Reply #2: War Needs Good Public Relations

[NVMojo]

this is fascinating, really ...

October 25, 2001

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.

snip...

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.

more...

http://www.fair.org/media-beat/011025.html

and this ...

How To Sell a War
The Rendon Group deploys ‘perception management’ in the war on Iraq

By Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber | 8.4.03

As U.S. tanks stormed into Baghdad on April 9, television viewers in the United States got their first feel-good moment of the war—a chance to witness the toppling of a giant statue of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

snip....

"Of course, we have no way of knowing whether Rendon or any other PR specialist helped influence the toppling of Saddam’s statue or other specific images that the public saw during the war in Iraq. Public relations firms often do their work behind the scenes, and Rendon—with whom the Pentagon signed a new agreement in February 2002—is usually reticent about his work. But his description of himself as a “perception manager” echoes the language of Pentagon planners, who define “perception management” as “actions to convey and (or) deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning. … In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover, and deception, and psyops .”

http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=299_0_1_0_C