Every time Iraqi insurgents grab a headline about mayhem, they get closer to their goal of ousting the U.S. from their country, reports Neil Monro. If this is true, should the U.S. media quit taking notes and making a joyful noise every time someone who offends Islam is assassinated by his countrymen or killed at random by a marketplace bomb?
http://nationaljournal.com/cgi-bin/ifetch4?ENG+NJMAG+7-njarchive+1198764-REVERSE+0+1+176+F+1+337+1+%22Neil+Munro%22
Issues & Ideas - The Dollar Value of Murder
Neil Munro
© National Journal Group, Inc.
Three attackers shot Iraqi comedian Walid Hassan four times in the head on November 20, 2006. Hassan's death was no more or less tragic than those of thousands of other Iraqis who have been killed in the three months since. But it had particular impact because he was a man trying to bring some laughter and lightness to a country in the throes of violence. He was the star of a weekend TV program called Caricature, which satirized Iraq's poor security, long gas lines, electricity blackouts, ineffective politicians, and insensitive coalition soldiers, and thereby provided some desperately needed comic relief.
National Public Radio's Jamie Tarabay summed up the effect of Hassan's death to her American audience on November 21. "We've seen more and more attacks over the last few days," she reported. "One of the ones that hit hardest, I guess, among the Iraqis here was the death yesterday of Walid Hassan.... This is a man who really tried to bring a bit of joy into the lives of Iraqis in terms of trying to get them to poke fun at their everyday lives, and he'll be missed."
The targeting of Hassan was more than the cold-blooded murder of a married father of five children. In its ability to reinforce the view, increasingly held by Iraqis and Americans, that Iraq is a chaotic, violence-prone, ungovernable place, it also was a great publicity coup for the insurgents who killed him.
Public-relations professionals routinely rate the success of a publicity event by adding up the volume of news coverage it generates, and then calculating the cost of a comparable amount of advertising space or time. In this case, Hassan's killers scored a 26-column-inch, page-one story in The Washington Post, plus a 10-inch, two-column photo on the inside jump page. The Post charges about $556 per column-inch for ads inside the newspaper, so the 36 inches of space could have cost an advertiser about $20,000. The Post also ran the story on its Web site.
The paper declined to say how much a similar amount of Web space would cost an advertiser, but other major newspapers charge about $20 per 1,000 online visitors. If 650,000 people clicked on The Post's site that day, the advertising value of the online story would have been about $13,000.
The murder was highlighted or mentioned by other newspapers, major and minor, across the country, including The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the St. Petersburg Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Kansas City Star. Most of them used one of the 36 Hassan-related stories put out by the Associated Press. The killing merited about two minutes of total air time in three televised reports on CNN, plus a few moments on a Texas TV station and on MSNBC. The TV exposure was worth about $9,000, according to TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG, based in Arlington, Va. Hassan's death received two mentions on National Public Radio, which asks underwriters to pay about $3,000 per day to reach an estimated 10 million daily listeners. The murder gained widespread coverage in the Iraqi and Arab media, too.
Now, the murder of Hassan did have its costs. Wages for Iraqi gunmen run about $300 a month, according to people who closely monitor the terror campaign in Iraq. This means that the pay for the three-man team of gunmen who killed Hassan added up to about $225 for maybe a week of planning. Terrorists must also pay for housing, weapons and ammunition, fuel, and probably a stolen car to mount the raid. Combine all of those expenses, and the cost of killing Hassan reached perhaps $2,000. If the gunmen had to get rid of the car they used to corner Hassan, the cost might have reached $6,000.
So, for a $6,000 investment, Hassan's killers earned as much as $100,000 in what they would deem to be favorable publicity in the United States. That's at least a sixteenfold return-on-investment for murdering Hassan. Now, in this case, "favorable" does not mean making Americans feel good about terrorists; it does mean making Iraq look horrible and not worth the cost to America to stay there -- the goal of virtually all of the insurgent groups in the country. Most of them think that if America leaves, their faction can win.
Overall, the terrorists' campaign in Iraq has had an "incredibly positive return for the insurgents who are working with sticks of dynamite and old cellphones," said David Michaelson, a nationally known expert on the costs and effectiveness of public-relations campaigns.
"I would agree," said Don Stacks, a professor and program director at the University of Miami's School of Communication. "The more the [terrorists] show what you're seeing on TV -- dead bodies, bombs going off, mangled Humvees -- the more people are turned off," he said.
In contrast, U.S. and Iraqi forces had a harder time during the same period getting positive publicity for their work against insurgents. On November 30, for example, Iraqi officials announced the arrests of an infamous sniper and 30 of his followers. The group gained notoriety because it often videotaped its attacks on U.S. troops, dubbed them in English, and posted them on Internet sites, where they were picked up by Arab TV stations and also by CNN.
The snipers knew the value of the videos. The Financial Times quoted one of them as saying, "The idea of filming the operations is very important.... The scene that shows the falling soldier when hit has more impact on the enemy than any other weapon." But according to Nexis, the November announcement of the snipers' arrests was not cited in any U.S. news reports.
Obvious successes, such as the U.S. military's killing last June of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, do generate a flood of valuable publicity. Throughout the following week, the U.S. media produced 467 stories about his death that also contained the word "success."
And just by making a speech or holding a press conference, President Bush can generate a flood of publicity. Bush's 2007 State of the Union speech, for example, was viewed by 30 percent of U.S. households, according to Nielsen Media Research, giving him an undiluted 49 minutes of access to 45.5 million viewers. By comparison, this year's Super Bowl was viewed by 42.6 percent of U.S. households. Advertisers paid $2.6 million for 30 seconds of access to the football audience. In crude terms, then, Bush bought himself as much as $255 million of airtime with the State of the Union address.
Military experts say that the terrorists in Iraq seek to inflict damage not only on troops and equipment but also on the psyches of Iraqis and Americans, to convince them that the Iraq democracy project is not worth the cost in dollars, lives, and disgust. Three rival extremist factions in Iraq share this goal: Baathist-led Sunni gunmen, Qaeda terrorists, and Shiite Islamic militias.
The killing of Iraqi performers and artists, the bloody suicides and car bombings in civilian markets, the shootings of U.S. soldiers all sent an unpleasant emotional message about the war to U.S. voters. "Disgust ... was probably the greatest driving force in the election," said Larry Kamer, the North American president of Manning Selvage & Lee, a global public-relations company.
TV images and photographs are particularly important in transmitting that message, public-relations professionals say. Generally, Kamer said, pictures are better than words because "we process [information] first by seeing and feeling, and then by reading and thinking." For example, Kamer said he could sell laundry detergent more effectively by using a full-page advertisement of a mom holding a baby in a towel than by publishing a full page of text extolling its virtues.
Good PR campaigns also need repetition, Kamer said. Constant acts of violence in Iraq, and heavy news coverage of them, help insurgents achieve that repetition. Many headlines, articles, and TV reports routinely describe the situation in Iraq as "chaos," or "chaotic," which is a close match for "unreliable," an unpleasant connotation for a product that all PR professionals try to avoid. The word "chaos" appeared in 274 articles on Iraq published in major U.S. newspapers during the first week of November 2006, according to Nexis.
The propaganda aspects of the warfare in Iraq are hard to measure and haven't been sufficiently studied, in part because "there are too many players, conditions, and nuances" to separate one influence from another, said Alan Kelly, a public-relations consultant who has posted a catalog of possible PR moves and countermoves on his Web site, www.plays2run.com. The government and the media need to pay more attention to the role that PR is playing, he said, because the struggle between jihadism and democracy is less a war of battles and bombs than "a war of information and a war of ideas."
Originally posted by der schwarze RitterYou'd ban the press from reporting from Iraq?
Every time Iraqi insurgents grab a headline about mayhem, they get closer to their goal of ousting the U.S. from their country, reports Neil Monro. If this is true, should the U.S. media quit taking notes and making a joyful noise every time someone who offends Islam is assassinated by his countrymen or killed at random by a marketplace bomb?
...[text shortened]... an "a war of information and a war of ideas."
Originally posted by RedmikeThe Western media mostly doesn't do any reporting from Iraq. Oftentimes, they hire an Iraqi stringer -- who probably has loyalties to the insurgents -- to do their reporting for them. Thus, they become the unwitting tool for disseminating the message of terrorist goons who are making life intolerable for normal, everyday Iraqis.
You'd ban the press from reporting from Iraq?
Originally posted by der schwarze RitterWow. The consipracy theories never end with you do they?
The Western media mostly doesn't do any reporting from Iraq. Oftentimes, they hire an Iraqi stringer -- who probably has loyalties to the insurgents -- to do their reporting for them. Thus, they become the unwitting tool for disseminating the message of terrorist goons who are making life intolerable for normal, everyday Iraqis.
Let me clear something up for you - the media cannot win or lose a war. Propaganda does not win or lose wars. If it could, then the Germans would have won WWII and or the Russians could have won the cold war. No country has controlled their media more than the Soviet Union during the cold war. Every word and every sound uttered to the Russian people was controlled by their government. And yet... they failed miserably against the US in a war that lasted 40 years.
Again, it's boots on the ground, bullets in the chamber, and bombs in the air. That's how you win or lose a war. Words alone won't get the job done.
The media's job is to report stories that make money. Abdul opening a new grocery doesn't make the headlines. A car bomb that kills 40 people however is a money maker. That's how it is. Welcome to capitalism! You're familiar with that right?
Originally posted by der schwarze RitterThe media should only report exactly what the government tells them to. Otherwise, we'll lose the battle to be free.
The Western media mostly doesn't do any reporting from Iraq. Oftentimes, they hire an Iraqi stringer -- who probably has loyalties to the insurgents -- to do their reporting for them. Thus, they become the unwitting tool for disseminating the message of terrorist goons who are making life intolerable for normal, everyday Iraqis.
Originally posted by der schwarze RitterThat's a 'yes' then?
The Western media mostly doesn't do any reporting from Iraq. Oftentimes, they hire an Iraqi stringer -- who probably has loyalties to the insurgents -- to do their reporting for them. Thus, they become the unwitting tool for disseminating the message of terrorist goons who are making life intolerable for normal, everyday Iraqis.