The Guardian (London)
November 28, 1994
MEDIA GUARDIAN: HIDDEN CONFLICT
BYLINE: Richard Norton-Taylor
SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. T17
LENGTH: 714 words
Don't Mention The War: Northern Ireland, Propaganda and The Media, by David Miller, Pluto Press, pounds 14.95 (pb).
NORTHERN IRELAND, John Major told the Commons on the opening day of the debate on the Queen's Speech, remained "at the top of our priorities". Just how long has it been at the top of the Government's priorities? It is, of course, a rhetorical question, as the title of this new book, Don't Mention The War, makes clear.
"The guiding light of British policy over the last 75 years has been to try and push Ireland to the margins of British politics," says David Miller. Over 3,000 people have died in a conflict - or war - which has cost British taxpayers over pounds 2,000 million a year. While most politicians and editors wrung their hands and isolated the conflict from mainstream politics, millions of pounds ( pounds 14 million in 1989 alone, according to Miller) was spent on press and PR by the Northern Ireland Office and the Army.
The battle for hearts and minds contained a basic inconsistency. While the Northern Ireland Office was busy promoting images of "normality", it created its own images of violence. Miller quotes from a 1989 NIO publicity booklet describing "a community that is carving out international respect for its resilience, work ethic, enterprise and hospitality". Fine. The NIO went on to contrast this "true face" with the "media image of the masked terrorist". Yet the NIO used precisely this image in its own publicity material.
Miller writes: "On the one hand, Government wants to emphasise the destruction and disruption caused by bombings and hoaxes, in order to discredit the IRA and to promote public vigilance. On the other hand, it is anxious to play down the extent of the devastation in order to avoid handing the IRA a 'propaganda victory' ".
The Boston Globe put it this way after the SAS killing of three unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar in March 1988: "Britain, on the one hand, treats the IRA as a criminal rather than a political organisation and strives to maintain the standards of investigation, arrest and trial that are normal in the British system of justice . . . On the other hand, there is the recurrent practice - and perhaps the unstated policy - of treating the IRA as an army and as if wartime rather than peacetime standards apply."
Miller also quotes David Gilliland, former NIO director of information, as claiming that "a government cannot win a propaganda war . . . Terrorists can say or do anything they like and the perception becomes the fact. We can only hammer away at telling the truth, but the truth gets overwhelmed in the sea of propaganda".
Four years ago, the Government admitted conducting a covert black propaganda campaign in the mid-1970s following disclosures by Colin Wallace about a smear campaign aimed at British politicians as well as the IRA. The Government, meanwhile, deprived paramilitary groups and Sinn Fein of what Margaret Thatcher called "the oxygen of publicity" by a broadcasting ban which sabotaged its own propaganda campaign overseas.
Miller points to the officially-inspired smear campaign against Carmen Proetta, one of the witnesses to the Gibraltar shootings and to how, unlike most of the British media, US newspapers concentrated at the time on the Government's changing its initial version of events by admitting that the IRA members were unarmed and that no bomb had been found.
He usefully points out that opinion polls have frequently shown a majority in favour of British withdrawal from Northern Ireland and refers to a debate within the BBC World Service about whether to use the term "terrorist" in its reporting (it has usually kept to the descriptive "IRA", while Reuters has used the term "guerrillas"). But Miller could have made more of the political and ideological use of language and the inaccurate use of "Ulster" or "the province" to describe the six counties.
Post-ceasefire, the book may seem stale and the author, a media studies lecturer at Stirling University, suffers from an over-scientific, occasionally naive, academic approach. But it serves a purpose in trying to stimulate a far from redundant debate.
Richard Norton-Taylor writes about the intelligence services for the Guardian