Mind-Munitions

278
Propaganda in the Age of Total War and Cold War
vigorous terms, that the BBC is not neutral on this point, and I hope that
his words will be heeded by the many who responsibilities for standing up
for our task force, our boys, our people and the cause of democracy.
Churchill would have been proud of her. The government was at
least happier with the attitude of the domestic tabloid press, which
threw itself wholeheartedly behind the war effort, although its
excesses (such as The Sun’s headline of ‘GOTCHA!’ greeting the
sinking of the Argentinian battleship Belgrano) were perhaps more
appropriate to eighteenth-century scandal-sheets rather than a
modern British journalistic tradition. The alarmed could take some
comfort in the wartime decline of The Sun’s circulation.
The fact that the war was short, lasting barely two months,
helped to sustain the patriotic mood that swept the country. After
the war, the House of Commons Defence Committee which investigated
the media coverage conceded that there had been more to
censorship than mere ‘operational security’, namely the ‘furtherance
of the war effort through public relations’. During the war itself
the philosophy underlining this appeared to take the form that late
news is no news for the media, which in turn is good news for the
military. With some film reports taking three weeks to reach
London, the BBC was forced to use pictures from other sources.
When Argentinian footage was used to fill the vacuum created by
British censorship, the BBC was accused of disseminating enemy
propaganda. When footage from British journalists did finally
arrive, it had been sanitized by the censors. Phrases such as ‘horribly
burned’ were cut out, news of setbacks such as the loss of HMS
Sheffield were delayed, even the substitution of the word ‘cleared’
for ‘censored’ were all part of an attempt to present a particularly
one-sided view of a war with little bloodshed. As one public
relations officer told an ITN correspondent with the Task Force:
‘You must have been told you couldn’t report bad news before you
left. You knew when you came you were expected to do a 1940
propaganda job’.
This type of comment revealed the eternal tension between the
military and the media in wartime: secrecy versus publicity. The
Ministry of Defence’s spokesman, Ian McDonald (whose slow,
deliberate, and expressionless nightly appearances on television
made him a national figure and earned him the tag of the ‘speakyour-weight
machine’) epitomized the traditional military preference
for secrecy. His policy was never to lie deliberately but never