Lecture.war1.2 Updated 1-10-08

Introduction/First week

Class focus – enduring issues: Much of study on wartime communication focuses on enduring (and important) issues such as freedom of the press and censorship. Want also to focus on government information policies, particularly techniques of persuasive communication and the presumed effectiveness of such communication on public opinion. Also, how media institutions shape war information to fit their own formats and practices and – because many of you are headed for professional careers communications – the issues involving individuals as journalists and communicators in war.

Discussion question: What (how much?) do you know about the war in Iraq/Afghanistan? How do you know that? Where do you get your information? Which media?

Examples?

Unless we have been personally to the war zone – or to the policy zone in Washington, D.C., or have friends or relatives who are personally involved -- we have to rely on some sort of communication medium to bring us that information. More often than not, our information comes through available systems of mass media and from the many forms of Internet communication, including news sites.

Syllabus, course requirements from http://www.uoregon.edu/~sponder/j412/SyllabusW08.htm

Sources and strategies

Central to government’s ability to conduct all war in a democratic society is the existence of public opinion sufficient to support the war effort. Rulers from antiquity to the present used numerous forms of persuasive communications to create and maintain sufficient public support for sacrifice necessary to conduct the war.

Statutes, statements, songs. Notion of marathon comes from legend of a Greek soldiers who was sent from the town of Marathon to Athens to announce the Persians had been defeated at the Battle of Marathon. In seventeenth-century Britain, Elizabeth I used new media technology, the printing press, to publish new words to a popular minstrel song that praised the crown’s naval victory over the Spanish fleet in 1588.

American Revolution – Founders view of appropriate role of press in stimulating support for war effort. .

Historians in the past have often assumed that the context of communications in wartime is anomolous – a period of national emergency in which the Bill of Rights is set aside and the government sets restrictions on speech and on the press, media institutions themselves change to reflect shifts in government and public opinion, and individuals working in media fields operate in a changed framework – and product different messages -- than they do in peacetime. Once the war or period of national emergency is over, “normal” free behavior resumes. Or at least it has in the past.

Behind that assumption is a view that, essentially, what happens to communications wartime, stays in war time. Prior to the last 50 years or so, this view that wartime was a separate period of national life, with different rules and behaviors, had some validity, since all-out war had been fairly rare in the first 150 years of American history. Military skirmishes might come and go, but major wars demanding significant sacrifices and restrictions on communications participation only once a generation or so. President

Abraham Lincoln shut down newspapers and revoked the right of habeas corpus during the Civil War, but this expanded presidency lapsed after the war, and did not resume again until the Spanish-American War, about 40 years later. Similar patterns of nearly a generation separated the Spanish-American War from World War I, and World War I from World War II and Korea.

From the Korean War in the early 1950s to the present, however, the United States has been involved in a continuing series of wars, large and small: the Cold War, the Vietnam War, in the Persian Gulf and now in Iraq and Afghanistan. Smaller wars included Nicaragua, Bosnia, Somalia and numerous others.

Changing contexts since Korean War

Both the nature of that wars in which the United States is involved have changed, and so have the communications media. Korea, for example, was the first U.S. war to receive (limited) television coverage. It was also the last war in which correspondents wore uniforms. Since Korea (actually since World War II), no formal declarations of war have been approved by Congress, and government information policies focused on techniques of persuasive communications and news management, rather than official restrictions on journalists.

In World Wars I and II, when Congress formally declared the United States to be at war, and president created official propaganda or “information” agencies to tell the citizens why the war was necessary and to publicize its progress. All forms of mass communication were enlisted to support the war effort, and official censorship agencies were established to prevent what the government deemed to be unsafe information from reaching the wrong people.

In those wars, most journalists, publicists, advertising professionals, broadcasters, film makers – all sorts of media professionals – joined in the war effort. Some volunteered, others served as quasi-official observers and communicators. In World War I, thousands of publicists, advertising experts, and journalists volunteered to serve the government’s propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information. In World War II, journalists wore uniforms to accompany the soldiers and submitted their stories to censors before they were transmitted to their newspapers, magazines or radio stations. The same was largely true in the Korean War.

In World War II, radio correspondents, including the famous Edward R. Murrow, submitted their copy for censorship prior to broadcast. That included Murrow’s great live broadcasts by radio – from the rooftops of London during German bombing. He submitted his copy to British intelligence before each broadcast. The same was true when Murrow’s CBS crew filmed one of the first television documentaries on the war in Korea.

Not all journalists went along with this, or supported the war effort. But whatever second thoughts were held by those journalists or professional communicators about accepting restrictions of their freedoms were most often voiced after the war was over. After World War I, journalists who volunteered for the Committee on Public Information wrote afterwards they were ashamed at the “propaganda” they had written. In both World Wars I and II, after peace was achieved, the wartime government information agencies were dismantled and “normal” constitutional and professional behavior resumed, more or less.

But in the period of open-ended unofficial wars since then, such as the Cold War, Vietnam, wars of intervention and now in the Middle East, the differentiation between war and peace has become blurred, both officially and in the professional world of communications.

Another question: What is now the role of communications – and communications professionals – in the gray zone of undeclared wars such as those in Iraq and in Afghanistan? What are the responsibilities of professional communicators here – to inform the public, to support the government, to maintain their professional ethics?

Complications and questions

Should the media (and the public) be allowed to dissent from government policies in time of national conflict? If so, how much and which policies?

Should individual journalists be unquestioning patriots, independent skeptics, or opponents of war policies?

Should journalists be allowed to witness and to report on everything the military is doing in the nation’s behalf? If not, which activities should remain off-limits and who should make those decisions?

Complicating that question is that in a complex modern society with expanding media of communications, there are many kinds of information that citizens presumably should know besides sensitive military information. That includes policy debates, a diversity of viewpoints about the war, the costs (human and economic), the lives of participants, etc.

For journalists, in addition to the broad questions outlined above, there is the operations question. How can journalists gain access to where the information is located, or the action is taking place? As in other kinds of journalism, the contexts of economic and political authority are important. But there are also on-the-ground questions of access, personal security, how to find sources, how to transmit information, dealing with gatekeepers.

Additional complications:

Communications (and communicators) have changed greatly since the days when publicists and advertising professionals volunteered for propaganda duty and journalists wore uniforms.

How have changes in communications systems – radio, television, satellite communications, also changed the context of war communications and affected how Americans see, hear and read? The press has become “the media.” And wars have become a special kind of media event.

And, given how much the science of measuring – and managing – public opinion has developed, how do those messages influence popular support or opposition to wars? We need to re-examine the presumed “lessons” of the Vietnam War, in which uncensored news coverage may or may not have greatly influenced the public’s declining support for the war effort. Beliefs based on that assumption continue to influence the decisions made today by the Defense Department and by many in the news media.

That’s a lot of ground to cover in 10 weeks. But if everyone comes out of here with a better understanding of the importance and the role of communications in modern war, that will be a good start.