http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1026-11.htm
Published on Friday, October 26, 2001
War Needs Good Public Relations
By Norman Solomon
For some people, war is terror, disaster and death. For others, it's a
PR problem.
At the Rendon Group, a public-relations firm with offices in Boston
and Washington, pleasant news arrived the other day with a $397,000
contract to help the Pentagon look good while bombing Afghanistan. The
four-month deal includes an option to renew through most of 2002.
This is a job for savvy PR pros who know how to sound humanistic. "At
the Rendon Group, we believe in people," says the company's mission
statement, which expresses "our admiration and respect for cultural
diversity" and proclaims a commitment to "helping people win in the
global marketplace."
A media officer at the Pentagon explained why Rendon got the contract.
"We needed a firm that could provide strategic counsel immediately,"
Lt. Col. Kenneth McClellan said. "We were interested in someone that
we knew could come in quickly and help us orient to the challenge of
communicating to a wide range of groups around the world."
As a PR outfit, Rendon has moved in some powerful economic circles,
with clients including official trade agencies of the United States,
Bulgaria, Russia and Uzbekistan. In Washington, the firm helped
organize a series of conferences on "post-privatization management in
the global telecommunications, electric power, oil and gas, banking
and finance, and transportation sectors." Some of the clientele has
been more liberal or touchy-feely: Handgun Control Inc. and the
American Massage Therapy Association.
Rendon proudly notes that it provided "community and media relations
counsel to the Monsanto Chemical Company in its effort to clean up
several contaminated sites." Overseas, Rendon helped the Kuwait
Petroleum Corporation to cope with labor strife and bad press when
closing a refinery in Naples, Italy.
Some clients have been more shadowy. Rendon worked for the government
of Kuwait in the early 1990s. And the firm made a lot of money by
contracting with the CIA to do media work for the Iraqi National
Congress, an organization seeking the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Now, the Rendon Group is facing what is perhaps its most challenging
project yet -- spinning for a war in Afghanistan. With its sights set
on media content in 79 countries, Rendon will use standard tools of
the PR trade, such as focus groups, websites and rigorous analysis of
news coverage.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that "we need to do a better
job to make sure that people are not confused as to what this is
about." It's typical of warmakers to claim that the biggest problems
lie with others' faulty perceptions rather than their own deadly
orders. But no amount of PR wizardry can change the cold facts: when a
bomb hits a home for the elderly or a hospital or a residential
neighborhood, or when a bombing campaign sets in motion a cataclysm of
mass starvation.
If some people are "confused" about this war, it may be because they
remember the rationale for it: Killing thousands of civilians is
unconscionable.
Though you wouldn't know much about it from watching TV news or
skimming the front pages, large numbers of Afghans -- many of them
children and elderly -- are facing the likelihood of starvation
because the bombing has forced recurrent halts to the movement of
food-aid trucks from Pakistan into Afghanistan. Concern is growing
among humanitarian aid workers that about 100,000 people are now in
imminent peril. By winter, the number could be in the millions.
Meanwhile, on television, we see footage of air-dropped meals that
amount to no more than 1 percent of what's needed to prevent people
from starving. That's called good PR.
At this point, the playbook for the Pentagon's media game is a
familiar one. Consider the words of Eugene Secunda, a professor of
marketing and former senior vice president of the J. Walter Thompson
firm. "Operation Desert Storm allowed only one view of the battle: the
one authorized by the military," he observed in 1991. "Like travelers
led from their buses by tour guides, the TV crews were given an
opportunity to videotape the 'panoramic vista' before them, and then
were whisked to the next officially authorized destination."
Writing a decade ago, Secunda foreshadowed the kind of coverage we're
now seeing. "In the aftermath of the war with Iraq, strategic
planners, preparing for future wars, are unquestionably examining the
lessons gleaned from this triumphant experience. One of the most
important lessons learned is the necessity of mobilizing strong public
support, through the projection of a powerful and tightly controlled
PR program, with particular effort directed toward the realization of
positive news coverage."
As bombs routinely fall on Afghanistan, that's the kind of coverage
that dominates television screens in the United States. For now,
anyway, the Pentagon is winning its PR war at home.
Norman Solomon's latest book is "The Habits of Highly Deceptive
Media." His syndicated column focuses on media and politics.
Note to readers: You can access free audio and video of Norman
Solomon's recent appearance on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" at
www.c-span.org/terrorism/journal.asp -- listed under Monday, Oct. 15.
The one-hour program focuses on media coverage of terrorism and the
bombing of Afghanistan.
