Scholarly Commentary
| In the end, the question was not whether H&K effectively altered public opinion, but whether the combined efforts of America's own government, foreign interests, and private PR and lobbying campaigns drowned out decent and rational, unemotional debate. |
| —The power house: Robert Keith Gray and the selling of access and influence in Washington |
The content, presentation, distribution, effectiveness, and purpose of Nayirah's testimony have been the subject of multiple public relations studies.
In his book, Strategic Maneuvering in Argumentative Discourse, Frans H. van Eemeren stating that "visual messages which accompany verbal argumentation can be so drastic that rational argumentation becomes almost impossible" described Nayirah's story as an argumentum ad misericordiam. In the paper The Hill & Knowlton Cases: A Brief on the Controversy by Susanne A. Roschwalb, the author noted that as H&K was a British firm, "what effect did British concerns -such as the possible collapse of its financial institutions, if the Kuwaiti currency, the dinar, became worthless -have on Hill & Knowlton’s efforts?" Ted Rowse, in his article Kuwaitgate — killing of Kuwaiti babies by Iraqi soldiers exaggerated in the The Washington Monthly noted that "Most reporters, having apparently been burned by Hill & Knowlton's handiwork in spreading the original Nayirah story without checking it out, seem to prefer to let the story fade away, passively falling, once again, for the company's public relations guile." John R. MacArthur, who authored Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War has noted that "at the time, it was the most sophisticated and expensive PR campaign ever run in the U.S. by a foreign government."
Read more about this topic: Nayirah (testimony)
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