Words of Mass Deception

An interview with Sheldon Rampton, from the US Center for Media and Democracy on the PR campaign for war.

Public relations and marketing in general are much more aimed at influencing people’s emotions than their rational thinking. And they especially like to appeal to the primitive emotions, that’s why you see pictures of pretty girls in bikinis used to sell automobiles, or beer, or what have you, and likewise the goal of any good marketer is to engage the emotions of the target audience, rather than their intellect. The reason being, that oftentimes the marketer is engaged in trying to persuade people to do things that may not be in their best interests, and it’s always easier to influence people when you appeal to something sub-cortical than if you’re trying to appeal to them to do something that may not be in their own interest.

Interviewer -- Now another interesting aspect of your book is that you consider the TV coverage, and we’re dealing here with North American TV coverage, and you say that nearly 70% of Americans were getting most of their information about the war in Iraq from all the news cable channels, and only 18% relied on the traditional nightly news. How significant was that shift towards cable news in terms of the ability of the public relations industry to influence that area of broadcasting?

Sheldon Rampton: It’s significant, because there’s a very different culture within the cable networks and those within the traditional networks, and there’s even another step removed from the culture of journalism that you see in the print media.

The cable networks in the United States are all about ratings, they’re all about emotions, there are programs that spend most of their time simply arguing and trying to out-shout people over things, rather than engaging in any serious journalism or investigation or analysis. It’s very inexpensive journalism, if you want to call it that, to produce, and again, it lends itself very well to emotional appeals and appeals to a sort of hyper-nationalistic emotionalism on the part of people who support the war.

In a chapter of the book entitled ‘The Air War’, we examine for example, the role that Bill O’Reilly, who has a show on Fox News played, and he had a guest on and we quote a transcript from the interview he did. The guest was actually the son of a man who died when the towers were hit by planes on September 11, and O’Reilly spent the entire interview interrupting this guest, literally telling him to shut up, and finally ordering his staff to cut off the guy’s microphone because he simply didn’t want to allow the guy to have a say. What’s really happening when you see that kind of thing on television is obviously not an attempt to present a balanced debate about different people’s points of view, it’s not even an opportunity for the opposite side to express his point of view, since they literally cut off his microphone. What it really is, is a way of entertaining the audience, in much the same way that a wrestling show or a sports event entertains them, by giving them the opportunity to watch someone get beat up. And that sort of journalism is driving the political agenda because it’s the primary source for a lot of people’s information. I think it’s very dangerous.





Interviewer - The Rendon group became quite prominent in the aftermath of the first war in the Gulf, back in the early ‘90s, where I think from memory and from your book, one of the incidents that’s pointed out is that thousands of Kuwaitis when the American and allied forces came in to liberate Kuwait, thousands of Kuwaitis had small, hand-held American flags and this fellow John Rendon speaking to a group of Air Force cadets posed the question, ‘Did anyone ever wonder how all those Kuwaitis got those flags?’ and yet it turns out of course that his company had organised that distribution. Now Rendon calls himself an information warrior or a perception manager; can I get you to talk about John Rendon and the work of people like that and their companies, and how important they were in the most recent conflict in Iraq?

Sheldon Rampton: Their job is to orchestrate the images that the public sees. Obviously when footage is shot of Kuwaitis waving American flags, the target audience of those images are American citizens. The message being sent is that the people of Kuwait are greeting the American soldiers as liberators. We had a very similar incident in the recent war, when with the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue, which was broadcast over and over again in the United States as something comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall, where masses of Iraqis were supposedly coming out into the streets to express their joy at being liberated, in reality that whole event was very carefully stage-managed, and if you look closely at the footage from that day, you can see that it was actually a very small crowd, and that the square where that toppling of Saddam’s statue occurred was in fact ringed with American tanks that had moved in there first before they let in a small crowd to engage in the statue toppling ceremony. The effect of those messages is mostly aimed at rallying public support back home for the war.

But the Rendon Group in particular has also played another role that’s very important in shaping US foreign policy. In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, the rent-a-group was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency to create a group that they named. They named it the Iraqi National Congress, named it after the African National Congress, for the purpose of being an anti-Saddam opposition group inside Iraq, and the remarkable thing to me as I explained in the book, is that the Iraqi National Congress and its head, Ahmed Chalabi, actually became one of the main sources for intelligence information that was trusted and believed by people like Donald Rumsfeld, and others within the Bush Administration. So they ended up actually taking their cues and gathering their information about what their prospects were inside Iraq from someone who was actually the head of a public relations operation created by their own PR firm. That’s really a classic example of people in power believing their own propaganda.