Embedding as a powerful PR war tactic



Reporter Mervyn Jess at the media

operations centre in Camp Bastion.

Source: BBC News Website

During the movie ‘War Spin’ described in the previous post, one of the PR tactics used by the military in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was to embed the journalists in with the Coalition forces. The aim was to provide the media with a detailed and interesting view of the war for their audience. 

It was also the easiest way for military to control the information and show the public what they would like them to see. By putting them with coalition forces the media were under their control. Independent journalists tended to be more suspicious, attempting to find information the army did not want publicised and embedding them proved to be a useful technique. In the movie, BBC journalists who were travelling with the coalition forces through the Iraq war zone said that it was very hard to stay objective about the military action while you being protected and feed by the soldiers. Essentially the journalists lives depended on the soldiers. As a result, getting the journalists closer to the military work and allowing them to join the forces helped to control the messages spread by the media.


At the end of the documentary there is a very importance sentence that embedding the journalists allowed the military to maximize imagery, whilst providing minimal insight. The images from the field are powerful and very desirable by viewers but show a very subjective point of view. They do not have any great factual value and would be better compared to a Hollywood production, then the work of a journalist. The images from war aim to shock, provoke emotions and mainly take the audience’s attention from the negative side of war.



Role of PR in war

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.

For more about media reporting during the Iraq war see: Iraq media section.

To see more about the manipulating the media during war: