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problem in the evidence. The date of the incident supposedly witnessed in 1990 by Nayirah when she visited Al-Adan Hospital is given only as “one day in late August.”
In other words, Kroll considered the reported incubator baby deaths at Al-Adan as
among the seven for which, conservatively judged, solid evidence existed, although
the report is unspecific as to the date. In response to a fax in which I sought more
detail, Alice McGillion, Managing Director of Kroll Associates, replied in a letter
dated July 8, 1993 that the nurses quoted in the report could say only that the incident
occurred sometime during the week of August 26, 1990. I was puzzled that hospi-
tal records could not identify the date more precisely, since it is standard practice
to maintain regularly updated charts on patients. In answer to my query, McGillion
wrote on August 23, 1993, “As to your request for clarification of chart information,
please remember that due to the emergency and resulting chaos of the situation, daily
records on patient care and progress were not being kept with their usual care.”55Now,
one can make allowances for panic and the non-maintenance of charts at the time of
the alleged incident, but, however sloppy the maintenance of charts might have been,
they would at least be expected to note eventually the time when data ceased to be
recorded by virtue of the disappearance of the baby.
If the evidence of incubator baby killing in the Al-Adan Hospital is solidly based,
according to Kroll, how reliable are the cases where even Kroll is not willing to give
its own “conservative” credence? Nayirah’s testimony, widely televised, was: “I saw
the Iraqi soldiers coming into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where 15
babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incuba-
tors, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”56 Kroll says that Nayirah’s experience
“amounted to a glance or ‘snapshot’ impression that included chaotic commotion and
the sight of one infant on the floor and the presumption that other infants, not seen,
had also been removed from incubators.”57 They say she witnessed the scene for no
more than seconds, hurrying out of the hospital in fear (given her identity) for her
safety. It seems remarkable that between the nurses, Nayirah, and a friend who was
with her, the date of this incident cannot be narrowed to within less than a week.
What is certain is that disproof of the alleged sighting is made more difficult when
the time frame is so extended.
Taking into consideration the deception involving the identity of their client
and witnesses and their obstinacy in clinging to a number of baby deaths that sub-
sequent reports proved to be false, it seems inescapable to conclude that Hill and
Knowlton was not interested in the whole truth of the matter but only in elements
that would promote the interests of their real client and, therefore, of themselves.
Is this news? Should there be concern? Of course a business looks out for its own
interests. So what? Suppose the following were true: the United States, for defensible
policy reasons, felt it necessary to go to war against Saddam Hussein. To do this, it
required the support of the American people, a support that did not exist to the
required extent. With the help of Hill and Knowlton, hired by Citizens for a Free
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Kuwait (which in turn was funded by the government of Kuwait), public opinion was altered sufficiently to implement the policy. Hill and Knowlton either invented
or embellished the incubator babies story or told its client what the Kuwaiti gov-
ernment needed to do to support it. Even if the details of the story were false, the
Iraqis were certainly guilty of some well-documented atrocities. Middle East Watch
does not mince its words: “Our own research on the occupation of Kuwait docu-
mented hundreds of gross abuses committed by Iraqi forces.”58 Why quibble about
the details?
Supposing the truth of these statements, it is certainly arguable that deception
may have been justified on the basis of the huge policy matters at stake. Many people
felt that the US involvement in the Gulf War was vital to world peace. From that per-
spective, the usual “dirty hands” arguments can be invoked to support the deception.
There are few absolutists who would say that deception is never justified no matter
how vital the stakes.
One answer to the “so what?” question is that democracy is a sham if those with
government power feel it is acceptable to gain support for their policies through such
deception. This answer does not settle the matter, for two reasons. First, not every-
one wants genuine democracy. Second, a substantial number of people seem to accept
deception, so long as it is for benign purposes. Here we should distinguish between
“benign,” chauvinistically interpreted to mean whatever increases one’s own coun-
try’s political and economic power in the globe at whatever cost to people of other
nations, and “benign” interpreted as reckoning in the costs and benefits to the people
of other nations as well. It is an unfortunate fact of US involvement in the wars of Iraq,
Afghanistan, and now (2013) the threat of war with Syria or Iran that a reckoning of
the second type was not done or done with any care and presented in such terms to the
people of the United States. It was for many a convenient assumption, perhaps conso-
nant with “American exceptionalism,” that the second kind of reckoning would not be
necessary, since it was felt that the expansion of US military power and influence would
guarantee a better world for everyone over time. The experience of the last 10 years has
done a lot to discredit that assumption. The possibility has come more clearly into sight
that ignoring the second kind of reckoning is not “merely” immoral but also geopoliti-
cally a huge mistake that leads to the diminishing of that very power and influence that
the wars and deceptions were supposed to achieve.
Every so often, people glimpse the wrongdoing that lack of accountability encour-
ages, and there is renewed demand for truthfulness and openness in government.
Notable examples of this are Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the false alle-
gations about Iraq, including weapons of mass destruction used to gain support for
the US-led war in Iraq in 2003. Recurring deceptions of the people have been used
to impress on the public the need for more military expenditures. A problem with
such deception is that it provokes a like response from the enemy. Perhaps the mili-
tary gains from such a race, but not the general public. In 1973, I.F. Stone noted the
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attempt to suppress information from a Coast and Geodetic Survey, which indicated that, contrary to the official position, underground nuclear explosions were detectable thousands of miles away.59 The suppression was important for heading off calls
for nuclear test bans and thus continuing the arms race. The New York
Times revealed military deceptions on the cost and need for weapons in the 1980s.60 In Canada, the
government at first sold the public on the sole-sourced (i.e., uncompetitive) purchase
of 65 F-35 aircraft on the basis of a cost estimate of $9 billion. When an official audit
estimated the full cost, including maintenance, of the purchase to be $45 billion, the
government backed off.61
The argument against this kind of deception is that it can easily become rampant
throughout the administration. If that happens, eventually cynicism and a sense of
futility develop regarding the democratic process. This is good neither for the holders
of power nor for those subject to their decisions.
The argument as stated is consistent with deception being otherwise justified on
a single-instance analysis, that is, not taking account of habit-forming repercussions.
What if the actual decision, quite apart from the process used to enable it to be put
into effect, is wrong? The outrage against the supposed 312 incubator baby deaths
needs to be compared with the estimated 46,900 children under age five who died
in Iraq between January and August 1991 as an indirect effect of US-led bombing,
civilian uprisings, and a UN economic embargo.62 Use of deception, we have seen, pre-
empts the judgment of the people. It prevents such judgment from being made effec-
tive through choice of congressional representatives by cutting it off from a grounding
in proper fact, as distinct from grounding in selected information and misinformation
disseminated by the power-holders.
Ivy Lee felt very strongly that it was wrong not to reveal to an audience the source
of a PR message. This principle in the incubator babies case was violated with regard
to the American people and to all but a few of the congressional caucus. The argument
that concealment of Nayirah’s identity was necessary to protect relatives in Kuwait
sufficed to ward off critical scrutiny, but, considering the enormous stakes involved
and the many lives lost during the war and as a consequence of it, the marginal increase
in risk to such of her relatives who may have remained in occupied Kuwait hardly pro-
vides a convincing justification.
Had Lee’s principle of being upfront with the sources of information been fol-
lowed, it seems unlikely that the incubator babies story would have been so easily
believed. But on the evidence reviewed here, there is still reason to be more concerned
than he was about one-sided accounts. The one-sided account Hill and Knowlton gave
of the incubator babies story contributed to burying the truth. According to their
account, Hill and Knowlton were not at fault for the misleading information; they
simply went with what they were told, taking the veracity of their sources for granted.
On the contrary, since the story is shaky in its entirety, Hill and Knowlton did not
serve the truth by pretending otherwise. The evasions and hyperbole, the “one-sided
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presentation” Lee referred to, continued to mask truths that the “other side” (in this case, MacArthur and Middle East Watch) painstakingly brought to public attention.63
ConCLUSIon
It is sometimes argued that truth by itself is morally indifferent and that the value of a
truth lies in its context, depending on the pragmatic implications of believing or acting
upon it. What good does it do, it might be asked from this perspective, to chase after
and expose deceptions that no longer have a role to play? The war is over, Kuwait was
liberated, and exposure of deceptions will not undo any of the war’s damage. Maybe
those involved in the deception should be commended for helping to bring about such
good as came of the war.
There are two answers to be given. One is pragmatic. If concern for the truth is
not shown now, the message to decision-makers is that they have a free hand in pursu-
ing deceptive means for accomplishing their goals in the future. We have seen reports
that the figures of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo were greatly exaggerated. Without pur-
suing matters of truth, we open ourselves to accusations of disinterest in wrongdoing
and share the responsibility that goes with willful blindness. If we are to have account-
ability, we need to know the truth about government-fostered deceptions, especially
those that commit a nation to involvement in war, with all the resultant suffering and
loss of life. So, the answer is that lack of concern for seemingly superannuated ques-
tions of truth has pragmatic consequences that cannot be ignored.
There is a second answer, very much in the spirit of St. Augustine. Without a strong
precommitment to truth, the process of our reasoning is liable to corruption. Carelessness
about knowing the truth concerning the effects of our actions affects our attitude towards
truth generally and ends up making us more likely to err in our calculations. Furthermore,
exposure of falsehood gives us a sense of protection against the arrival of an Orwellian
world (or should one say the more complete arrival of an Orwellian world?), just as pun-
ishment for crimes helps to restore a sense of justice, even though we can expect that
falsehood and crimes will both continue.
In the first edition of this book, in August 2002, I wrote, “If a deception on the
scale and with the impact of the incubator babies story is allowed to fade into remote
history without a sense of apprehension about the ease with which people can thus be
manipulated, the message given to future manipulators will surely be one of encour-
agement.” Unfortunately, these words have proved to be prophetic. August 2002 was
exactly the time that the administration of US President George W. Bush began circu-
lating a series of deceptions designed to create fear of an attack by Iraq using weapons
of mass destruction. These deceptions were developed, refined, and repeated many
times until Secretary of State Colin Powell made his misleading presentation to the
UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, complete with charts connecting Saddam
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Hussein with al-Qaeda and a vial suggestive of anthrax found in and removed from Iraq. This paved the way for the ill-fated war in Iraq. For the most part, the mainstream
media in the United States received the allegations uncritically, in contrast to the alter-
nate media. When the allegations were later determined to be unfounded, no serious
attempt was made to prosecute the perpetrators of the falsehoods. It may be that con-
trols against deceptive propaganda should be instituted or that treaty provisions such
as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which holds under Article
20 that “Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law,” should be enforced. That
question raises issues of free speech, to which we must now turn.
notes
1 J.A.C. Brown, Techniques of Persuasion (London: Penguin, 1963) 170f. See also Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: D. McKay, 1957).
2 See Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly: The Image of Women in Advertising (Cambridge Documentary Films, 1979) and Still Kil
ling Us Softly (Cambridge Documentary Films, 1987), a movie and video, respectively, that makes this point forcefully and with some humour.
3 Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Ethics in Advertising (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana; and Ottawa: Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1997) 27–28.
4 An urban myth spawned by James M. Vicary claimed that imperceptible (because they were shown for only one three-thousandth of a second) coaxings—“Hungry? Eat popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola”—during a showing of the film Picnic in Fort Lee, New Jersey, led to increased sales of those products. Mark Crispin Miller has reported that the “findings” were fabricated (“Hollywood: The Ad,” The Atlantic Monthly, April 1990: 41–54), but the myth is still occasionally passed on as true, even by some students who are assigned the article as compulsory reading. See also Miller 43, 48.
5 Pontifical Council 20.
6 A large collection of jingles can be found at
7 See the CAB’s statement at
8 As of October 2012; see
9 ASC 2011–2012 Annual Report, Standards Matter, 2;
2012AnnualReport.pdf>.
10
11 ASC, 2010 Ad Complaints Report, Year in Review, 7;
consumerComplaints/2010AdComplaintsReport.pdf>.
12
13 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1984) Chapter 11.
14 For a more detailed discussion, see R.L. Arrington, “Advertising and Behavior Control,” Journal of Business Ethics 1, no. 1 (January, 1982): 3–12; and Reese Miller, “Persuasion and the Dependence Effect,” in Business Ethics in Canada, 2nd ed., ed. Deborah C. Poff and Wilfrid J. Waluchow (Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hal , 1991): 479–88.
15 P.T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs or Recollections of P.T. Barnum Written by Himself (London: Ward, Lock and Co., 1882).
16 Commission on Public Relations Education, Public Relations Education for the 21st Century: A Port of Entry, October 1999;