The Guardian’s Peter Wilby makes a good point:
Georgia won the propaganda war.
But Russia won the military one.
The problem is that many Western media acted under the PR spin machine of the government of Georgia:
The brief war in the Caucasus was a classic example of the situation outlined in Nick Davies’s book Flat Earth News.
Most newspapers hadn’t a clue what was going on and lacked sufficient resources to find out.
So skilfully presented PR was at a premium.
Wilby explains that Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili, speaks English, wants to join Nato, sent troops to Iraq, got himself educated at Harvard, cultivates a media-friendly style (and) has a PR firm, Aspect Consulting, based in Brussels, London and Paris, which also acts for Exxon Mobil, Kellogg’s and Procter and Gamble.
Almost hourly over the five-day war, press releases landed on foreign news desks.
Russia continues to attack civilian population.
The capital Tblisi was “intensively” bombed.
A downed Russian plane turned out to be “nuclear”. European “energy supplies” were threatened as Russia dropped bombs near oil pipelines.
A “humanitarian wheat shipment” was blocked. Later, “invading Russian forces” began “the occupation of Georgia”.
Saakashvili’s government filed allegations of ethnic cleansing to The Hague.
Note the use of terms that trigger western media interest: civilian victims, nuclear, humanitarian, occupation, ethnic cleansing.
So, a newspaper like London’s Daily Mail had this headline:
” ‘1,500 die’ as the Russian tanks roll in”.
Only in the last paragraph of the story did it become clear that the Georgians, not the Russians, were alleged to have killed 1,500.
As Wikby says:
Not only was it August, when many reporters are on holiday, it was also the Olympics, and the few still on duty were mostly in Beijing.
The Financial Times headline, “Georgia says Russia at war”, may have seemed strange, but it summed up the state of Fleet Street’s verifiable knowledge as the armies moved into action.
In the age of 24-hour news, however, the press cannot hang about waiting for reporters to arrive.
In summary:
If our newspapers cut, cut, and cut news budgets and journalistic resources, the result is this: public relations and propaganda take over.
Analysis? Yes.
But facts first.
By journalists.
Not by PR people in London.
(Picture by David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters)
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