Mind-Munitions

Propaganda, Cold War and the Television Age 279
to endanger the safety of the troops. He also knew that, thanks to
the increasing internationalization of the media, the Argentinians
would be watching. If a denial served to deceive the enemy, then
well and good. But tension with the media increased when the
military deliberately used them as instruments for deception. On
this issue, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Terence Lewin, stated:
I do not see it as deceiving the press or the public; I see it as deceiving
the enemy. What I am trying to do is to win. Anything I can do to help
me win is fair as far as I’m concerned, and I would have thought that
that was what the Government and the public and the media would
want, too, provided the outcome was the one we were all after.
The press may have disagreed, but whether the public would have
done so is another matter, especially as polls revealed a considerable
majority of public support for the war. The cheerful mood of
despatches from the fleet, combined with the jingoism of the
tabloids (‘UP YOURS, GALTIERI!’ and ‘ARGIE-BARGY’ ran other Sun
headlines) and high domestic morale, seemed only to justify the
military’s restrictions on the media. The overall result was that the
British public received comparatively little information – and some
disinformation – about what was happening when it was happening.
Despite several graphic voice reports of the action, there were
remarkably few television pictures of the war until it was all over
and the islands had been re-taken. But the notion that the British
military had enjoyed a good media war with a supportive and
compliant public needed to be tempered by one event afterwards.
When a Ministry of Defence official, Clive Ponting, released documents
showing that the British government had indeed lied over
the direction in which the Belgrano had been sailing when it was
attacked by a British submarine, he was arrested and tried under
the 1911 Official Secrets Act. The jury refused to convict him.
It appeared, then, that an answer had been found not only to
Robin Day’s question about democratic war and its relationship to
television but also that the British had stumbled upon an antidote
to the ‘Vietnam effect’. As former US Secretary of State, Henry
Kissinger, commented: ‘If we could have got the support for our
Vietnam policy that the prime minister has for her Falklands
policy, I would have been the happiest man in the world’. But, to
Mrs Thatcher, nothing short of total, uncritical support had been
acceptable. While she became determined to tackle the BBC, she