No life like it: The PR battles of the Canadian military

[PMedMoe]

CBC News

IRA BASEN: MEDIA WATCH

Article Link

It must have been a good day to be Rick Hillier. His announcement that he will be stepping down in July as Canada's top soldier provoked a flood of gushing tributes in the normally reserved Canadian press.

A Globe and Mail editorial called him "the right man at the right time" who "put the bite back into the Canadian Forces." The editors also praised him for "refashioning the spin from Ottawa that had long sought to portray Canada's military as an NGO," a reference to an aid-giving non-governmental organization.

The paper's lead columnist, Christie Blatchford, one of the general's biggest fans in the Canadian media, wrote that Hillier "made it respectable again to be in the Canadian Forces," and "gave the Canadian soldier his mojo back."

More on article link.  Interesting read.

 

[Edward Campbell]

We need to remember that communications or public affairs or public relations or whatever else one might want to cal it is:

• An absolutely vital tool weapon in the budget wars – the battles that are just as more important than Panjwai for the future of the CF; and

• Centralized, in DND so that they serve he Minister.

In my opinion we need three separate and distinct and mutually independent communications branches:

1. One serving the MND and DND -  a classic communications staff designed to spin the news to make he MND and his government look good or, at least not too bad;

2. One serving the CDS and the CF – a public relations staff designed to continue doing what Gen. Hillier, with a very small staff, did so well; and

3. One serving the public – a public informationstaff hat would provide unclassified, unbiased factual information on request.

We DND needs to win the budget wars and, to do that, both the MND/DND and the CDS/CF have to look good to Canadians – at least as good as health care, infrastructure, education and tax breaks. But we also need to provide Canadians with hard facts about the CF – the sorts of facts that, demonstrably, have not been spun by public affairs specialists. We need a public information staff hat will be trusted by the media for both its integrity (no cover-ups) and its work ethic (answering requests quickly and as completely as security regulations permit).

 

[40below]

We need to remember that communications or public affairs or public relations or whatever else one might want to cal it is:

• An absolutely vital tool weapon in the budget wars – the battles that are just as more important than Panjwai for the future of the CF; and

• Centralized, in DND so that they serve he Minister.

In my opinion we need three separate and distinct and mutually independent communications branches:

1. One serving the MND and DND -  a classic communications staff designed to spin the news to make he MND and his government look good or, at least not too bad;

2. One serving the CDS and the CF – a public relations staff designed to continue doing what Gen. Hillier, with a very small staff, did so well; and

3. One serving the public – a public informationstaff hat would provide unclassified, unbiased factual information on request.

They actually have that already. There are two communications shops – one is in the office of the minister and deals pretty much with the political pronouncements of the day, the second is DND's own. You don't ask the minister about operational issues, you don't ask a major about how long the troops should be in Afghanistan. Much as I want to hate the latter as much as the former, the DND staff PAOs are really good, from the unit level up, and responsive, even when it's a bad news story that they'd rather not talk about. They don't actually spin in the old style – nobody much does that these days, the cost of being caught in an outright lie is too damaging. They're not doing badly.

I also notice that in the last few years, they've been training up reservists to put out their message also, sending them through much the same PAO training as the regs. There's always going to be bad news coming out of any organization, what the Forces is belatedly figuring out is that they can get good press too, they just have to get the message out and have people there trained to think, "Hey this is a good story, we should get this out." Reporters have an easy time covering public government or school boards or other organizations because a) there's a level of public openness there that doesn't exist in the Forces – there are no city councils on base, nobody there is elected and the place is surrounded by razor wire, you can't just drop in and wander around to see if anything interesting is going on; and b) people can be punished  for talking to you. The military has to be the ones to work harder to get their message out. They're doing it, they could do better, but they're doing it.

 

[a_majoor]

They need to be doing it a lot better if headlines like this are any indication of how the MSM spin the news against the mission:

http://phantomobserver.com/blog/?p=1024

The Media Still Wants to Mislead Canadians on Afghanistan

Most readers of newspapers tend to get their news by — what else? — skimming the headlines. And it’s common journalistic practice that the person writing the headlines isn’t the person crafting the story. Take this headline, for example, from today’s Ottawa Citizen:

Forces heading toward ‘failure’ in Afghanistan

The thing is, most readers of the Citizen who see “Forces” and “Afghanistan” in the same headline will assume that what’s being talked about are the Canadian Forces, which happens to be the official English-language name for our military. But if you read the article by Richard Foot, you’ll see that he’s talking about an article in the American Interest which discusses NATO forces currently deployed in Afghanistan. (A brief excerpt of the article itself can be found here, and excerpts from an in-journal rebuttal are available here; full text is apparently behind a subscriber firewall.)

Is the headline misleading? Perhaps that’s not the right word; disingenous probably would be more accurate. But it’s a subtle, almost subconscious way to advance the idea that Canada isn’t doing well in Afghanistan, even though the content doesn’t really talk about Canada-specific activities at all.

Now it should be possible to write a more accurate headline: “NATO could still fail Afghanistan,” for example. But whoever does headlines for the Citizen on that page obviously chose not to do it that way, and as a result my respect for and trust in print media drops just that much more.

 

[GAP]

Soldier, It's Time to Talk
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Article Link

With the looming resignation of the media-aware Gen. Rick Hillier, one wonders if his successor will stand up to politicians with his verve. Not since the Second World War have so many journalists been attached toour military in the field. Embedded in Kandahar, media types eagerlyrelay contradictory assessments to the oft-confused Canadian public. (Inmy view, the most reliable is former Sun writer Matthew Fisher, now withthe National Post).

Media over-coverage has become something of a problem. The support our military gets today is remarkable. The government would like to harness the unexpected popularity of soldiers, but at the sametime cut any risk for embarrassment.

So it micro-manages -- fatal, when done to the military. Prime Minister Stephen Harper realizes that public support for soldiers doesn't necessarily mean approval of the war in Afghanistan. Increasingly, the PMO sticks its bureaucratic nose into how the army should deal with the media. Anything the least controversial seems to have to be okayed before being released.

Journalists with the army have to sign a bunch of documents vowing they'll conform to regulations and not break security rules that may endanger operations.

Fair enough. This is pretty standard. But in the quest for effective public relations, DND (and the PMO)doesn't seem to realize that the most effective public relations instruments are the regiments, and soldiers themselves.

By trying to screen the positive from the negative, and publicizing the heroic while curtailing the embarrassing, all that's achieved is mistrust and suspicion among the media.
More on link

 

[Globesmasher]

They need to be doing it a lot better if headlines ..................

Agreed - we still have a long way to go in the PA/PR battle.
However, that being said, in my 20 years of service I have enjoyed watching a very steady (albeit slow) improvement in our military Public Affairs capabilities.

But, as Thucydides alluded to, we still have a long way to go .............
But at least we're going in the right direction.