Conflict Propaganda in Syria

Narrative Battles

Oliver Boyd-Barrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367697471
• eBook ISBN: 9781000523836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book investigates rival narratives about the conflict in Syria from 2011 onwards.

It examines the starkly different narratives about the Syrian conflict told by mainly Western mainstream and alternative media, and contrasts these narratives with the equally polarized but more nuanced narratives of mainly Western scholars and long-form journalists. Differences of narrative concerning the conflict include: what is deemed relevant context in trying to explain the war; whether the war is best seen as a civil conflict or as a proxy war fought among external powers; the degree of emphasis given to the alleged crimes of the Syrian regime as opposed to the alleged violence of Salafist militia; the accuracy of the "origin" story of the conflict in Daraa; the extent to which the initial protestors were secular campaigners calling for democracy or whether they were Muslim extremists seeking a sectarian society governed by sharia law. Several case studies of propaganda institutions are examined here, including the journalism of Marie Colvin; the role of government-funded NGOs; the controversies surrounding each of three major instances of alleged regime use of chemical weapons, and the politicization of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

This book will be of much interest to students of media and communication studies, propaganda studies, Middle Eastern politics, and International Relations in general.

Part IIntroduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003143079-1

1War, media, and global crises

DOI: 10.4324/9781003143079-2

Wars occasion enormous loss of life and intense suffering for many of those who survive. Modern technology accelerated the speed with which conflagration ignites and the scale of its tragedy. Loss and suffering would be mitigated if those party to, or implicated in, war were afforded deeper understanding (unmediated by propaganda) of the reasons why war is fought, the diverse ways in which it is fought, and what special interests pay for and/or promote it.

Early decades of the twenty-first century, arguably, have been less violent than many previous epochs. Yet such “peace” is concomitant with acts of terrorism, bloody civil conflicts, proxy wars, forced migrations, totalistic surveillance, extreme policing, militarization of culture, extreme inequality, weakened democracy, and reckless disregard for climate collapse. This is hardly the absence of violence but its gestation or manifestation in alternative forms. If the first Cold War was succeeded by a period of relative “peace” between Western and former/current communist nations, this hardly constitutes absence of violence if the “peace” is wasted in preparations for war that may provoke or accidentally spark nuclear conflict, followed inevitably – within a decade – by the end of human existence.

War exacerbates the unprecedented crises of our times. The “war on terror” was fought over resource-security issues at a time when traditional sources of energy such as petroleum were thought by some (mistakenly, it turned out) to have “peaked.” Even as “terror wars” played out, international relations were further destabilized by a paradoxical combination of: (a) turbo-charged supply of fossil fuel (notably, “fracked” gas); (b) acknowledgment, amidst lingering climate change denial propaganda, of severe, irreversible climate change resulting from burning of fossil fuels, and (c) the inexorable rise of cheaper, renewable energies, intensifying the panic of fossil fuel capitalists to maximize profit while they still could.

Media play a significant role in (mis)informing publics about such issues. Migrant surges from African and Middle Eastern countries seeking European sanctuary from 2011 were instigated partly by climate, but mostly by Western-funded military destabilization of countries that struggled to protect national sovereignty from the neo-liberal Washington consensus. Open to voices concerned by global climate change in the 1980s, WMM became confused and intimated over two critical decades by the “propaganda of climate science skepticism” – paid for mainly by energy giants (powerful sources of advertising) such as Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Shell, deploying the services of paid fabulists, some of whom had cut their teeth sowing seeds of doubt about the consequences of nicotine addiction.

The term “fake news” was re-introduced into public discourse by President Trump in 2016 to discredit WMM stories threatening Trump interests. It was a limited, distracting device, useless for identification of the profound, multi-faceted constraints on media’s coverage of war and examination of how propaganda is “done” in the twenty-first century.

Over two decades WMM (and non-Western counterparts once thought exempt from Western trends) – including “legacy” print and print-plus-online journalistic publications – experienced existential crisis. Digitization, social media, deregulation, privatization, intense commercialization, concentration, and conglomeration combined to disrupt a robust public sphere, independent of rival centers of power, financed from either the advertising-plus-subscription model or alternative formulae of public sponsorship. Reporting confronts a world in transition from a relatively stable superpower duopoly to a complex, fragile, multi-polar, globalized coagulate, one in which a single military superpower, its allies or subalterns, undergirded by a passive-aggressive ideology of neo-conservatism, resists diminution of entitlement by show of force – under the monikers of “war on terrorism” and related fear-mongering campaigns whose ever-revolving targets range from al-Qaeda to ISIS, Kim Jong-un to Nicolas Maduro, Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping.

Because propaganda is a form of communication, its dissemination is inextricable from media systems. Not all propaganda craves mass attention. Propaganda may target single individuals, departments of state, and institutions with power to make things happen, often through private, even interpersonal communications. Propaganda that requires at least implicit consent of significant proportions of the population to specific ideas, policies, and actions of governing elites, that grows in stature from the perceived legitimacy conferred by consent, requires either or both the construction, shaping, and dissemination of ideas through media, or the staging or execution of actions, behaviors, events etc. whose purpose is in part propagandistic and that will capture media attention. A function of mainstream media, in almost all known societies since the industrial age, is to reinforce hegemonic political, economic, and ideological underpinnings. In societies that permit public debate, contests between ideas represented within mainstream media are restrained by the ideological perimeters of officially or constitutionally recognized political parties or other groups.

Mass communication has grown significantly over two hundred years in reach, form, technology, diversity of content and function. Tying together technological infrastructures for the capture, composition, dissemination, and reception of communication and entertainment, media industries are central to the global economy. As they became centrally integrated within the structures of global capitalism, they grew more diverse in product, concentrated in ownership, and commodified. Media whose business is information of public interest and relevance – that serve the “public sphere” – fared poorly relative to other spheres of media activity. The challenges that contemporary informational media face in the digital age include assaults on their autonomy, economic survival, and public credibility. We should not assume that media vulnerability to external agendas of propagandists is more severe than previously. In some respects, the situation is healthier, but the potential for massive damage from those parts of the media industry most vulnerable to propaganda is arguably unprecedented, globally and historically. There is unlimited scope for multiple perspectives but only a small number of sites, usually associated with established “legacy” media, command the status, credibility, information-gathering resources, and professionalism of mainstream mass media. Until information and perspectives are selected and endorsed by the mainstream, they have little potential to bring about change.

This situation coincides with intense political fissures and tensions worldwide. The world is at a perilous juncture. Sources of peril relate to (1) global heating and environmental degradation, (2) potential nuclear conflict and war, (3) hegemonic, aggressive neo-liberalism, supplying universal pretext for great power intervention, (4) steepening social inequalities, undermining fragile democracies, and (5) burgeoning tolerance for irrationality, befitting a “post-truth” era. When the world is most in need of robustly funded public information systems that are independent, inclusive, investigative, with global reach, resources available to public information institutions and the quality of their practice have deteriorated. They become more vulnerable to propaganda machinations.

Why Syria?

My attention turned to Syria when writing Media Imperialism (published 2015). This examined pretexts for war, in the conjuring of which WMM routinely acted in complicity with government, intelligence, and elite agendas. While I wrote, there occurred the first of several scandals concerning the authenticity of claims that the Syrian regime had deployed CW against opposition forces (in East Ghouta 2013). President Barak Obama had previously declared a “red line” on CW, imparting the impression that, should the regime use them, the world could expect Western retaliation comparable to that witnessed in Libya and, before Libya, in Iraq, with pervasively disastrous consequences. The 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, I had argued, were among the most reprehensible of war crimes committed since World War II. I could not foresee how Western destruction of Iraq’s Hussein regime would destabilize Syria. I worried that “red line” theater presaged another fruitless, brutal, costly, wasteful, and destructive Western war-of-choice, further extending a long chain of regime-change interventions of dubious justice, dating back at least as far as the destruction of the twin towers in 2001 and the pointless US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan that followed. I could have chosen any of numerous earlier points in time, including Western support of Boris Yeltsin in Russia during the 1990s, or Western involvement in the Balkan wars of the late twentieth century.

Models of war propaganda

Formal study of propaganda is impregnated with academic discourses in literature (including rhetoric and narrative), linguistics (semiotics), socio-linguistics (discourse), psychology (perception, attention, and retention) social psychology (interactive communication and persuasion), social anthropology (social practices of “reading,” “viewing,” and gaming), mass communication and media studies (including the political economy of media and their business models, the relationships tying media to other centers of social, political, economic, and cultural power, the social functions of media, and media effects).

Study of mass communication, rather more than related fields, wrestled mightily trying to assess the power of media to persuade. Inclined in the early decades of the twentieth century to exaggerate the power of media to change minds, the discipline shifted during and after World War II toward an empirical approach embedded in social science methodologies. These introduced nuance and sophistication. Research documentation of the many variables intervening in the transmission of messages through processes of audience sense-making, including impacts of a broad range of contextual factors, established a theoretical orthodoxy that attributed only modest power to the media, and greater influence than heretofore understood to the autonomy of audiences, whether individually or collectively. In the field of news, this included a move away from the idea of news media as institutions that told people what to think, to the idea of their telling people what to think about. This orthodoxy was shaken in the 1990s by improvement in conceptualizing the construction of media content. Newer theories of “framing,” “indexing,” and “priming” examined how texts constructed their topics by selective highlights and omissions, emphases, and marginalization, foregrounding and backgrounding, and predisposed audiences to attend to certain aspects and ignore others. Particularly on issues with which audiences were unfamiliar, this returned the media back into more sinister perspective, but afforded fresh scope for thinking about texts, meanings, and interpretations. Theorizing about media frames blended with older tools of linguistic and literary analysis that focused on the relationship of texts to storytelling (e.g., the universal recurrence of hero, villain, helper, and narrator roles), and the evolution of how discourses (patterns of linguistic choice, invocations of ideas and associations, arrangement of arguments) addressed different phenomena.

This ground is well-trodden. A well-known US text by Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell reviewed various definitions of propaganda and offered their own:

Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.

(Jowett and O’Donnell 2018)

The choice of words helped distinguish propaganda as a particular form of persuasion in which a persuader assumes a position of power over the persons being persuaded, such that he/she shapes, manipulates, and directs at the service of the propagandist, first and foremost. Propaganda is more likely than transparent, interactive communication to exhibit the features of concealed purpose, concealed identity, control over information flow, management of public opinion, and manipulation of behavior.

The authors’ explication of propaganda first constructed its history, highlighting notable examples of its exercise by states, armies, churches, revolutionary, and social movements. It then examined the “institutionalization” of propaganda practice, its socially pervasive embedding through modern mass media, advertising, and polling within a culture of promotion. To demonstrate the relevance of the study of the psychology of persuasion and its relationship to mass media, the authors drew on theories of consistency, exposure learning, McGuire’s model, the diffusion of innovations, agenda setting, cultivation, uses and gratifications, uses and dependency, and the impacts of cultural studies and collective memory studies.

Jowett and O’Donnell dedicated a chapter to psychological warfare, compiling a history of outstanding examples, including Soviet and Nazi practices and propaganda in numerous US wars including the Vietnam War and the first and second “Gulf Wars.” They referenced the seven propaganda “devices” identified by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) in 1937: name-calling; glittering generalities; transfer; testimonial; plain folks; card-stacking; band wagoning. This list was amplified by later military applications such as the US military Chieu Hoi program. This targeted North Vietnamese soldiers with “fear of death” threats and appeals to the hardships endured by the Viet Cong, their loss of faith (it was presumed) in a communist victory, the common soldier’s concern for relatives and the hardships they faced, and disillusionment with the war. The emphasis was on the idea of propaganda being contained within a campaign, one with a specific message for a target audience, employing techniques of rhetoric for maximization of impact.

Other analysts have amplified the original IPA list. The Swiss Policy Research site identified the following standard gambits: the enemy is solely responsible for the war; we are innocent and peace-loving; the enemy has barbaric features; we fight for a good cause, the enemy for selfish ends; the enemy commits atrocities on purpose, but with us it’s an oversight; the enemy uses illegal weapons; our losses are small, the opponents’ are enormous; our cause is supported by artists and intellectuals; our mission is sacred; anyone who doubts our reporting is a traitor (Swiss Policy Research 2020). In studying the three-way conflict between Ukraine, Russia, and the West following the 2014 coup d’état in Kiev, Boyd-Barrett identified several axioms of propaganda. His entry on elections resonates with the classic 1988 work of Herman and Chomsky on US media coverage of Central American elections:

Elections for independence that take place under the rule of authorities who do not enjoy the approval of Western powers will be considered less than legitimate by those powers and their media, especially when they occur in periods of conflict and unrest (as in Crimea). Elections for independence that take place under the rule of authorities that are approved by Western interests may not even be necessary (as in Kosovo) or, if held, are reassuring signs of democracy even in the most unpromising of circumstances (as in presidential elections in Ukraine that elected Poroshenko to the presidency, and the parliamentary elections that were held in August 2014).

(Boyd-Barrett 2017, 154)

Describing the “Nayirah” incident during the prelude to the first Gulf War, when strategic communication operator Hill and Knowlton’s pro-war campaign effectively deployed the false testimony of a witness whose identity was misrepresented, Jowett and O’Donnell established a broader perspective on propaganda, one that involved the conjuring of perception through coordinated communications of multiple sources and their “evidence,” with a view to staging a fake reality. Their book outlined a framework for the analysis of propaganda, supplemented with detailed case-studies. One showed how, during Gulf War 2, US television network chiefs colluded with official war propaganda by hiring former military generals, briefed for the purpose by the Pentagon, as supposedly independent “pundits” for news and talk shows. Some were salesmen for defense companies and rewarded by the Pentagon with access to sales opportunities. The practice did not stop.

Such examples demonstrated how construction of effective propaganda campaigns involve numerous levels of deception, going far beyond the design and contents of a message. These include the crafting of public perception of the sources of a message, or the staging of reality to create “facts” that are incorporated into the message, and the arrangement of multiple streams of dissemination and repetition to ensure its domination of the public sphere over potential alternatives.

This sophisticated approach to propaganda was compellingly demonstrated in the writing and professional practice of an acclaimed grandfather of public relations namely, Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis. Among his accomplishments (Bernays claimed to have helped substitute the term “public relations” for that of “propaganda”) he worked for the tobacco industry in the 1920s to persuade women to disregard social taboos on their smoking in public. He staged a “news” event at which young women (supposedly “debutantes” and “suffragettes”), during an Easter Day parade in New York, lit up cigarettes as “torches of freedom.” Bernays ensured that press photographers knew when to capture the moment. He established a lasting template for staging and publicizing regime-change ope...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Competing narratives
• Part III Mainstream narratives
• Part IV Counter-narratives
• Part V Institutions of interventionist propaganda
• Part VI From long tail to conclusion
• Conclusion
• References
• Index