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‘TELLING IT LIKE IT IS’: CONTEMPORARY WAR,

PROPAGANDA, MEDIA AND THE STATE
Piers Robinson

Overview
Of the many varied and potent contributions made by Phil Taylor, his insights regarding the murky world of
war and media have provided political communication scholarship with essential knowledge. But perhaps his
greatest contribution lies in his robust and intellectually honest analysis of how states attempt to influence
media through perception management and propaganda during times of war. At the same time, even up until
now, the full theoretical and normative implications of his work in this area have been insufficiently grasped
by those of us who model and theorise media-state relations. With this in mind, this chapter explores three
aspects of Taylor’s intellectual legacy in the realm of propaganda and perception management: his analysis of
propaganda activities, his normative position that perception management and propaganda is a necessary fact
of life, and his advocacy of the need for even more propaganda.
The chapter starts with the theoretical and describes how even the most critical existing models and theories
of media-state relations1 have failed to grasp both the extent and complexity of how states engage in
propaganda during war-time. The result is that, in terms of shaping the media agenda, political communication
scholarship all too often underestimates the role of the state during war, whilst at the same time overestimates
the role of the state during non-war situations. It is argued that greater attention to the insights provided by
Professor Taylor provides an important correction to these problems. The chapter then discusses a deeper and
more challenging argument to be drawn from Taylor’s work, one that concerns the normative implications of
media-management by the state. Reflecting Taylor’s view that propaganda is at times a necessity, the
implications of his position for how media should cover war is explored through the lenses of realist, liberal
and critical perspectives. In doing so, the inconsistencies and assumptions of so much of the war and media
literature are considered, and in turn our need to debate more explicitly what we expect of journalists during
war is emphasised. More sceptically, the chapter is concluded by exploring a seminal case of propaganda, the
British government’s September Dossier on Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’. Here it is argued that the case
study shows how Taylor’s advocacy of the need for more propaganda was misplaced, and that such advocacy
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has dangerous consequences.

Propaganda, Perception Management and Theories of Media-state Relations

Arguably his seminal work, Taylor’s Propaganda and onPersuasion 2 provided an upfront and honest account of
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 Arguably his seminal work, Taylor’s Propaganda and Persuasion2 provided an upfront and honest account of
how the US and UK managed media during the 1991 Gulf War. Taylor documented the ways in which the
news pool system allocated selected journalists to frontline units, whilst the remainder were presented with
Copyright © 2014. I.B.Tauris. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

carefully constructed daily briefings in Dhahran (Saudi Arabia), and he shows how censorship merged with
these practices in order to create a ‘controlled information environment’ that was favourable to the US-led
coalition. He also unpacked the deceitful side of coalition perception management including the fabricated
story about Iraqi soldiers switching off incubators in a children’s hospital ward in Kuwait. From relatively
benign approaches to spinning the news, through to the darker arts of perception management and propaganda,
Taylor’s account is refreshingly honest and direct. Overall, Taylor’s greatest triumph in this work is to convey
successfully the ways in which the Western military, principally in the US and UK, had learned the lessons of
perceived media disaster in Vietnam, in order to become experts themselves at managing the media.
In many ways building upon Propaganda and Persuasion, Taylor devoted his entire career to developing a
better understanding of how militaries and governments might manage the ‘information space’ more
effectively in order to achieve their objectives. Today, scholarly, military and political attention to propaganda
is extensive, and a slippery array of terms are used to define activities aimed at managing perceptions. Indeed,
terms such as information warfare, public diplomacy, global engagement, perception management and
strategic communication have all been used as short hand for the increasingly sophisticated and organised
approaches to managing the information space. A good example of perception management/propaganda
activity can be found in the UK context: coalition military operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan and the 2003
Iraq War were accompanied by organised attempts to influence media agendas by promoting coverage of
some issues rather than others, and by encouraging the framing of stories in ways that supported the
government’s cause. At least some of the impetus for these attempts during the 2001 war in Afghanistan came
from Alistair Campbell (Chief of Strategy and Communications for the Blair Government), who created
‘Coalition Information Centres (C.I.Cs) in Washington, London and Islamabad that would coordinate the
release of information, attempt to control the news agenda and rebut opposition claims.’3 The recent wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq have revealed ever more adaptive and innovative information management strategies that
include the high profile policy of embedding journalists with frontline units. Of course, in all this, what was
most refreshing about Taylor’s approach was his willingness openly to call these activities by their rightful
name, propaganda. Indeed, Taylor was a leading advocate of propaganda:

If I can do anything sensible with this lecture, I should therefore like to destigmatise the word itself and to re-establish ‘propaganda’,
in a sense, to its pre-1914 meaning . . . What we really need is more propaganda not less. We need more attempts to influence our
opinions and to arouse our active participation in social and political processes.4

And it is Taylor’s honest and detailed appraisal of propaganda that marks out his first major contribution to
political communication scholarship. Put bluntly, against all those scholars who consciously and unconsciously
relay euphemisms such as ‘perception management’ and ‘strategic communication’, which are themselves
elements of propaganda; and all those who misperceive government media-management operations as benign
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and reactive attempts to get the governments message across, Taylor’s intellectual honesty is an important
corrective. In theoretical terms, Taylor’s analysis of propaganda also provides an important insight into
media-state dynamics and one which, as I shall now discuss, is insufficiently grasped by leading theoretical

accounts and models. Of those scholars who- printed

have onattempted toAMexplain media-state 5
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 accounts and models. Of those scholars who have attempted to explain media-state relations,5 the most
sustained and empirically substantiated position has been that, most of the time, media remain supportive of
their governments during wartime. As Daniel Hallin6 documented in his seminal study of US media and the
Copyright © 2014. I.B.Tauris. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable

Vietnam War, for most of the time journalists uncritically relayed official propaganda regarding the
righteousness of that war and the likelihood of military success. Only when political elites in Washington
started to argue about the likelihood of success did journalists start to raise serious questions about the
Vietnam War. Although some studies have identified important exceptions to this tendency of media to
‘manufacture consent’7 for governments during war,8 all have tended to confirm the argument that media
autonomy and independence is seriously curtailed during war and crisis.
In terms of explaining this pattern of media deference, the most frequent explanation across these accounts,
and one that is invoked to explain both patterns of wartime and non-wartime media-state relations, relates to
the close relationship between journalists and official sources: i.e. news media coverage ends up being
supportive of government because journalists rely upon, and defer to, official sources. For example, Bennett’s
widely cited and paradigmatic indexing hypothesis9 highlights the ‘symbiotic’ and ‘transactional’ relationship
between journalists and official sources which is generated by the need of officials to get their message across,
and the need of journalists to produce news. For Hallin,10 deference occurs because of a routine of objective
journalism whereby objectivity is understood as reporting the range of viewpoints from across the US
legislature and executive. Wolfsfeld’s Political Contest Model11 describes war-time media as an ideal type
example of media behaving as a faithful servant to the state, whereby the conditions of privileged access and
control of information creates a power in balance firmly in favour of the military and political officials. He
highlights the 1982 Falklands War to illustrate his point, showing how journalists, travelling the 8,000 miles to
the war zone with the British Royal Navy were almost entirely reliant on British officials and military both for
information and the capacity to communicate reports back to the UK.
Beyond the ‘sourcing explanation’, the other major explanations emanating from these accounts concern
ideology, political economy and patriotism, all of which are deeply rooted in underlying political and
economic structures. Specifically, both Hallin12 and Herman and Chomsky13 argue that, during the Cold War
at least, ideological imperatives structured around anti-communism meant that US journalists and US policy
makers shared the same worldview. As a result, events such as the Vietnam War could only ever be interpreted
as a morally justified struggle against communism, and never as a war of aggression against a majority of the
Vietnamese people. Herman and Chomsky discuss the political economy of the US news media, and the
consequences of this for media coverage. For them, the size, concentration of ownership, and profit
orientation of mainstream US media, interlinks with political elites: the end result is that media reporting tends
largely to support political and economic elites. Also, a number of scholars identify patriotism and national
identity as the key factor in shaping media reporting of war.14 For example, some scholars describe how the
appeal to patriotism is a powerful rhetorical tool employed by policy makers in order to silence dissent. At the
same time, as Mueller’s rally round the flag thesis15 describes, populations tend to support instinctively their
leadership at times of national crisis and, as Bennett and Paletz16 argue, commercial news media are
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vulnerable to the concern that patriotic publics will not welcome critical coverage during war. In addition, the
patriotic sentiments of journalists themselves might naturally incline them to support ‘their’ side during a war.
For all their explanatory power, however, none of these attempts to theorise and explain media-state

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