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SOLOMON MCCOWN HOSTS PANEL OF EXPERTS ON WHO
WON THE PR WAR.
PANEL FINDS INDUSTRY COMMENTARY IN WAR IN IRAQ
On Wednesday, May 21, the Publicity Club of New England and Solomon McCown & Company co-sponsored what for Solomon McCown will be the first in a series of industry-related discussions. This inaugural panel, entitled "Who Won the PR War?" examined the war in Iraq and the way its truths were conveyed and received.
The panel struck a successful balance between in-the-trenches experience – quite literally – and the bigger picture perspective of the commentator/pundit, comprising
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Jules Crittenden, embedded Boston Herald
reporter, whose reports from the front line as he traveled with U.S.
Army's Third Infantry Division in Iraq were widely read and appreciated
for their clarity and straightforwardness of tone and their uncolored,
behind-the-scenes perspective. |
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David Muir, WCVB-TV, the award-winning news reporter whose work in Quatar shone as he brought back – and was the only broadcaster to do so -- poignant stories of New Englanders far away from home.
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Dan Kennedy, senior writer and media critic
from The Boston Phoenix, known for his hard-line look at media's
process and product, whose work in war time asked tough questions about
truth, bias, and how the news reaches it intended audience. |
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Tobe Berkovitz, professor of communications
at the College of Communications at Boston University, who brought to
the mix, as perhaps only a professor can, an assessment of the PR war
that took into account the history of embedding, dating back to Vietnam.
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Certainly, some of the most memorable moments came from Crittenden and Muir's remarkable on-the-ground stories. Crittenden offered an inside perspective on an early column about a soldier in his troop who received some alcohol in the mail and spent the night getting ill on the cot beside him. Knowing that he had to have the trust of his division in order to do any meaningful reporting, Crittenden initially said that he would not write about the incident. But after he heard the commander's harsh and eye opening reprimand and affecting words about preparedness for battle, he decided that the story had critical news value and that in fact he would write about it. In relaying this promise and how he withdrew it, he offered an inside look at a reporter's competing commitments to his internal sense of honor and the truth that he is duty bound to bring to readers.
David Muir provided an extreme look at the other side of a difficult situation, describing how each day reporters stationed in Quatar, the military operations headquarters, would gather for a "briefing," only to be read the exact same non-news of the day before. Muir described his search for New England stories, a search that led him in one instance to a school where a Norwood woman was teaching music. He sought permission to ask the students about their teacher, but then slowly began pushing the envelope with questions about what these young students thought about the war, capturing them on camera as they repeated their parents' very grown up anti-Bush, anti-U.S. sound bites.
Before Dan Kennedy spoke, he reminded all of us about the losses suffered, in particular the recent death of Boston Globe reporter Elizabeth Nueffer, a journalist known for her bravery. He then undertook a layered and affecting examination of bias, noting that he appreciated Crittenden's reporting because it was labeled as a column with Crittenden's picture, and therefore that the reader's expectation was the truth of an individual's experience and not necessarily the broader truths that Kennedy deemed largely denied, at least to the average American consumer of war time news. To Kennedy, the victor in this PR War, especially in the embedding process, was the Bush-led U.S. government, and he elicited a laugh when he remarked that some of his readers don't consider him to be "left enough."
Tobe Berkovitz agreed that in many ways the War in Iraq was a victory for President Bush. He cited the democratic candidates currently "wandering dazed and confused" in Iowa and New Hampshire. But he also pointed out that Bush set out to only win over voters who were on the fence and therefore winable. As in the Vietnam war, he noted, a large group of oppositionists arose, which one could cite as a PR victory for Europe, the Middle East, and Muslim fundamentalists. Thus, according to Berkovitz, who won the PR War "depends on which continent you're on."
