Monday, January 26, 2009

The Powe of PR during War

The first class of this semester was about PR during war. I found it a very interesting topic because I learned how public relations practitioners use media tools to persuade a country of starting a war and how they can convince the public that national interest is under threat.
Every war obviously has two sides of the story, and any of the sides have the right to start the war, but isn’t it interesting how we, as PR practitioners, can change people’s minds?
The most important aspect is what the public perceives about the conflict, and how by using PR people can think that it’s good to start a war against any other country.
Currently, we have the example of the Israeli war against Palestine. As we can see in the news, the Israeli army has been dehumanised by the showing videos of the soldiers bombarding schools and hospitals, but what is the Palestinian army doing? Aren’t they doing the same? Aren’t they using schools and hospitals as a tactic against the Israelis? So at this point, who is behaving worse?
This is a good example of how much power public relations has during a war. The vision that the European countries have of the Israeli war is that they are not acting morally but attacking civilians, but isn’t that what the Palestinians want the rest of the world to see?
I recently interviewed an Israeli citizen and asked him about what he thinks about the conflict and, obviously, his view about the conflict is totally different from what we can see every day in the news.
To conclude, I have learned that the worlds perception during a war depends on what kind of PR each country is doing, so I can say that the media has too much power to condemn or condone the other.

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