Chapter 3 from the book "Pre Suasion. A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini".
For an unrelated reason, I was fortunate to be in London to witness a set of extraordinary festivities commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne of England. Although the queen had been traveling the globe for months to Commonwealth nations hosting Golden Jubilee events in her name, the celebrations peaked on June 4, 2002, with a program on the Mall in London that drew over a million well-wishers from around Britain and the world. The marked adulation surprised many in the national press who’d predicted the Jubilee would be a fizzle, demonstrating the modern-day irrelevance of the British monarchy in general and of Her Royal Highness in particular.
The opposite proved to be the case. In the several weeks’ run-up to June 4, throngs within the United Kingdom flocked to dedications, parades, concerts, and special proceedings honoring the queen, which she honored in turn with her presence. Especially coveted were invitations to small parties where it was sometimes possible to be addressed personally by the queen in a receiving line.
Of course, the opportunity to meet Elizabeth II under any circumstances would be considered exceptional; but the chance to meet her amid the pomp and pageantry of the Golden Jubilee added even more significance to such occasions, which were widely reported by the media. One report stood out from all the others for me. A young woman moving through a reception line at one of the small fêtes experienced the horror of hearing the cell phone in her purse begin to ring just as she met the queen. Flustered and frozen with embarrassment as her phone pealed insistently, she stared helplessly into the royal eyes that had become fixed on her bag. Finally, Elizabeth leaned forward and advised, “You should answer that, dear. It might be someone important.”
WHAT’S SALIENT IS IMPORTANT
While the graciousness of Elizabeth’s advice offers an insight into her beloved standing among her subjects, the content of that advice offers another type of insight: anything that draws focused attention to itself can lead observers to overestimate its importance. Who, on the other end of the line, could conceivably have been more important at that singular moment than Her Majesty, the Queen of the Realm, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of her reign? I can’t think of anyone. Yet the unknown caller was proclaimed worthy of it—by the queen, no less.
Now, a critic might argue that Elizabeth didn’t overestimate the potential import of the caller one whit; that her response was born of a characteristic personal tendency toward kindness and not at all of a characteristic human tendency toward misassessment in that sort of situation. The critic would be wrong, I believe, because although royals are often said to be of a different breed than the rest of us, they are not of a different species. Numerous researchers have documented the basic human inclination to assign undue weight to whatever happens to be salient at the time.
One of those researchers is Daniel Kahneman, who, for personal and professional reasons, is an excellent informant on the character and causes of human behavior. On the personal side, he’s been able to observe from within a multitude of cultures and roles—having grown up in France, earned degrees in Jerusalem, Israel, and Berkeley, California, served as a soldier and personnel assessor in Israel, and taught in Canada and the United States. More impressive, though, are Kahneman’s credentials as a renowned authority on matters of human psychology. His teaching positions have always been prestigious, culminating with an appointment at Princeton University that included simultaneous professorships in psychology and public affairs. His numerous awards have also been prestigious, but none as noteworthy as the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, the only such Nobel in history given to an individual trained as a psychologist.
It’s no wonder, then, that when Daniel Kahneman speaks on issues of human psychology, he gets hushed attention. I am reminded of a famous television commercial of many years ago for the financial services firm E. F. Hutton that depicts a pair of businessmen in a busy restaurant trying to talk over the din of clanking silverware, loud waiters, and neighboring table conversations. One of the men says to his colleague conversations. One of the men says to his colleague, “Well, my broker is E. F. Hutton, and E. F. Hutton says...” The place goes silent—waiters stop taking orders, busboys stop clearing tables, diners stop speaking—while everyone in the room turns to take in the advice, and an announcer’s voice intones: “When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen.”
I’ve been to several scientific conferences at which Professor Kahneman has spoken; and, when Daniel Kahneman talks, people listen. I am invariably among them. So I took special notice of his answer to a fascinating challenge put to him not long ago by an online discussion site.
He was asked to specify the one scientific concept that, if appreciated properly, would most improve everyone’s understanding of the world.
Although in response he provided a full five-hundred-word essay describing what he called “the focusing illusion,” his answer is neatly summarized in the essay’s title: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.”
The implications of Kahneman’s assertion apply to much more than the momentary status of the caller to a ringing phone. They apply tellingly well to the practice of pre-suasion, because a communicator who gets an audience to focus on a key element of a message pre-loads it with importance. This form of pre-suasion accounts for what many see as the principle role (labeled agenda setting) that the news media play in influencing public opinion. The central tenet of agenda-setting theory is that the media rarely produce change directly, by presenting compelling evidence that sweeps an audience to new positions; they are much more likely to persuade indirectly, by giving selected issues and facts better coverage than other issues and facts. It’s this coverage that leads audience members—by virtue of the greater attention they devote to certain topics—to decide that these are the most important to be taken into consideration when adopting a position. As the political scientist Bernard Cohen wrote, “The press may not be successful most of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling them what to think about.” According to this view, in an election, whichever political party is seen by voters to have the superior stance on the issue highest on the media’s agenda at the moment will likely win.
That outcome shouldn’t seem troubling provided the media have highlighted the issue (or set of issues) most critical to the society at the time of the vote. Regrettably, other factors often contribute to coverage choices, such as whether a matter is simple or complicated, gripping or boring, familiar or unfamiliar to newsroom staffers, inexpensive or expensive to examine, and even friendly or not to the news director’s political leanings.
In the summer of 2000, a pipe bomb exploded at the main train station in Düsseldorf, Germany, injuring several Eastern European immigrants.
Although no proof was ever found, officials suspected from the start that a fringe right-wing group with an anti-immigrant agenda was responsible. A sensational aspect of the story—one of the victims not only lost a leg in the blast but also the baby in her womb—stimulated a rash of news stories in the following month regarding right-wing extremism in Germany. Polls taken at the same time showed that the percentage of Germans who rated right-wing extremism as the most important issue facing their country spiked from near zero to 35 percent—a percentage that sank back to near zero again as related news reports disappeared in subsequent months.
A similar effect appeared more recently in the United States. As the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, approached, 9/11- related media stories peaked in the days immediately surrounding the anniversary date and then dropped off rapidly in the weeks thereafter.
Surveys conducted during those times asked citizens to nominate two “especially important” events from the past seventy years. Two weeks prior to the anniversary, before the media blitz began in earnest, about 30 percent of respondents named 9/11. But as the anniversary drew closer, and the media treatment intensified, survey respondents started identifying 9/11 in increasing numbers—to a high of 65 percent. Two weeks later, though, after reportage had died down to earlier levels, once again only about 30 percent of the participants placed it among their two especially important events of the past seventy years. Clearly, the amount of news coverage can make a big difference in the perceived significance of an issue among observers as they are exposed to the coverage.
Why do we typically assume that whatever we are focusing on in the moment is especially important? One reason is that whatever we are focusing on typically is especially important in the moment. It’s only reasonable to give heightened attention to those factors that have the most significance and utility for us in a particular situation: a strange noise in the dark, the smell of smoke in a theater, a CEO standing to speak. Nonhuman species have worked this out, too, and have evolved similar priorities.
Rhesus monkeys, for example, will pay in the form of sacrificed food rewards just for the opportunity to view important (high-status) members of their colony; but they will require a reward to divert their attention to unimportant members. In all kinds of species and for all kinds of reasons, it makes great sense to direct attention to those options that scale largest in rank.
This sensible system of focusing our limited attentional resources on what does indeed possess special import has an imperfection, though: we can be brought to the mistaken belief that something is important merely because we have been led by some irrelevant factor to give it our narrowed attention.
All too often, people believe that if they have paid attention to an idea or event or group, it must be important enough to warrant the consideration.
That’s not true, as the German and US agenda-setting examples revealed. In those instances, news coverage driven by a sensationalistic or timely story element grabbed audience attention and changed where it was concentrated.
In turn, that changed focus influenced viewers’ importance judgments of national issues.
After recognizing the extent of our vulnerability to the focusing illusion, I’ve come at last to appreciate a standard saying of Hollywood press agents: “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” I’d always thought the statement nonsense, as there are memorable instances of bad publicity deflating the reputation and earnings of one or another high-profile figure. Golfer Tiger Woods’s losing an estimated $22 million per year in endorsement revenues shortly after his sex scandal became public in 2009 is one example. But now I see how the idea, while false in one respect, can be true in another. It’s often said that the fate celebrities fear most is to be ignored, forgotten, or otherwise dropped from the cultural consciousness. Powerful publicity of any sort spares them that worst of all fates because it brings them attention; and raw attention anoints them with presumed importance. Especially in the arts, where one’s worth is almost entirely subjective, an elevated public presence contributes to that worth. Accordingly, people will pay to see highprofile celebrities (within their performances, productions, and appearances) because they, as individuals, seem to matter. Monkey colonies aren’t the only environments where residents will pay to watch seemingly important figures.
Thus, the persuader who artfully draws outsize attention to the most favorable feature of an offer becomes a successful pre-suader. That is, he or she becomes effective not just in a straightforward attention-based way—by arranging for audiences to consider that feature fully—but also by arranging for them to lend the feature exaggerated significance even before they have examined it. When audience members do then consider it fully, they experience a double-barreled effect. They are likely to be convinced that the attribute is especially desirable by the one-sidedness of the evidence they’ve been directed toward and to view that attribute as especially important besides.
Stars in their “I”s and our eyes. Focused attention leads celebrities and audiences to overestimate the celebrities’ importance.
BACK ROADS TO ATTENTION
It is rousing and worrisome (depending on whether you are playing offense or defense) to recognize that these persuasive outcomes can flow from attention-shifting techniques so slight as to go unrecognized as agents of change. Let’s consider three ways communicators have used such subtle tactics to great effect.
Managing the Background
Suppose you’ve started an online furniture store that specializes in various types of sofas. Some are attractive to customers because of their comfort and others because of their price. Is there anything you can think to do that would incline visitors to your website to focus on the feature of comfort and, consequently, to prefer to make a sofa purchase that prioritized it over cost? You’ve no need to labor long for an answer, because two marketing professors, Naomi Mandel and Eric Johnson, have provided one in a set of studies using just such an online furniture site. When I interviewed Mandel regarding why she decided on this particular set of issues to explore, she said her choice had to do with two big, unresolved matters within the field of marketing—one relatively recent and one long-standing. The new topic at the time was e-commerce. When she began the research project in the late 1990s, the impact of virtual stores such as Amazon and eBay was only beginning to be seen. But how to optimize success within this form of exchange had not been addressed systematically. So she and Johnson opted for a virtual store site as the context for their study.
The other matter that had piqued Mandel’s interest is one that has vexed merchandisers forever: how to avoid losing business to a poorer-quality rival whose only competitive advantage is lower cost. That is why Mandel chose to pit higher-quality furniture lines against less expensive, inferior ones in her study. “It’s a traditional problem that the business-savvy students in our marketing courses raise all the time,” she said. “We always instruct them not to get caught up in a price war against an inferior product, because they’ll lose. We tell them to make quality the battleground instead, because that’s a fight they’ll most likely win.
“Fortunately for me,” she continued, “the best of the students in those classes have never been satisfied with that general advice. They’d say, ‘Yeah, but how?’ and I never really had a good answer for them, which gave me a great question to pursue for my research project.”
Fortunately for us, after analyzing their results, Mandel and Johnson were in a position to deliver a stunningly simple answer to the “Yeah, but how?” question. In an article largely overlooked since it was published in 2002, they described how they were able to draw website visitors’ attention to the goal of comfort merely by placing fluffy clouds on the background wallpaper of the site’s landing page. That maneuver led those visitors to assign elevated levels of importance to comfort when asked what they were looking for in a sofa. Those same visitors also became more likely to search the site for information about the comfort features of the sofas in stock and, most notably, to choose a more comfortable (and more costly) sofa as their preferred purchase.
To make sure their results were due to the landing page wallpaper and not to some general human preference for comfort, Mandel and Johnson reversed their procedure for other visitors, who saw wallpaper that pulled their attention to the goal of economy by depicting pennies instead of clouds. These visitors assigned greater levels of importance to price, searched the site primarily for cost information, and preferred an inexpensive sofa. Remarkably, despite having their importance ratings, search behavior, and buying preferences all altered pre-suasively by the landing page wallpaper, when questioned afterward, most participants refused to believe that the depicted clouds or pennies had affected them in any way.
Soft sell. Visitors to an online furniture website who saw this landing page wallpaper decorated with clouds became more inclined toward soft, comfortable furniture. Those who saw wallpaper decorated with pennies became more inclined toward inexpensive furniture.
Additional research has found similarly sly effects for online banner ads —the sort we all assume we can ignore without impact while we read. Wellexecuted research has shown us mistaken in this regard. While reading an online article about education, repeated exposure to a banner ad for a new brand of camera made the readers significantly more favorable to the ad when they were shown it again later. Tellingly, this effect emerged even though they couldn’t recall having ever seen the ad, which had been presented to them in five-second flashes near the story material. Further, the more often the ad had appeared while they were reading the article, the more they came to like it. This last finding deserves elaboration because it runs counter to abundant evidence that most ads experience a wear-out effect after they have been encountered repeatedly, with observers tiring of them or losing trust in advertisers who seem to think that their message is so weak that they need to send it over and over. Why didn’t these banner ads, which were presented as many as twenty times within just five pages of text, suffer any wear-out? The readers never processed the ads consciously, so there was no recognized information to be identified as tedious or untrustworthy.
These results pose a fascinating possibility for online advertisers: Recognition/recall, a widely used index of success for all other forms of ads, might greatly underestimate the effectiveness of banner ads. In the new studies, frequently interjected banners were positively rated and were uncommonly resistant to standard wear-out effects, yet they were neither recognized nor recalled. Indeed, it looks to be this third result (lack of direct notice) that makes banner ads so effective in the first two strong and stubborn ways. After many decades of using recognition/recall as a prime indicator of an ad’s value, who in the advertising community would have thought that the absence of memory for a commercial message could be a plus? Within the outcomes of the wallpaper and the banner ad studies is a larger lesson regarding the communication process: seemingly dismissible information presented in the background captures a valuable kind of attention that allows for potent, almost entirely uncounted instances of influence.
The influence isn’t always desirable, however. In this regard, there’s a body of data on consequential background factors that parents, especially, should take into account. Environmental noise such as that coming from heavy traffic or airplane flight paths is something we think we get used to and even block out after awhile. But the evidence is clear that the disruptive noise still gets in, reducing the ability to learn and perform cognitive tasks.
One study found that the reading scores of students in a New York City elementary school were significantly lower if their classrooms were situated close to elevated subway tracks on which trains rattled past every four to five minutes. When the researchers, armed with their findings, pressed NYC transit system officials and Board of Education members to install noisedampening materials on the tracks and in the classrooms, students’ scores jumped back up. Similar results have been found for children near airplane flight paths. When the city of Munich, Germany, moved its airport, the memory and reading scores of children near the new location plummeted, while those near the old location rose significantly.
Thus, parents whose children’s schools or homes are subjected to intermittent automotive, train, or aircraft noise should insist on the implementation of sound-baffling remedies. Employers, for the sake of their workers—and their own bottom lines—should do the same. Teachers need to consider the potentially negative effects of another kind of distracting background stimuli (this one of their own making) on young students’ learning and performance. Classrooms with heavily decorated walls displaying lots of posters, maps, and artwork reduce the test scores of young children learning science material there. It is clear that background information can both guide and distract focus of attention; anyone seeking to influence optimally must manage that information thoughtfully.
Inviting Favorable Evaluation
Although communicators can use attention-drawing techniques to amplify the judged importance of a feature or issue, that’s not always wise. Relevant here is Bernard Cohen’s observation about press coverage—that it doesn’t so much tell people what to think as what to think about. Any practice that pulls attention to an idea will be successful only when the idea has merit. If the arguments and evidence supporting it are seen as meritless by an audience, directed attention to the bad idea won’t make it any more persuasive. If anything, the tactic might well backfire. After all, if audience members have come to see an idea as more important to them than before, they should then be even more likely to oppose it when it is a plainly poor one. Indeed, a lot of research has demonstrated that the more consideration people give to something, the more extreme (polarized) their opinions of it become. So attention-capturing tactics provide no panacea to would-be persuaders.
Still, if you have a good case to make, there are certain places where those tactics will give your persuasive appeals special traction. One such place is in a field of strong competitors. In modern business, it is becoming increasingly difficult to outpace one’s rivals. Easily copied advances in development technologies, production techniques, and business methods make it hard for a company to distinguish the essence of what it offers— bottled water, gasoline, insurance, air travel, banking services, industrial machinery—from what other contestants for the same market can deliver.
To deal with the problem, alternative ways of creating separation have to be tried. Retailers can establish multiple, convenient locations; wholesalers can put big sales staffs into the field; manufacturers can grant broad guarantees; service providers can assemble extensive customer care units; and they all can engage in large-scale advertising and promotional efforts to create and maintain brand prominence. But there’s a downside to such fixes. Because these means of differentiation are so costly, their expense might be too burdensome for many organizations to bear.
Could resolving the dilemma lie in finding an inexpensive way to shift attention to a particular product, service, or idea? Well, yes, as long as the spotlighted item is a good one—a high scorer in customer reviews, perhaps.
Critical here would be to arrange for observers to focus their attention on that good thing rather than on rivals’ equally good options. Then its favorable features should gain both verification and importance from the scrutiny.
Already some data show that these twin benefits can produce a substantial advantage for a brand when consumers focus on it in isolation from its competitors. Although the data have come from different settings (shopping malls, college campuses, and websites) and different types of products (cameras, big-screen TVs, VCRs, and laundry detergents), the results all point to the same conclusion: if you agreed to participate in a consumer survey regarding some product, perhaps 35-millimeter cameras, the survey taker could enhance your ratings of any strong brand—let’s say Canon—simply by asking you to consider the qualities of Canon cameras but not asking you to consider the qualities of any of its major rivals, such as Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, or Minolta.
More than that, without realizing why, your intention to purchase a Canon 35mm camera would likely also jump, as would your desire to make the purchase straightaway, with no need to search for information about comparable brands. However, all of these advantages for Canon would drop away if you’d been asked to consider the qualities of its cameras but, before rating those qualities, to think about the options that Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, and Minolta could provide.
Thus, to receive the benefits of focused attention, the key is to keep the focus unitary. Some impressive research demonstrates that merely engaging in a single-chute evaluation of one of several established hotel and restaurant chains, consumer products, and even charity organizations can automatically cause people to value the focused-upon entity more and become more willing to support it financially.
One applicable tactic being employed with increasing frequency by various organizations is to request evaluation of their products and services —only their products and services. As a consumer, I am routinely asked by providers to consider and rate business performances of one sort or another.
Occasionally I am petitioned through a phone call or direct mail, but typically it is via email. Sometimes I am to evaluate a single experience such as a recent hotel stay, online purchase, or customer service interaction.
Periodically, the “How are we doing?” question asks me to assess features of an ongoing partnership with my travel agency, financial services firm, or phone provider. The requests seem innocent enough and acceptable because they appear intended (as I am sure they are) to gather information that will improve the quality of my commercial exchanges. But I’d be surprised if my compliance didn’t also give the petitioners, especially the highly ranked ones, a hidden bonus: my focused attention to their mostly favorable facets with no comparable attention to the mostly favorable facets of their ablest rivals.
Other research has extended these findings to the way that leaders and managers make strategic choices inside their organizations. Individuals assigned the responsibility for reversing a sales slump within a paint manufacturing company took part in a study. Each was asked to evaluate the wisdom of only one of four worthy possible solutions:
(1) increasing the advertising budget, which would raise brand awareness among do-ityourself painters;
(2) lowering prices, which would attract more pricesensitive buyers;
(3) hiring additional sales representatives, who could press for more shelf space in retail stores; or
(4) investing in product development, to boost quality so that the brand could be promoted to professional painters as the best in the market. It didn’t matter which of the four ideas the decision makers evaluated: the process of targeting and evaluating one, by itself, pushed them to recommend it among the options as the best remedy for the company to adopt.
But surely the typical highly placed decision maker wouldn’t settle on an important course of action without evaluating all viable alternatives fully, and he or she certainly wouldn’t make that choice after evaluating just one strong option, right? Wrong and wrong, for a pair of reasons. First, a thorough analysis of all legitimate roads to success is time consuming, requiring potentially lengthy delays for identifying, vetting, and then mapping out each of the promising routes; and highly placed decision makers didn’t get to their lofty positions by being known as bottlenecks inside their organizations.
Second, for any decision maker, a painstaking comparative assessment of multiple options is difficult and stressful, akin to the juggler’s task of trying to keep several objects in the air all at once. The resultant (and understandable) tendency is to avoid or abbreviate such an arduous process by selecting the first practicable candidate that presents itself. This tendency has a quirky name, “satisficing”—a term coined by economist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon—to serve as a blend of the words satisfy and suffice.
The combination reflects two simultaneous goals of a chooser when facing a decision—to make it good and to make it gone—which, according to Simon, usually means making it good enough. Although in an ideal world one would work and wait until the optimal solution emerged, in the real world of mental overload, limited resources, and deadlines, satisficing is the norm.
But even courses of action selected in this manner should not be allowed the unfair advantages of a different sort of unitary assessment—one focused only on upsides. In the excitement of a looming opportunity, decision makers are infamous for concentrating on what a strategy could do for them if it succeeded and not enough, or at all, on what it could do to them if it failed. To combat this potentially ruinous overoptimism, time needs to be devoted, systematically, to addressing a pair of questions that often don’t arise by themselves: “What future events could make this plan go wrong?” and “What would happen to us if it did go wrong?” Decision scientists who have studied this consider-the-opposite tactic have found it both easy to implement and remarkably effective at debiasing judgments. The benefits to the organization that strives to rid itself of this and other decision-making biases can be considerable. One study of over a thousand companies determined that those employing sound judgment-debiasing processes enjoyed a 5 percent to 7 percent advantage in return on investment over those failing to use such approaches.
Shifting the Task at Hand
On March 20, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq by US-led forces. After a series of rapid military strikes that crushed the government of Saddam Hussein, it eventuated in an extended, agonizing, and brutal slog that cost the United States dearly in blood, money, prestige, and global influence. The Bush administration’s initial justification for the war—to rid the region of Saddam’s cache of “weapons of mass destruction”—was debunked (the weapons never materialized) and was revised regularly to incorporate such new purposes as eliminating Saddam’s humanitarian abuses, terminating Iraq’s support of Al Qaeda, safeguarding the world’s oil supply, and establishing a bulwark for democracy in the Middle East. Nonetheless, the administration deflected attention from these questionable and shifting reasons through an ingenious media program— one that had the effect of directing the public’s gaze away from the larger rationale for the war and onto its daily execution. That outcome was neatly accomplished by changing the task that representatives of the world’s most important news agencies set for themselves in covering the conflict.
The “embedded reporter program” of the war in Iraq was the product of a joint decision by US officials and major media bureau chiefs to place reporters directly within combat units—to eat, sleep, and travel with them— during the course of military operations. Although the exact numbers vary depending on the source, at the program’s height, between six hundred and seven hundred media representatives had the kind of access to the hostilities that had been denied them by US decision makers in the 1991 Gulf War and prior military operations in Afghanistan. Partly as a way to better ensure the safety of all concerned and partly as a public relations move, the US military developed the idea for the program with direction from Bush administration public affairs officials in the Department of Defense.
To media heads, the advantages of the program were obvious and exciting. With their personnel functioning alongside the troops in almost every sense, they would be able to convey to their audiences the experience of combat with levels of detail and currency rarely available to them before.
The prospect of viscerally engaging video, graphic photographs, and riveting first-person accounts offered a dream come true to news organizations that had chaffed under the information restrictions of earlier military campaigns.
Besides a window into the reality of soldiering, their live-in status would allow embedded reporters special access to the soldiers themselves and, thus, to the personal circumstances of these men and women. Those human interest stories are also highly coveted by news media for their audiencedrawing powers. One study found that embedded reporters were able to include such human interest elements in over a third of their stories, whereas unembedded reporters could do so in only 1 percent of theirs.
To US officials, the advantages of the program were different but no less compelling. First, under the wings of armed protectors, risks to the various media personnel in Iraq could be reduced significantly. The possibility of hundreds of news people trying to find headline-grabbing stories in a war zone and instead finding themselves hostages, casualties, or in need of rescue was a headache the military wanted to avoid. Also, the personal observations of journalists from around the world (nearly 40 percent of embedded slots went to non-US news agencies) provided an invaluable kind of risk protection to the military—from possible untruths about the war coming from Saddam’s government. As Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Bryan Whitman put it, embedded reporters would be in a direct position to undercut the credibility of “what the Iraqi Defense Ministry might be putting out.”
There was a third, much larger benefit to the armed forces as well.
Because the media chiefs were so attracted to the idea of an embedded reporter program, they made concessions that slanted the coverage more favorably to the military, which was allowed to play a role in the training, selection, and dismissal of reporters as well as to review their reports prior to publication. At an academic conference one year after the invasion,
Colonel Rick Long, who was head of media relations for the US Marine Corps, was asked why the military advocated for the program. His answer could not have been more straightforward: “Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment . . . Overall, we were very happy with the outcome.” Colonel Long and his colleagues had every right to be happy. Research analyzing the stories coming out of Iraq at the time detected a more positive tilt toward the military in those written by embedded reporters.
But this disparity in tone was modest compared with another difference between the reports of embedded and unembedded journalists. It was a difference that served the purposes of the Bush administration more than those of the military personnel on the ground. Embedded reporters’ accounts were focused almost entirely on the troops: their daily activities, food, clothing, and supplies, how they prepared for battles, the tactics they employed, and the bravery they showed in battle. Indeed, 93 percent of all stories filed by embedded journalists came from the soldiers’ perspectives, compared with less than half of that from their unembedded counterparts.
And because, for the most part, the armed services had done a good job of feeding, clothing, supplying, and training the soldiers, who, for the most part, performed effectively and courageously, the military had a strong case to exhibit to those who could report on it firsthand.
Something crucial was lost, though, in this deepened but narrowed coverage: the embedded journalists—whose reports received an astonishing 71 percent of front-page war coverage during the conflict—were not reporting in any meaningful way on the broader political issues involved, such as the justifications for the war (as an example, the absence of weapons of mass destruction was mentioned in just 2 percent of all stories) or the operation’s impact on US standing and power abroad. How could we expect anything else of them? Their eager superiors assigned them to cover what one analysis termed “the minutiae of the conflict,” which absorbed all of their time, energy, and consideration.
Home again after leaving their combat units, many of the “embeds” were able to reflect on the constrained point of view that their assignment had created for them. But while they were in the field, their incessant focus on soldiers and soldiering set the media agenda for the conflict. After an extensive review of published articles at the time, news analyst and sociologist Andrew Lindner described the upshot starkly: “Not only did embedded reporting represent a majority of the total available press, it dominated public attention.” Thus, with the vast majority of front-page war stories never addressing the whys of the fight but instead its whos and hows, the predominant media message to the public was evident: the thing you should be paying attention to here is the conduct of the war, not the wisdom of it.
One conclusion from research we’ve covered in this chapter is that issues that gain attention also gain presumed importance. Some of that same research demonstrates that if people fail to direct their attention to a topic, they presume that it must be of relatively little importance. With those basic human tendencies in mind, think of the implications of the embedded reporter program for US public opinion toward the invasion of Iraq. The dispatches of journalists in the program carried the kinds of content—vivid firsthand accounts of combat and emotionally charged human interest stories of combatants—that the media love to pitch and the public loves to catch. That content dominated public attention and thereby defined for the public which factors to consider more and less important about the invasion, such as those related to individual actions and battlefield outcomes versus those related to initial justifications and geopolitical ends. Because frontline combat factors represented a prime strength of the war, whereas larger strategic ones represented a prime weakness, the effect of the embedded reporter program was to award center stage import to the main success, not the main failure, of the Bush administration’s Iraq campaign. The focusing illusion ensured it.
There is nothing to suggest that this topically imbalanced coverage was part of the grand design for the program on the part of administration and military officials, who seem to have been interested in it mostly for traditional information warfare purposes, such as gaining more control over the screening, training, and review of reporters, as well as putting them in an eyewitness position to counter enemy propaganda. Similarly, there is no evidence that the media chiefs who helped forge the program anticipated the full span of its public relations benefits to the Bush administration. Instead, it was only in retrospect, after the results of news story analyses started surfacing in academic journals, that this realization began to form.
Ironically, then, the major public relations effect of the embedded reporter program appears to have been a side effect—a hidden one. It was an unexpected by-product of a decision to make the task of the most visible journalists covering the war molecular rather than molar in scope.
The stealthy impact of bringing selective attention to a favorable type of information is not limited to the beneficial shaping of an assigned task. As we’ve seen, the persuasive consequences of managing background information and inviting singular evaluation went unrecognized by individuals subjected to those procedures, too. Through this cloaked influence, techniques designed merely to channel temporary attention can be particularly effective as pre-suasive devices.
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