On the opening page of his book Crosbie quotes Samuel Johnson’s perceptive comment, made in 1758: “Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictate and credulity encourages,” but then largely fails in following this up rigorously.
Although his book is focused on the US army, it begins by looking over the shoulder of the Irish reporter William Howard Russell as he wrote those legendary dispatches from Crimea in 1853–1856 that galvanised the British public and created modern war correspondence. At first barely noticed by British forces at the front, his impact back home was immense, and soon a policy was established for Russell and his followers that provided access and protection in exchange for their self-censorship of any dispatches from the battlefield. This set the tone for future arrangements. Journalists and their counterparts struck various deals to balance the journalists’ desire for access, on the one hand, and the military’s attempts to keep unsavoury truths out of the public domain, on the other. In the US Civil War and throughout the First World War, correspondents began to view their role as cheerleaders rather than as independent observers. During the Second World War, the American press became complicit in supporting the government’s propaganda campaigns, abandoning entirely its role as a critical voice.
From Crimea to Pearl Harbor, the US military had ample opportunities to learn not only that the press could be a risk factor if ignored but also that a compliant press could be a useful tool. The close study of Second World War general George C. Marshall (he of the Marshall Plan) revealed the active role he took in managing the US news media. This was a routine part of his job. Humble, diffident, the archetype of the professional officer, Marshall nevertheless had no illusions that senior officers could simply focus on battlefield concerns and ignore how the Army’s efforts were mediated to the American public. Marshall understood that the press was a critical resource, but he managed it cautiously, using the subtle strategies of anticipation, alignment, and (more rarely) intentional misdirection to ensure that the Army was perceived in a positive light.
Crosbie’s book is a detailed history of the US military’s relationship with the media over six decades from 1939 to 2000. It deals with a vitally important political and sociological subject but, as he himself states, one, which has not been covered in much depth by previous researchers. He focuses on the historical emergence of undoubtedly one of the most important sites of domestic political strategy for the US Army: the field of media management—a topic that social scientists have almost entirely neglected, with the exception of pioneering work by a handful of British sociologists.
Unfortunately, like so many pieces of vital research, this narrative, is written in an academic style, making it less easily accessible to a wider readership. But don’t let that put you off, as it contains useful insights for those with the sufficient erudition and stamina.
Crosbie examines how the army has gradually transformed its relationship with civilian government and the public by engaging actively with the press. He traces Army media management from its origins as an ad hoc task to its professionalisation and formalisation today, alongside the army’s rise as a political force, and its renewed ascent after learning key lessons from the experience of Vietnam.
Throughout history, up until the Vietnam war, there had been little awareness of the role journalism could play in conveying the truth of war and state violence to the civilian population, even though state censorship had been widely employed in an attempt to prevent unwelcome facts reaching the public.
Following the end of the Second World War, the place of the Army in American politics underwent a dramatic transformation. At first, top Army leaders anticipated that they would retain a central role in public life and looked to journalists, then working under voluntary conditions of access and recently freed from censorship, to help the Army tell its story. The post war period and the Cold War saw an increasing militarisation of American social and political life.
Crosbie explores how and why Army leaders failed to effectively nurture the media-military relationship through their public-information officers, setting themselves up to learn the lesson of strategic failure despite operational victory. As a consequence of partisan conflicts at home, during the 1940s and 1950s, he says, the military was stripped of much of its legal authority over the flow of information in war zones by the early 1960s and this was reflected in its loss of control during the Vietnam War.
From the early 20th century onwards, the increasing use of photography, followed by radio and then television, the means of widely broadcasting the realities of war became a given. The Second World War demonstrated the way the media, particularly photography and film, could help promote and publicise the course of a war in governments’ interests. It was, though, the Vietnam war, that brought home the vital role the new media could also play in changing public opinion (from pro- to anti-war). It was the last war in which accredited journalists were given almost full access to the battlefield and allowed to cover events with little interference by military or civilian governments. Until that time, the ruling authorities had been confident that their journalists, by and large, would report “patriotically” and not undermine their aims. The Vietnam War was a huge awakening for them and brought about a whole rethink. As the images and sound bites from Vietnam increasingly revealed, this was a very dirty war being fought by the mightiest global military power against a small “Third World” nation, in which the accepted rules of war, morality and ethics were abandoned by the former in a ruthless battle for domination. Over time, the reporting by journalists began to sway public opinion, particularly in the United States, but also globally, and in the end forced the US government to bring the war to an end.
Since then, governments and military commanders have severely restricted journalists access to war zones and now only allow “embedded” journalists to cover war zone activities. Embedded journalists are those specially selected for their track record of loyalty to the state and unquestioning obedience to the ruling elite. In this way, the military can largely control the way its wars are reported and what the public is allowed to see and know. Today, the US military takes a keen interest in shaping all press coverage and, through it, public perception and oversight of the armed forces. After misjudging the domestic political landscape during the Vietnam War, the military embraced a much more strict media management, recognising that control over information was central to how wars are fought. Even as the army presented itself as a scrupulously apolitical organisation, its leaders strove to reshape their political environment through public relations.
In the first State of the Union address, George Washington set as the most immediate order of concern the question of military power, noting that “to be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” Today, the US Department of Defense (DOD) houses the greatest concentration of force on the planet, with yearly expenditures accounting for nearly 40 percent of the world’s defence spending.
Democracies, Crosbie says, have much to fear from their militaries. Military dominance or coups d’états pose existential threats, but military power can also corrupt the democratic process in a variety of ways. Legal, cultural, and economic checks help balance the state’s power by holding its actions accountable to the public, but all these checks, if they are to be effective, require the free flow of information, at least among elected officials and their agents. Democratic oversight is reliant upon the work of professional journalists, whose interests awkwardly intersect with military preferences for autonomy. Although, as we are today well aware, the concentration of power over the press by wealthy interests inhibits all but a handful of journalists from being able to publish their own opinions and insights freely.
“Disinformation, deceit, emotional manipulation, mass persuasion, misdirection, and silence are all tools of statecraft, no more so than during times of war. Journalists use these tools as well, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes out of principle and sometimes out of corporate interest. For centuries, commenters have noted the threat to truth and honesty during times of war. War’s effect on journalism and on the capacity for both civilian and democratic oversight is a particular danger to the life of a democracy,” Crosbie notes.
Useful as his book is, the author does pull his punches somewhat, and in his concluding remarks lets the army off the hook in terms of its role in undermining truthful and open journalism as well as civilian democracy itself. He also skirts the complex issue of the military industrial complex and its implications for democratic control and openness, as well as the traditional intimacy between the military and Hollywood, where war films are often little more than propaganda for the US military. But as associate professor of military operations at the Royal Danish Defence College his perspective is perhaps understandably somewhat trammeled.
The Political Army: How the U.S. Military Learned to Manage the Media and Public Opinion. By Thomas Crosbie. Columbia University Press Pbck £30.00
John Green is a former trade union official, a journalist and former documentary film-maker, which in the 1970s involved clandestine filming assignments in South Africa in the 1970s aimed at helping bring the abhorrent practices of the apartheid regime to world attention. He is the author of numerous books, including Ken Sprague, People’s Artist, A Revolutionary Life: Biography of Friedrich Engels and Britain’s Communists: The Untold Story
The views expressed in the articles published on this website do not necessarily represent those of Liberation
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