide the audiences with a lot images while keeping them out from the real issues. In fact, military were able to control to some extent what audiences would see.
- Centralized press briefings: all the press briefings were held in the US central command in Doha, Qatar which allowed the military to feed the journalists the information they wanted and to retain the information they did not want to share.
- Limited facts and contexts , spin and lies as in the case of Private Jessica Lynch
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/may2003/jess-m23.shtml
For more information about Spin in War, have a look at the following video:
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