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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. q |
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