Prince Harry, PR hero

My interview about the Prince Harry PR stunt is publised by Die Zeit online today. It's in German here, and in English below.

Q1. Some headlines from last week's UK newspapers:

- Harry: The Secret Hero (Daily Express)

- Prince Harry: My War (Daily Mirror)

- When Harry Met Tali (Daily Star)

- Harry: One of our Boys. Frontline Prince Kills 30 Taliban (Sun)

Is this, from a media studies point of view, war propaganda?

Yes, though perhaps not in the classic way. These sorts of PR stunts have become increasingly common in recent decades, from the British paratrooper photographed being given a cup of tea by a grateful Falklands Islander in 1982, though the BBC news story about a British soldier who had adopted a gerbil as a lucky mascot in the 1991 Gulf war, to the pictures of burly soldiers taking care of babies in Kosovo in 1999. The thing to bear in mind is that PR has become ever more important as the purposes of military action have become harder to define and to defend politically.

Traditionally, propaganda was designed to demoralise your enemy and to build up domestic support for a war. The war had a purpose - defeating a rival, meeting a threat, acquiring territory - and the propaganda was secondary to achieving that end. Today, when wars are fought not for clear interests but for ill-defined 'values', image and presentation have become all important.

Q2. Is this, from your point of view, glamorising war?

It's an attempt to substitute a glamorous image for any more serious political justification for war. The absence of any clear purpose in Afghanistan is what makes these sorts of stunts so important.

Q3. The Guardian writes: Last September the British media agreed on a news blackout, for security reasons. In return they were assured to receive pooled footage which hit the screens and front pages last week. Did the reporters and editors act as independent reviewers at all?

The episode is in British journalism's worst tradition of deference to authority. As so often in the past, pleas from the military about 'security' considerations appear to have convinced editors that censorship was justified. Yet clearly these considerations could more easily have been met by simply not sending Prince Harry to Afghanistan in the first place. Surely the prince's military prowess is not such that his deployment was an unavoidable military necessity! The military will have known that a leak was always likely. They just hoped that Harry would be there long enough to get some good pictures. The fact that British journalists agreed to go along with it is shameful.

Q4. How did the pooled footage affect the media coverage?

It produced the sort of uncritical coverage you've described. Let's recall, though, that the British media already have a rather embarrassing record in this respect. Last June, around the time that Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair as Prime Minister, British journalists were asked to publicise the good work that British troops were supposedly doing winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan. The month before he took office, Brown already announced that this would be a priority. Many in the media responded enthusiastically, but in their capacity as PR professionals rather than journalists.

The BBC's main evening news programme on 21 June 2007, for example, devoted half the bulletin devoted to lauding Western efforts - particularly those of the British army - to civilise the poor, benighted Afghans. The newscaster presented much of the programme from Camp Bastion in Afghanistan, including a live two-way with John Simpson in Kabul. We watched US medics save the lives of a pregnant woman and her premature baby, both injured by a gunshot during what was described as a family feud, and were told that this medical procedure was part of an effort to 'win hearts and minds' among Afghan 'tribesmen'.

Whose hearts and minds were supposed to be won over by the rest of the BBC's Afghan package - which included a lightweight human-interest piece on the youngest British soldier, an item on efforts to build schools and teach English, and Simpson's own freely-offered opinion that, without the presence of the British military, Afghanistan would descend into 'civil war'?

Q5. Does the media coverage have any influence on the public opinion about the (unpopular) deployments of UK soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The idea seems to have been to deflect attention away from the failing campaign in Iraq, towards the supposedly more successful effort in Afghanistan. That is not a workable strategy in the longer term.

Q6. The British Army is known to have fallen short of its recruitment targets in past years (sources: BBC, Guardian). Also, the British Army is the only one in Europe, where 16 year olds can be recruited (deployment not before age 18 though). Does the media coverage have any effect on the British Army's recruitment efforts?

It's too soon to tell, though no doubt for the army itself this was seen as a useful marketing exercise. More broadly, there is a question mark over the extent to which traditional military and national values have any resonance with people. Today politicians often seem uncomfortable with such ideas, presenting soldiers more as social workers than warriors, and telling their troops to be 'culturally sensitive'. Coalition forces in Iraq were told not to display their national flags, for example, out of 'respect' for the country they were invading.

In the case of Afghanistan, notwithstanding the sort of uncritical coverage which, as I've just said, was already being produced in some quarters, the British military seemed to feel that their efforts were not getting enough attention and appreciation. Last September, around the same time that he was privately telling British news executives about the Prince Harry plan, the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, was publicly complaining about a 'growing gulf between the Army and the nation'. Now we know that he already had the solution in mind!

Q7. What's the cut for Prince Harry in this case?

Who knows how much it will benefit the prince's personal image, and frankly who cares? The most important propaganda success here is that everyone is discussing the rights and wrongs of this one media stunt rather than asking more fundamental questions about what British and other troops are doing in Afghanistan to begin with. It's easier to engineer photo-opportunities like this one than to explain what this mission is for.