Randal Marlin

by Propaganda

Lee did oppose, as might be expected, disseminating false information, but his main concern was with the disastrous results of detection. He was not averse to the

  occasional suppressio veri with suggestio falsi. For instance, he posited a situation in which a tourist who speaks no Russian boards a Moscow train without a ticket; his

  advice is, “Whenever you get into a bad situation, make signs and smile.” Obviously,

  the tourist cannot fully articulate a literal falsehood but can give the false impression

  that everything is all right. Lee’s moral is more revealing: “It is only necessary for a

  man to tell his story in the best way he can, with such signs as he can manifest; to do it

  with a smile and with a pleasant attitude, and he can accomplish wonders.”36 Applied

  to the tourist, there is scarcely cause for concern, but when we treat this as a model for

  the behaviour of huge corporations toward the public, we have, indeed, reason to be

  apprehensive. I can picture the complaint department of a retail organization smiling

  while disclaiming responsibility for a defective product.

  Lee was aware of a certain unfairness occurring when one competitor can afford

  to spend large sums of money on PR while another is unable to do so. This situation

  results in advocacy for one side without corresponding advocacy on the other. The

  truth no doubt suffers. In an article written for the mass-circulation magazine Collier’s in 1925, Lee frankly admitted that he had no answer to the question of unfairness

  where there are unequal resources for PR available to contending parties.37 One answer

  would be something like legal aid for PR, but with current cutbacks to even basic legal

  aid, the outlook for such a scheme being adopted is not favourable. Apart from the

  problem of unfairness, Lee did not object to one-sided presentations as long as the

  source was upfront.

  Lee did explicitly countenance some deviousness in persuasion. A case in point

  is that of Statler Hotels. Their regular advertisements in Saturday Evening Post, one of the widest circulation magazines in the early part of the twentieth century, played

  up their wonderful service. The purpose of these advertisements, Lee revealed, was

  primarily to influence the staff themselves into giving better service. It was a clever bit

  of psychology, but somewhat manipulative. If the truth were told to workers, it would

  likely generate some, although probably not very serious, resentment at this trickery.38

  One reason why Lee had few scruples about giving one-sided accounts of events

  was that he saw that even public officials were uncertain about what passes for truth.

  US President Calvin Coolidge had said, “Propaganda seeks to present a part of the

  facts, to distort their relations, and to force conclusions which could not be drawn

  from a complete and candid survey of all the facts.” He also stated, “We don’t want any

  propaganda.” However, at the very time Coolidge made those remarks, his Secretary

  of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, was carrying on what Lee judged to be an active

  propaganda campaign on behalf of the Mellon Plan, which involved reducing taxes on

  the rich. First presented to the House Ways and Means Committee in 1923, the plan

  was passed in 1926, following tremendous media support. Lee commented: “What he

  [Mellon] did was to give a selection of the facts,” not a complete and candid survey of

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  all the facts. Lee argued against Coolidge’s lip-service condemnation of one-sided presentations, by asking rhetorical y, “Can you kindly tel me of any situation in human

  history which has ever been presented to the people in the form of a candid survey of

  all the facts?”39

  Lee’s answer is an unsatisfactory response to Coolidge’s complaint about propa-

  ganda because he fails to deal with the entirety of what he reports as Coolidge’s actual

  words. Coolidge spoke of conclusions that could not be drawn from a complete and

  candid survey of all the facts, not of those that are not, in fact, drawn from such a sur-

  vey—the alternative being, of course, to draw the conclusion from a biased selection

  of the facts. Because Lee was in sympathy with the Mellon Plan, perhaps he thought

  that the conclusion in its favour could be drawn from such a complete and candid

  survey. We do not know what Lee’s response would have been in a case where the con-

  clusions could not have been supported from a survey of all the facts. One response

  to that hypothetical case, suggested by some of Lee’s writings, involves simply hiding

  in a fog of relativity or scepticism. If nothing can be known for sure, then, it might

  be argued, you can never force any conclusions and, thus, never be guilty of propa-

  ganda in Coolidge’s terms. However, this approach is not consistent with Lee’s own

  characterization of propaganda as “something that insidiously plants wrong ideas in

  the mind and has an ulterior motive.”40 The reference to “wrong ideas” reflects a posi-

  tion other than complete scepticism. Lee seems to oppose outright deception, but not

  one-sidedness of presentation, where some worthy cause (in his mind) was at stake

  and where, in addition, there was an absence of any “al -sided” or objective account.

  PR techniques, applied to promotion of goals that can be justified when all the per-

  tinent facts are taken into account, is morally better than when they are applied to pro-

  mote goals that cannot be so justified (other things being equal). This is true whether

  we are thinking subjectively, from the point of view of PR practitioners, or objectively,

  in relation to other people’s evaluation of the goals. There remains a problem, however,

  when subjective and objective assessments are in conflict. What if the goals seem rea-

  sonable to the PR practitioners but not to the general public when all the facts are in?

  In fact, the public is not usually given all the pertinent facts by PR practitioners, who

  are content to follow their own subjective valuation. At the heart of this problem is the

  one of grassroots democracy versus elitism. My tentative conclusion (although more

  discussion is reserved for Chapter 8) is that there are well-known dangers of biased

  judgment connected with the elitist perspective and that respect for democracy should

  discourage unfettered one-sidedness in presentations on policy matters.

  Hill and Knowlton and the gulf War: A Case Study41

  An illustration of the clash between moral imperatives is provided by the Hill and

  Knowlton campaign, following the August 2, 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, to

  bring US opinion in favour of going to war against Iraq. One imperative was to get the

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  job done, something the Reagan-Bush administration also supported. The other was to respect PR ethics. The latter lost, according to Ivy Lee’s major principle about being

  upfront regarding funding and information sources. The campaign was successful, and

  the United States went to war in January 1991, not only ousting the Iraqis from Kuwait

  but also causing huge damage to the whole Iraqi infrastructure, with consequent loss

  of life for many civilians. This success was linked directly to the violation of L
ee’s prin-

  ciple; in fact, the Wall Street Journal reported dissatisfaction within the PR profession with the “discredit on our business” brought on by the company’s tactics.42 Prominent

  among the forces that helped sway opinion in favour of war was the incubator babies

  atrocity story: according to it, Iraqi invaders dumped 312 babies out of their incubators

  on to the cold floors of Kuwaiti hospitals and left them there to die while they took

  the incubators to Iraq. The story seemed to reveal a deep-seated callousness and disre-

  gard for human life among the Iraqis. It received banner headlines in some newspapers

  when it was confirmed by Amnesty International. It was later discredited.43

  The New York firm of Hill and Knowlton was responsible for presenting evidence

  to the public that this atrocity took place. With over $10 million from a group called

  “Citizens for a Free Kuwait” (CFK), the firm had ample means to publicize whatever

  version of truth or falsehood it chose. Most of the money, in fact, came from the

  Kuwaiti government. According to John MacArthur, “CFK reported to the Justice

  Department receipts of $17,861 from 78 individual US and Canadian contributors and

  $11,852,329 from the government of Kuwait.”44

  Not only was the identity of their client presented deceptively, but so was the

  identity of their most convincing witness to the atrocity, who appeared before a

  congressional human rights caucus. A Kuwaiti girl, identified to the public only as

  15-year-old Nayirah, was discovered later to be the daughter of Shaikh Saud al-Nasser

  al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States. Had she been so identified

  at the time, her story might have been treated with more scepticism.45 Congressman

  Thomas Lantos, co-chair of the congressional human rights caucus, admitted that he

  was informed of Nayirah’s identity, but the other co-chair, John Porter of Il inois, said

  he did not know her identity. Hill and Knowlton contradicted him on this matter,

  and he did not sound very convincing in answer to questions put by Linden MacIntyre

  of the CBC’s the fifth estate program. He made an important admission, though, in

  saying that the rest of Congress and the public should have been informed:

  I think it [true identity of the girl] certainly should have been known at the time

  of the hearing. It would have had bearing on what she might have said. Yes, I think

  people—members of Congress certainly, and members of the public—were entitled

  to know the source of her testimony.46

  Why was the story so effective? It supplied exactly the kind of attention-getting

  and emotion-arousing ingredients necessary to fuel the indignation of Americans

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  against the enemy and thus provided the basis for widespread approval of the war.

  Atrocity stories abound in any war, as we have seen, but people have become accus-

  tomed to hearing about rapes, murders, and mutilations. This story was novel because

  the Iraqi invaders were pictured as brutes dumping innocent babies. The timing of

  the story—which hit the headlines first in October and even more resoundingly in

  mid-December 1990 (see below)—contributed to its effect. Coming that close to

  Christmas, when many people have in mind the newborn Christ and the massacre of

  the innocents by King Herod, gave it enormous resonance and impact. Furthermore,

  Christmas is a time for holidays, when people, preoccupied with various festivities,

  are not so likely to check on the accuracy of news reports. The momentum of the

  story was too great to stop without the most securely founded counter-evidence. Well-

  grounded rebuttals were difficult to obtain prior to the Christmas holidays, and by

  New Year’s the story was fully rooted in people’s consciousness.

  What we do not know, and cannot expect to find out, is the precise connection

  between Hill and Knowlton and all the different forms in which the story appeared.

  This should not surprise us, since, as noted in Chapter 2, we still do not know, after

  nearly 100 years, the full truth about the corpse factory story of World War I. It is

  worth contemplating some similarities between the two tales. In both cases, the

  story got an initial toehold in public consciousness through isolated reports without

  official acknowledgement. References in the press to theft of incubators began on

  September 5, 1990 in the London Daily Telegraph, where the source was given as

  the exiled Kuwaiti housing minister, Yahya al-Sumait. Two days later, newspaper

  reports of incubator atrocities, supplied by Reuters news agency and published in

  the Los Angeles Times, gave as sources women identified only by their first names.

  As MacArthur points out, it is a serious breach of journalistic practice to print only

  first names. If witnesses refuse to give their last names, their testimony should be

  treated warily.47

  The first impact came with coverage by the news media on October 10, 1990 of

  Nayirah’s testimony before the human rights caucus. Pictures of the tearful, distraught

  girl were widely published. On November 27, Dr. Ibrahim Bahbahani testified to the

  UN Security Council that he personally had buried 40 newborn babies who had been

  taken from their incubators. According to Middle East Watch, Dr. Bahbahani’s testi-

  mony was arranged by Hill and Knowlton. It was discredited when it was discovered

  later that he was not a surgeon, as he claimed, but an orthodontist; he admitted the

  bodies were buried without examination to determine their time and cause of death.

  In a March interview with ABC news, he said he buried around 30 and that he did not

  know whether or not the 120 babies buried by his group as a whole (according to his

  testimony) were taken from incubators at al .48

  The crowning touch came on December 19, 1990 when Amnesty International

  was named as the source confirming the story of 312 incubator baby deaths. Apparently,

  the organization had been duped. In an April 1991 news release, it admitted: “Once

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  we were actually in Kuwait and had visited hospitals and cemeteries and spoken to doctors at work, we found that the story did not stand up.”49 Until this incident,

  Amnesty International’s reliability was generally considered excellent. In the circum-

  stances, it would have been hard to find a more credible source, and, understandably,

  the press treated their account as fact and exploited the story for all the publicity value

  they could get. The impact was such that it may well have made the difference to the

  number of votes in Congress, which narrowly voted in favour of the war; the Senate

  passed a resolution supporting the war effort on January 12 with only a five-vote mar-

  gin. As MacArthur notes, “six pro-war senators (five Republicans and one Democrat)

  specifically cited the baby incubator allegation in their speeches supporting the reso-

  lution.”50 In fact, with the commencement of war in mid-January, US attention was

  completely diverted to the SCUD missile attacks and ground action. The question of

  the veracity of the atrocity story dropped out of sight from t
he mainstream press.

  What is the truth about the alleged incubator baby atrocity? What was Hill and

  Knowlton’s involvement, and how ethical or unethical was their role in all of this? Did

  they orchestrate the duping of Amnesty International, for example? In my analysis,

  both Hill and Knowlton and the Pentagon were heavily involved either in suppressio

  veri or lack of diligence toward finding and presenting the truth. A speech given on April 20, 1993 by Tom Eidson, then CEO of Hill and Knowlton, denied that the company engaged knowingly in any deception; coming after so many published reports on

  the actual funding of the PR campaign, the true identity of their star witness, and the

  numbers of babies who died, his account appears disingenuous at best. Eidson states,

  for example, that “Kroll Associates, the international investigative organization, issued

  a report that documented the atrocities and revealed official Iraqi documents ordering

  the removal of the incubators.” He also referred to a Pentagon report in which, under

  the heading “Deaths Attributable to Iraqi Torture and Execution,” there is the item

  “Premature babies removed from incubators .. 120.”51 But the Pentagon report itself

  says that the information was “obtained from hospital records and medical personnel”;

  earlier it gave the source as the Kuwait City medical records.52 There is no indication

  that care was taken to evaluate the reliability of witnesses from whose testimony the

  figure of 120 incubator baby deaths was derived. Recall that Amnesty International

  also had received information from medical sources, but by their April 1991 report

  they wrote: “Although some medical sources in Kuwait, including a Red Crescent

  doctor, were still claiming babies had died in this way, we found no hard evidence to

  support this. Credible opinion in hospitals discounts the allegations.”53

  Following the war, Kroll Associates was hired by the government of Kuwait to

  determine, among other things, the veracity of allegations concerning infant deaths

  caused by removal of incubators. It gives as its “most conservative estimate, based on corroborated eyewitness testimony ... that a minimum of seven babies died directly because of the looting of incubators and ventilators from pediatric wards at Al-Jahra and Al-Adan

  hospitals” (emphasis in the original).54 Nevertheless, there is an important credibility 208 PROPAGANDA AND THE ETHICS OF PERSUASION