Mind-Munitions

274
Propaganda in the Age of Total War and Cold War
shortage of equivalent material from the enemy side – the difference
between rigid media control and unfettered media access –
meant that Americans began to fight amongst themselves about the
respective merits of the war, and many could only draw one conclusion.
In short, television helped to simplify a complicated war.
By its very nature, it relies upon sensational coverage, generalization
and selection. It killed off the old myth that ‘the camera
never lies’.
In 1970, in a famous article, the distinguished British broadcaster
Robin Day wondered about the new age of televised
warfare. He wrote:
Television has a built-in bias towards depicting any conflict in terms of
the visible brutality. You can say, of course, that that is what war is –
brutality, conflict, starvation and combat. All I am saying is that there
are other issues which cause these things to come about, and television
does not always deal with them adequately … One wonders if in future
a democracy which has uninhibited television coverage in every home
will ever be able to fight a war, however just.
It might equally be said that the conduct of diplomacy is
incompatible with the needs of television, as the Cold War ‘era of
negotiations’ between 1969 and 1975 revealed. Television cameras
can film leaders or decision-makers rolling up to a meeting in
limousines, it can film them getting out of their cars and going into
their meetings and, if the diplomats are media-sensitive (still a rare
breed), it can capture appropriate ‘sound-bytes’ encapsulating
intentions. But the round-table negotiations which follow are rarely
conducive to entertaining television. As the non-televisual period
of detente between the superpowers unfolded in the 1960s and
1970s, television news instead settled into a pattern of picture-led
reporting of disasters, earthquakes, coups and terrorist activities –
confirming the medium as best suited to event-based reporting and
entertainment rather than as an issue-based mechanism capable of
providing detailed, contextualized analysis. This would not matter
so much but for the fact that most people were now gaining most
of their information about what was happening in the world from
television rather than from the older media of press and radio. By
its inherent predisposition to simplify, television thus became an
ideal medium for propaganda, as terrorist groups around the
world recognized.