Mind-Munitions

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Propaganda in the Age of Total War and Cold War
had in fact made the same mistake as her political hero, Winston
Churchill, in not being able to trust the democratic media in wartime.
Patriotic journalists, especially those working alongside fighting
soldiers from their own country, do not want to reveal information
that might be of value to the enemy because of an identification of
shared risks and shared interests. But within a democratic framework,
they demand the right to retain their critical judgement.
They know that their reports have an important bearing on civilian
morale, yet they reserve the right to criticize. Governments that
attempt to censor views, as distinct from news, are their natural
enemies. In the Falklands conflict, there remains the suspicion that
the Thatcher government confused national interests with political
interests, equating them as one and the same, when healthy
democracy demands that they be kept separate. It is easier, and
perhaps more acceptable, to do this in wartime, when the media
serve as a fourth arm of national defence. But the dangers of
restricting the normal flow of opinion – critical or otherwise – in
times of peace is a challenge to democracy that must be resisted.
The problem since the 1980s is that the accepted definitions of
conflict are changing. One such change is the ‘low intensity conflict’
which the Americans found themselves in shortly after the
Falklands war. The US invasion of the small Caribbean island of
Grenada in October 1983, ostensibly to ‘rescue’ American students
from Cuban-backed communists on the island (fear of hostagetaking
again), saw the next significant development in the post-
Vietnam, post-Falklands military-media dynamic. Operation Urgent
Fury was to be undertaken with the media excluded altogether. It
was too dangerous, said the Reagan administration, dodging the
issue of whether it was more dangerous a precedent for an open
democratic society not to allow the media to report freely on
events of national concern. But Grenada was not 8000 miles away.
Several journalists responded to the official media black-out by
hiring fishing boats to sail to the island, only to be intercepted by
US naval ships and planes. Seven who did make it ashore quickly
found themselves under house arrest and were unable to file any
copy, a frustrating experience at the best of times but even more so
as they observed events in a very different light from the versions
being disseminated by VOA and other official sources (such as US
psy-ops). One later wrote that ‘Reality was the first casualty of the
Grenada “war” and there was something strangely Orwellian