PHILADELPHIA: It is one of the most famous images of the war in Iraq — a US soldier scaling a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and draping the Stars and Stripes over the black metal visage of the ousted leader.

But for Harper’s magazine publisher John MacArthur, that same image of US military victory is also indicative of a propaganda campaign being waged by the Bush administration.

“It was absolutely a photo-op created for (US President George W.) Bush’s re-election campaign commercials,” MacArthur said. “CNN, MSNBC and Fox swallowed it whole.”

In 1992, MacArthur wrote Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, a withering critique of government and media actions that he says misled the public after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

In MacArthur’s opinion, little has changed during the latest Iraq war, prompting him to begin work on an updated edition of Second Front. US government public relations specialists are still concocting bogus stories to serve government interests, he says, and credulous journalists stand ready to swallow it up.

“The concept of a self-governing American republic has been crippled by this propaganda,” MacArthur said. “The whole idea that we can govern ourselves and have an intelligent debate, free of cant, free of disinformation, I think it’s dead.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan denied the existence of any administration propaganda campaign. A Pentagon spokesman also denied high-level planning in the appearance of the American flag in Baghdad.

In fact, a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that Americans were happy with Iraq war coverage, though many wanted less news coverage of anti-war activism and fewer television appearances by former military officers. But MacArthur insists that both Gulf wars have been marked by phoney tales calculated to deceive public opinion at crucial junctures.

On the eve of the 1991 Gulf War, Americans were asked to believe that Iraqi soldiers tossed Kuwaiti infants from hospital incubators. Not true, he says.

This time, MacArthur says the Bush administration made false claims about Iraqi nuclear weapons, charging Baghdad was trying to import aluminium tubes to make enriched uranium and that the country was six months from building a warhead. The International Atomic Energy Agency found those tubes were for artillery rockets, not nuclear weapons. And MacArthur says a supposed IAEA report, on which the White House based claims about Iraqi weapons-making ability, did not exist.

“What’s changed is that there’s no shame anymore in doing it directly,” MacArthur, 46, said of what he views as blatant White House and Pentagon propaganda campaigns.

Cynthia Kennard, assistant professor at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, said the Bush administration has mastered the art of building favourable public images and shaping messages to suit its own interests. “It’s put the journalism profession in somewhat of a paralysis,” said Kennard, a former CBS correspondent who covered the 1991 Gulf War. “This is not a particularly glowing moment for tough questions and enterprise reporting.”

While MacArthur accuses news outlets generally of avoiding opposition stands, his own magazine has been vitriolic towards Bush, describing the president in its May issue as a leader who “counts his ignorance as a virtue and regards his lack of curiosity as a sign of moral strength.”

But MacArthur is not troubled by the thumping patriotism displayed by cable TV news outlets like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel, which leads CNN and MSNBC in ratings.—Reuters