GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS, INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS AND THE MEDIA SINCE 1945 Increasingly commercialised news media organisations play an important part in the global flow of modern communications. The impact of the media and their relationship to the international system has scarcely begun to be appreciated. In Global Communications, International Affairs and the Media since 1945, Philip Taylor traces the increased involvement of the media in issues of war and peace. The author analyses the nature, role and influence of communications within the international arena in the modern world and its interaction with foreign policy. Politics, society, culture, the economy and foreign affairs are all now inseparable from the information created and exchanged on an international basis. Mass communication and mass media are comparatively recent phenomena but provide the conditions in which politicians, statesmen and soldiers have been increasingly forced to operate. Using case studies which include the Gulf War and Vietnam, Global Communications details contemporary problems of reportage whilst also providing a comprehensive historical context. This book offers a study of media in practice rather than in theory and details the realities of living in an information age. Global Communications provides an accessible guide to this growing field for students of communications studies, media studies, international relations and international history. Philip Taylor is Reader in International Communications and Deputy Director, Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds. THE NEW INTERNATIONAL HISTORY SERIES Edited by Gordon Martel Professor of History at the University of Northern British Columbia, and Senior Research Fellow at De Montfort University. EXPLAINING AUSCHWITZ AND HIROSHIMA History Writing and the Second World War, 1945–1990 R.J.B.Bosworth IDEOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE MODERN WORLD Alan Cassels Forthcoming: WAR AND COLD WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST Edward Ingram NORTH EAST ASIA An International History John Stephan RUSSIA AND THE WORLD IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Teddy Uldricks REVOLUTIONARY ARMIES IN THE MODERN ERA S.P.MacKenzie GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS, INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS AND THE MEDIA SINCE 1945 Philip M.Taylor London and New York First published 1997 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1997 Philip M.Taylor All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Taylor, Philip M. Global communications, international affairs and the media since 1945/ Philip M.Taylor Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Communication, International. 2. Mass media—Political aspects. 3. World politics—1945– I. Title. II. Series: New international history series. P96.I5T39 1997 302.2–dc21 97–930 CIP ISBN 0-203-42962-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-73786-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-11678-3 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-11679-1 (pbk) To Debbie, for still being here CONTENTS Series editor’s preface ix Preface xi Acknowledgements xvii List of abbreviations and acronyms xix Introduction—The third wave and the fourth dimension: communications and the media in the information age 1 Order and disorder in the information age 2 Reinventing wheels 7 The third wave 11 The fourth dimension 20 To have or have not 23 1 International communications and international politics since 1945 27 Drawing the battle-lines of ideological war 28 Extending the conflict to the Third World 37 The real new world information order 47 The new world (dis) order 52 2 Brushfires and firefighters: international affairs and the news media 58 Foreign policy in the mass media age 59 Public opinion and foreign policy 69 Diplomacy and the media 73 Cultural and public diplomacy 77 Television and diplomacy 83 The limits of television in foreign policy 88 Agenda-setting in real time 94 3 Illusions of reality: the media and the reporting of warfare 99 The first flawed rough drafts of history 100 Framing the military-media dynamic 102 The myth of the Vietnam Syndrome 108 Antidotes to the Vietnam Syndrome 115 vii CONTENTS Real war and media war 119 Real-time wars: Desert Storm 124 Our wars and other people’s wars 130 Conclusions 139 4 Mind games: information warfare and psychological operations 145 Third-wave warfare 146 Some definitions and operational principles 149 From psywar to PSYOPS 153 Black propaganda versus white 157 Psywar in the Cold War era 164 PSYOPS reborn: Desert Storm 170 Military operations other than war in the nineties 179 Conclusions 189 Conclusion: back to the future 193 Glossary 203 Notes 205 Bibliography 229 Index 242 viii SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE What we now refer to as ‘international’ history was the primary concern of those whose work is now recognised as the first attempt by Europeans to conduct a truly ‘historical’ investigation of the past, and it has remained a central preoccupation of historians ever since. Herodotus, who attempted to explain the Persian Wars, approached the subject quite differently from his successor, Thucydides. Herodotus believed that the answers to the questions that arose from the confrontation between the Persians and the Greeks would be found in the differences between the two cultures; accordingly, he examined the traditions, customs and beliefs of the two civilisations. Critics have long pointed out that he was haphazard in his selection and cavalier in his use of evidence. The same has never been said of Thucydides, who, in attempting to explain the Peloponnesian Wars, went about his task more methodically, and who was meticulous in his use of evidence. Over the next two thousand years, men like Machiavelli, Ranke and Toynbee have added to the tradition, but the underlying dichotomy between the ‘anthropological’ and the ‘archival’ approach has remained. Diplomatic historians have been condemned as mere archive-grubbers; diplomatic history as consisting of what one file-clerk said to another. The ‘world-historians’, the synthesisers, have been attacked for creating structures and patterns that never existed, for offering explanations that can never be tested against the available evidence. The aim of ‘The New International History’ is to combine the two traditions, to bring Herodotus and Thucydides together. While drawing upon the enormous wealth of archival research conducted by those historians who continue to work in the political tradition of formal relations between states, the authors in this series will also draw upon other avenues of investigation that have become increasingly fruitful since the Second World War. Ideology and culture, immigration and communications, myths and stereotypes, trade and finance have come to be regarded by contemporary scholars as elements essential to a good understanding of international history, and yet, while these approaches are to be found in detailed monographs and scholarly journals, ix SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE many of their discoveries have not been presented in a readable and accessible form to students and the public. ‘The New International History’, by providing books organised along thematic, regional or historiographical lines, hopes to repair this omission. Anyone interested in the conduct of international relations in the twentieth century is aware of the significant—perhaps revolutionary—role that the media has come to play. Reportage and commentary in print, on radio and television, and most recently on the internet, have profoundly altered the way in which states conduct business with one another. And the relationship between journalists and officials is fraught with complications because, in spite of their dependence upon one another, they have learned to regard one another with suspicion that borders on hostility. Most students of this phenomenon come from the media world itself, and few bring to their analysis any sense of historical perspective. Their work suffers from this defect. Philip Taylor, with ground-breaking work on propaganda during First World War, between the First and Second World Wars and on the Gulf War behind him, is uniquely qualified to offer an historical synthesis of the role of the media in ‘the information age’. Provocative and stimulating, careful and analytical, Global Communications, International Affairs and the Media since 1945 is an excellent example of ‘the new international history’. Gordon Martel x PREFACE This book stems from a long-standing interest in the role of news and image management in the context of twentieth-century foreign policy. Like many historians, however, I have always felt slightly nervous about straying away from the past and into more contemporary issues—the cherished domain of social scientists. My favourite foreign country—the USA, that is—has forced a re-think. As the sole remaining superpower, the United States is struggling to come to terms with what its role should be in the post-Cold War era. And, as a society which has always been deeply conscious of its self-image, and one indeed whose very emergence