A recent war that we had coverage of almost every day was the Iraq war. During our class at the University of Westminster we watched the movie titled ‘War Spin’, which is a part of a series called ‘Correspondent’ broadcast by the BBC and it shows what war looks like from a media relation point of view. This documentary helped me to understand how much PR is involved in war and how the military allows viewers to see only what they want to present.
The main thought taken from this movie is that the main PR strategy during the Iraq war and other conflicts was to control the source of information. The programme shows how the military manipulates the mainstream media using a few different techniques. One of the techniques during the Iraq war was to placed the journalists in the Central Command Centre in the building far away from the field of war and provide them with an army representative who would supply them with a series of unremarkable facts and information. The main idea behind this action is to limit the facts and context about the war by carefully controlling the topics which were chosen by military. This allowed military to deliver news to journalists on a daily basis in order to keep them interested. As a result the media shows what military wants them to show and stopped uncomfortable information and comments being revealed by different sources to the broadcaster.
The movie showed the importance and power of PR during a war. It demonstrates how spin is used in various ways during times of war and how hard journalists have to work during a military conflict in order to get the information that is carefully protected.
To see more about the manipulating the media during war:
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