By Richard S. Levick
The current Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal confirms what communications experts in and out of politics have been saying for generations - "you need to see it to believe it."
David Gergen, the legendary White House communications director during the Reagan Administration, regularly received phone calls from national journalists asking him how he
liked the latest highly negative story about his boss on national television. "I loved it," he would say, because the pictures were so flattering.
The ear always defers to the eye. We believe what we see, not what we hear. Understand why pictures hit us so hard where we live. We are visual animals who are hard-wired to
react immediately to pictures because of "fight or flight" conditioning.
And so too was it last month when, for the first time in a generation, Americans were stunned to see unsettling images of war and abuse - including torture - in their livings
rooms and on their front pages. The graphic depiction of Iraqi prisoners being abused by their American captors was no longer relegated to a political debate or positioning about
the best method to extract information. Rather those digital images that were beamed around the world stood in stark contrast to the Pentagon's words about "the system"
working.
The average American today receives 3,000 to 5,000 messages every day, from blaring television/radio ads, to business requests, to pleas from clamoring children. We don't have
the time to process all that information. But pictures cut through the clutter. They make us feel. They may even make us think. And sometimes, they become a defining moment in
time.
Remember that famous photo of the sailor kissing a girl you thought was his girlfriend on VJ Day in Times Square in 1945? Or that infamous picture of the Vietnamese child
running after being burned by napalm during that war? And, of course, the pictures from 9/11 and the collapse of the World Trade Center.
In Vietnam, the war was lost on two fronts. First, with no coherent political strategy, a military victory was not possible. The other was visual. No words about "the light at
end of tunnel" were adequate enough to trump the concrete pictures from the killing fields of An Loc.
George W. Bush's White House knows the power of pictures. That's why it bars media coverage of the photographs of body bags and coffins coming home from Baghdad. "Nightline"
was chastised simply for showing pictures of the fallen to accompany the litany of their names.
Ronald Reagan always knew that numbers meant nothing to us emotionally. Cite statistics about thousands of welfare cheats and the Silent Majority yawns. Tell the story of one,
and you have drama. Show it, and you have high drama, high populist dudgeon, and a common historic experience.
Two years ago when Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld obviated that little inconvenience called the Geneva Conventions, it was just another news story. Existing Army
regulations governing the interrogation of prisoners would also no longer be strictly observed.
At that time, the only fresh pictures were still the residual images of the September 11th attack, photos that would do precisely the opposite of creating any outrage at the
perilous step that the President and his people were taking.
Now, though, with a few photographs and video, our moral high ground around the globe is gone, and the job of trying to build trust in Iraq has become almost impossible. And
the awful consequence of visual communications is that those searing images of history can never be erased.
They comprise the ultimate propaganda weapon.
Richard Levick, Esq. is president of Levick Strategic Communications, a litigation and crisis PR firm that has handled media relations for more than 3000 cases and matters
worldwide, including the Catholic Church debacle and the Rosie O'Donnell Rosie litigation. He can be reached at [email protected].