Beyond Hegemony :Classical Propaganda Theory and Presidential Communication Strategy After The Invasion Of Iraq

KARTIKA PRATIWILUVIANA AVRIYANTI

MAHFUD ACHYARParamadina Graduate School - 2013

The Hegemonic Perspective

“The consensus that undergirds civil society including beliefs and norms concerning private property, the market, social relations, and the proper role and behavior of political elites and the governments.” (Marxist or Gramscian: 1971)

“A large body of work that seeks to understand the government-press nexus in terms of the government’s ability to keep information available to the public within such narrow ideological boundaries that democratic deliberation and influence are all but impossible”. (Entman, 2004 : 46)

Classical Propaganda Theory

Propaganda is an essentially situational, pragmatic and not ideological phenomenon.

Propaganda is a form of communication aimed towards influencing the attitude of the community.

Classical situational propaganda concerns its relative independence from ideology.

The Differences

Hegemonic Theory

- Hegemonic theory sees the themes constituting Propaganda as the ideas of the ruling class – directly benefiting society’s owners and rulers. So, the masses are under control of the super-power.

- It holds that the president and other government officials (including the military) wield extra ordinary power to shape news coverage of war and by extensions, to manage public opinion.

The Classical Propaganda Theory:

- Propaganda showed the bedrock beliefs of the masses are more important than political ideology because propaganda must align with common beliefs for it to be effective.

- Propaganda was not the art of inflicting an opinion on the people, but rather the art of receiving an opinion from the masses.

Hegemony, Propaganda, and Iraq

Let’s compare the predictions of the Hegemony traditions with classical propaganda tradition in Iraq post-invasion:

Hegemonic Perspective:

1. With respect to use of Propaganda : Hegemonic expects president will go on the offensive; generating rhetoric to promote an ideological position, unchecked by the events on the ground.

2. News coverage : hegemonic predicts presidential rhetoric will set the news agenda, framing war coverage for the news media and public.

3. Public Opinion :Hegemonic predicts the presidential domination of the news will result in strong support for presidential policies.

Propaganda Perspective

- Argues that president will often find themselves on the defensive with respect to propaganda when collision of real world events with mass public creates political pressure.

- News coverage : Classical propaganda theory suggest that the president might have the loudest voice he must compete for attention with events or others offered by his critics.

- Public Opinion : it predicts that president will succeed leading public opinion only insofar as he sells what the public wants to buy. News dominance can’t buy support.

Perspective

- Compare the predictions of the hegemony tradition with those of the classical propaganda tradition.

1. With the respect to use of propaganda, the hegemonic, perspective expects presidents will go on the offensive, generating rhetoric to promote an ideological position, unchecked by events on the ground.

2. With the respect to news coverage, the hegemony tradition predicts presidential rhetoric will set the news agenda, framing war coverage for the news media and the public.

3. With the respect to public opinion, hegemony theories predict the presidential domination of the news will result in strong support for presidential policies.

Method

1. Two coders read all of the front-page New York Times stories about Iraq for the period between January 2003 and June 2004.

2. They coded for the presence of any mention of U.S. casualties.

3. A test of inter-coder reliability on this particular measure was near perfect (95 %), with the only differences turning out to be when one or the other coder missed a reference to casualties in the next.

4. To track the presence of other themes in war news we used the Nexis database to determine how many stories about Iraq contained relevant keywords.

On the defensive: Quagmire, Casualties, and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

The hegemonic perspective envisions a president able to command media attention in support of its agenda and to determine the news framing applied to Iraq.

Case: Pressure on the Bush administration began almost as soon as the U.S military had toppled Baghdad.

The pressure came in three forms:

1. A public desire for visible progress toward eventual success in establishing security and order in Iraq

2. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction

3. Rising public concern over U.S. casualties.

Eroding News Dominance

- It is clear that the conditions that enabled him to manage the news in the prewar period disappeared soon after the invasion.

- The result was that war news in fact amplified the pressure previously outlined, giving them the political force that pressured the Bush administration into its defensive propaganda posture.

- President Bush’s failure to dominate the news can be seen in two ways.

- Casualties were not the only troubling topic making news management difficult.

Responsive Propaganda

- Bush did not so much manage news of Iraq as manage his public relations efforts in light of news from Iraq.

- The defensive and pragmatic nature of the administration’s propaganda campaign reveals itself in several ways:

1. In contrast to hegemony’s predictions, the administration did not spend much time touting its successes in the post-invasion period.

2. The reactive, rather than proactive

3. In response to the collapse of its initial justification for war in Iraq.

Implication

- Bush does not speech about how many military to Iraq

- Mass media write a news about Bush Speech

- Bush control to the media? Or control the hegemony?

- Antonio Gramsci and Karl Marx Theory about propaganda

- Hannah Arendt about public theory

- Propaganda: Harold Laswell Theory

War Justification

As classical propaganda theory predicts, the administration responded to the pressures created by the flow of casualties in Iraq by stepping up its propaganda efforts to justify the war. The efforts can be seen in two ways:

- First: the Bush administration made greater efforts to communicate with the public when the situation on the ground in Iraq worsened. For Example doing TV Press Conference.

- Second : Its attempt to reframe the entire US mission in Iraq; to find and destroy Iraqi weapons of mass destruction because Iraq become the central front in the war on terror.

Summary

Presidents are not the iron hegemony of news and opinion, they occupy the center of a vortex of political pressures during war that forces them to respond or risk losing public support.

At their strongest moments, presidents can certainly dominate the news and make it difficult for critics to gain a foothold but on the other hand influencing the public becomes harder as the administration’s control over information erodes, and the public slowly grows aware of discrepancies between official rhetoric and reality.

Classical propaganda theory encourages a broader and more agnostic consideration of the forces shaping elite strategy and communication. It still allowing opinion differences among the elites and the general public. As a result, Classical propaganda theory is better than hegemony theory because it more accurately maps the social and political world and better apprehends of the role and impact of communication.

Reference

- Stanley J. Baran and Dennis K. Davis. 2010. Mass Communication Theory:Foundations, Ferment, and Future, Sixth Edition. Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.