National Identity-Protective Media Coverage of Military Crises: An International Media Effects Study

In political conflicts across the globe, military personnel have committed terrible violations, killing innocent civilians not by mistake, but by deliberate force or negligence. Many nations’ militaries are guilty of these crimes—from Bloody Sunday to Rawagede to My Lai in the past, to recent incidents involving British and American soldiers in Afghanistan. After such incidents, one might expect public outrage, followed by investigation and debate over policy. Instead, what we see more often is a short-lived outcry, with blame put only on low-level soldiers, and very few critical questions asked about broader policies. National publics then move on without meaningful debate. After the 1968 My Lai massacre, for example, there was only a single conviction made, to which a majority of the American public objected; limited evidence suggests the incident changed public support for the war. Thus, even if such events—especially in hindsight—spark outrage, there is limited evidence of any meaningful debates over policy change. When such incidents are made public, it is nearly always in official interests to communicate in ways that manage the crisis, minimizing the damage to themselves and their institutions. In previous research, we have identified certain patterns of messages used by military and government officials during such moments; these messages downplay the severity of the incidents, and re-direct attention to the positive qualities of the military and the nation itself. These messages, we argue, protect citizens’ national identity—that is to say, their positive feelings toward their nation —by restoring a positive image of the nation and downplaying the negative actions of national group members (in this case, soldiers). Research shows that such national identity-protective strategies dominate news coverage of such events, and have profound effects upon public opinion, leading people to be less critical of the event itself and broader policy, and less critical of the nation as a whole. But two issues remain unresolved: (a) to what extent it is actually the identity-protective content of these messages, and not simply their persuasive content, that determines their effects? And (b) to what extent do these message effects occur outside the U.S. context? To explore these questions, we ran an international online survey-experiment, among British and American subjects. Subjects received news accounts of military atrocities that were attributed either to their national ingroup or a national outgroup, as well as the identity-protective frames promoted by elites and journalists in response to these incidents. By comparing attitudes among British and American subjects to ingroup- and outgroup-protective frames, this research moves us closer to understanding the psychological effects and implications of national identity-driven rhetorical strategies in response to military crisis.