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Americans and the Holocaust

Propaganda and the american public.

For many people, the word "propaganda" brings to mind the lies and misinformation created by totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany. However, propaganda also shaped public opinion in the United States during the 20th century. These sources show how Nazi Germany and the US both used different kinds of propaganda messaging to influence Americans' attitudes about Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust.

The documents, illustrations, and recordings featured here are all examples of different types of propaganda—created and distributed by both the United States and Nazi Germany—that targeted the American public in the 1930s and 1940s. They illustrate how wars are not only fought with weapons, but also with information and messaging. Armed with propaganda, both governments tried to shape American citizens' opinions and secure public support in a time of conflict.

Although the concept of propaganda 1 dates back to ancient times, its first widespread modern use occurred during World War I . The warring powers used propaganda to motivate their own populations and to weaken their enemies' will to fight. Like the tank, airplane, and battleship, propaganda became an essential and powerful weapon in modern warfare. Its supporters argued that it could shorten wars and ultimately save human lives by convincing the enemy to surrender.

President Woodrow Wilson established the first US propaganda agency in 1917, 2 a move that received strong criticism after the war. Concern arose over the fact that wartime propaganda had deepened widespread suspicions of—and discrimination against—many marginalized people who were accused of not being "100 percent Americans." Later revelations about the fabricated nature of many so-called " atrocity stories " during the war made Americans more skeptical about propaganda.

A public debate in the United States concerning the effects of propaganda emerged shortly after WWI. In the 1920s and 1930s, scholars in America and Europe published the first scientific analyses of propaganda and its functions. 3 Some commentators feared that now Americans were living in an "age of lies" that threatened democracy and freedom of the press by distorting and falsifying the news. 4

During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt 's administration, Congress, and many private citizens remained fearful of propaganda in the years before  World War II . Concern over foreign influence in American politics emerged with renewed strength. Beginning in 1934, Congress began investigating Nazi Germany's propaganda efforts in the United States. This led to the creation of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1938. That same year, Congress passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, requiring people who were "employed by agencies to disseminate propaganda in the United States" to register with the State Department.

Soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, senior Nazi official Joseph Goebbels began working to create a positive image of Germany's new regime in the United States. Goebbels's  Ministry of Propaganda and Public Englightenment  focused on countering negative reports about the regime's violence against Jews and political opponents. A new goal was added by the end of the 1930s as Nazi Germany drove Europe into war—encourage isolationism in America and keep the United States out of the conflict. A  Nazi pamphlet included in this collection —recovered by an American college student—attempts to paint a favorable image of Germany while making an appeal to American antisemitism . 5

Throughout the 1930s, Americans grew fearful of Nazi, Soviet, Italian, and Japanese propaganda in the United States. 6   Many people also believed that Great Britain and Jewish leaders and organizations were using propaganda to draw America into WWII. Isolationists like the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh made headlines by accusing American Jews and President Roosevelt of being pro-war agitators. 7 That year Congress launched an investigation into the film and radio industry to determine if Jewish people working in Hollywood were promoting pro-war propaganda in an attempt to direct public opinion and foreign policy.

Educators also worried that Americans could fall prey to propaganda. As a result, schools began to teach students how to identify propaganda. The newly created Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) continued these activities. Using examples from politics, the IPA provided teachers and students with materials to make them more critical consumers of information. A leaflet included in this collection titled  "Hitler Wants You to Believe...,"  also tried to show Americans how to see through Nazi propaganda. Readers were warned to be skeptical of rumors spread by the Nazi regime and its allies.

Though wary of the dangers of propaganda, President Roosevelt created the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1942. The agency coordinated the government's messaging about the war effort through film, radio, newspapers, posters , and pamphlets. OWI officials wanted to avoid the mistakes of the past war by toning down so-called "hate propaganda." They stated that the OWI "must give the people a truthful, clear, and uncompromising picture of the enemy." This task, they maintained, was impossible without providing a "frank account of what the enemy does." One OWI poster featured in this collection —released following the 1942 murders of hundreds of innocent Czech civilians—reflects horror and dismay at Nazi brutality. While the purpose was to inform the public about "all the facts about the war and the enemy," these accounts were also intended to stir outrage and generate action.

US propaganda during World War II did not only expose and highlight the dangers posed by  the Axis powers . American propaganda also focused on encouraging participation in the war—through employment in the armaments industry, conservation of valuable resources, or service in the armed forces. Posters like the one featured here touched upon patriotic themes to generate enthusiasm for joining the military.

As information about the Holocaust  came to light, some concerned Americans sought to publicize these crimes in order to generate public and governmental action. But America's official propaganda agencies hesitated to promote stories about Nazi crimes. They feared that they would be dismissed as "atrocity stories" like those that circulated after World War I.

The shock that many American soldiers experienced when they encountered the Nazi concentration camp system in 1945 quickly led to actions publicizing Nazi crimes. A short film created to expose the horrors of Nazi camps appears in this collection. General Dwight D. Eisenhower's remarks in April 1945  implored journalists and members of Congress to visit the killing centers themselves in order to bear firsthand witness and to ensure that these crimes could never be dismissed as propaganda.

Whether through artwork, radio and television broadcasts, or print media, propaganda provided both Nazi Germany and the US important tools for communicating and promoting official policies and actions during World War II. No major power recognized this more clearly than the Third Reich, but the United States also used propaganda to advance its war aims. Indeed, in the battle for Americans' hearts and minds, it proved perhaps the most powerful weapon.

In this collection, propaganda is defined as biased information designed to shape public opinion and behavior. It can be spread by governments, political parties, or private organizations to advertise a particular cause, movement, candidate, or nation. It generally plays upon emotions, selectively omits information, and succeeds when its targeted audiences respond positively to its messages.

For more information on the roots of American propaganda, see Alan Axelrod,  Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda  (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

For an interesting discussion of this public debate, see Erika G. King, "Exposing the 'Age of Lies': The Propaganda Menace as Portrayed in American Magazines in the Aftermath of World War I,"  Journal of American Culture , Vol. 23, Issue 2 (June 2000), 17-23.

“Propaganda—Asset or Liability in Democracy?" America’s Town Meeting of the Air , Series Two, Number 22, April 15, 1937 (New York: American Book Company, 1937), 12-14; for additional information on Bernay’s views on propaganda, see also Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda  (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928); "Manipulating Public Opinion: The Why and The How,"  The American Journal of Sociology , Vol. 33, No. 6 (May 1928), 958-971; "The Marketing of National Policies: A Study of War Propaganda,"  Journal of Marketing , Vol. 6, No. 3 (Jan., 1942), 236-244; and "The Engineering of Consent,"  Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , Vol. 250, Communication and Social Action (Mar. 1947), 113-120.

For more on antisemitism in the US, see the related collection in Experiencing History , Nazi Ideals and American Society .

Officials also warned of a so-called "Fifth Column" that was poised to sabotage industry and terrorize the population. The term "Fifth Column" dates back to the Spanish Civil War, and is attributed to Nationalist general, Emilio Mola, who reportedly announced that he was sending four military columns to advance on Madrid and had one column of sympathizers and agents operating inside the city to aid the revolt. It quickly entered into the popular vocabulary through the world press, film, and a play of the same name by Ernest Hemingway. For more, see the item in this collection,  Roosevelt's Address on the "Fifth Column."

For more on Americans' perceptions of Lindbergh, see the related items in  Experiencing History, Letter from Yale Students to Charles Lindbergh  and "'Now We Think ---- .""

All 16 Items in the Propaganda and the American Public Collection

German Leaflet Alleging Allied Atrocities

tags: Americans abroad fear & intimidation propaganda retribution & revenge US armed forces

type: Pamphlet

German Leaflet for Black American Soldiers

tags: Americans abroad propaganda US armed forces visual art

"'Propaganda Kit' Made in Germany"

tags: activism community propaganda visual art

Lidice: "This Is Nazi Brutality"

tags: activism fear & intimidation propaganda retribution & revenge visual art

type: Poster

"Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty"

tags: propaganda US armed forces visual art

"Careless talk. . . got there first"

tags: censorship propaganda US armed forces visual art

German Leaflet: "Jewry and Penal Punishment"

tags: Americans abroad antisemitism fear & intimidation law enforcement propaganda

Robert Henry Best: "Best's Berlin Broadcast"

tags: Americans abroad antisemitism fear & intimidation Jews in North America politics of fear propaganda

type: Radio Broadcast

"Hitler Wants Us to Believe..."

tags: antisemitism politics of fear propaganda visual art

Norman Krasna, "Lest We Forget"

tags: group violence Jews in North America liberation

type: Documentary

Roosevelt's Address on the "Fifth Column"

tags: politics of fear propaganda

type: Newsreel

Dr. Fritz Linnenbuerger: "Trip to Germany"

tags: Americans abroad propaganda

type: Report

Louise Kleuser to J. L. McEhlany

tags: activism Christianity propaganda religious life women's experiences

type: Letter

"Desecration of Religion"

tags: Christianity politics of fear propaganda religious life

type: Photograph

"Nazi Exchange Students at the University of Missouri"

tags: activism antisemitism education Jews in North America propaganda

type: Newspaper Article

Film of General Dwight D. Eisenhower Visiting the Ohrdruf Camp

tags: Americans abroad food & hunger health & hygiene liberation US armed forces

type: Raw Footage

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Propaganda’s Progression

Over the years, misinformation campaigns have changed. here’s why the latest are so difficult to stamp out..

• United States

In the last few years, propaganda has taken on a new character, and the effects will reverberate far into the future. To understand how, it is worth looking at influences over time.

In World Wars I and II, propaganda was used to shape public opinion through print. Especially during the first war, books, newspapers, cartoons, slogans, theatre, and even postage stamps were common vehicles on both sides to promulgate favorable information. The propaganda kept publics on-side and boosted the ranks and morale of the armies . By the second World War, propaganda had changed, though, and movies in particular were used to incite fear. There were still the usual posters to mobilize soldiers, but they were negative rather than positive. “Stop this Monster that Stops at Nothing,” read one.

In 1947, a publisher in St. Paul, Minnesota released a red-scare comic book titled: “Is This Tomorrow; America Under Communism!” The animated cover displays the American flag engulfed in red flames as a backdrop of Black and white U.S. soldiers being brutally attacked by Communist soldiers. In this case, propaganda crossed racial lines to ensure that all Americans, regardless of color, could identify with the need to support and join soldiers in the fight against communism at all cost. It galvanized the public through symbolism and general personalities, like the soldier, in which all citizens respected and could relate to.

By the Cold War, propaganda mixed both methods: the promotion of ideologies and the demonization of personalities. In Cuba in 1956, the social revolution and propaganda strategy turned the collective consciousness of the Cuban people towards the personality of Fidel Castro . Castro was born to wealth but hated the elite, a welcome sentiment among those struggling for a decent living. Castro personally represented the struggle. Like other revolutionary leaders in history, i.e. Lenin and Trotsky, Mao, Haiti’s Louverture, Algeria’s Fanon, and the Mexican Emiliano Zapata, the U.S. propaganda used images and caricatures of Castro to demonize all that he stood for. However, the propaganda backfired, as Castro’s ideologies struck a chord with Black America in terms of injustice and socioeconomic inequality. Moreover, his appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1959 added an unexpected appeal as a victorious rebel with an attractive guerilla sidekick in Che Guevara. Ideological propaganda and the demonization of personalities as tools were losing ground. Citizens were beginning to use their own intelligence to determine what and who was to be avoided in foreign affairs.

The Arab Spring rebellions from 2010 to 2015 mark the boom in the use of the internet for propaganda . However, instead of strategic positioning by a war office, images and videos were posted by average citizens. Different than previous propaganda, the focus was on the populist struggle. People were tired of being oppressed by poverty and inequality, as exemplified by Mohamed Bouazizi, aged 26, who set himself on fire publicly in Tunisia as the ultimate protest against poverty . Following his act, which spurred the rebellions, citizens took the promotion of propaganda into their own hands through social media. As such, the propaganda of the Arab Spring movement intended to communicate inequities and the rise of populism.

On the heels of the Arab Spring came the rise of the Islamic State, and with it another iteration of propaganda, this one with a clear vision to stamp out Western values with Islam. A major shift in vehicles for promotion differentiates this propaganda from all past years. The dawn of social media with worldwide access became the primary propaganda tool for the Islamic State. Platforms like Facebook and YouTube were used to send highly effective videos, both taped and real-time, that infiltrate the psyche visually, auditorily, and intellectually. This level of propaganda serves as a cognitive manipulation , often not recognized until one is faced with dire consequences from nefarious actions, or until there is a change in one’s own identity . More effective than posters, stamps, and movies with hired actors, cyber-propaganda is today’s most dangerous form of guerilla warfare.

Russia’s cyber-propaganda in the United States over the past four years has helped to divide the country ideologically to the point of an insurrection by radical Trump supporters. Indeed, its misinformation, promoted easily through social media in the form of advertisements, YouTube videos, and Twitter chats has stoked hate and conspiracy theories. This reaches millions of Americans.

As it relates to revolutionary movements, the author Jeff Goodwin offers a fundamental reason as to why small numbers of rebels can be successful in their missions: “One possible explanation is that insurgencies that are ‘racial’ or ethnic in nature as well as rooted in class or socioeconomic grievances are likely to be particularly intractable, whereas rebellions that are merely class-based will be easily defeated or co-opted.” Russian propaganda in the United States included messages that preyed upon multiple ideological differences within the fabric of the nation. They promoted messages of fear about losing jobs to immigrants, and Second Amendment rights being stripped. They pushed misinformation about federal overreach, and the need for more policing to stop crime.

Given real problems that underlie those messages—the economic decline of white people in states that in the past profited from the free labor of Black slaves , coupled with a new industrial revolution that left their industries behind—and you’ve got a high likelihood that Trump supporters will continue to mobilize. Russia use of the age-old power of propaganda might have set the scene for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, but quelling the intra-state discord is up to America.

Angela R. Pashayan is a Ph.D. student in political science at Howard University.

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Articles on Propaganda

Displaying 1 - 20 of 162 articles.

How you can tell propaganda from journalism − let’s look at Tucker Carlson’s visit to Russia

Michael J. Socolow , University of Maine

Can we be inoculated against climate misinformation? Yes – if we prebunk rather than debunk

Christian Turney , University of Technology Sydney and Sander van der Linden , University of Cambridge

North Korea has demolished its monument to reunification but it can’t fully erase the dream

David Hall , University of Central Lancashire

It’s a myth that England was created on the battlefield – most of it happened at the negotiating table

Clare Downham , University of Liverpool

North Korea ramps up military rhetoric as Kim gives up on reunification with South

Sojin Lim , University of Central Lancashire

‘Politically neutral’ Russian athletes can now enter the Olympics – but don’t expect many to compete

Keith Rathbone , Macquarie University

What Vietnam’s ban of the Barbie movie tells us about China’s politics of persuasion

Jordan Richard Schoenherr , Concordia University

Ukraine: Kremlin warning of ‘forever war’ reflects shifting Russian rhetoric about ‘special military operation’

Stephen Hall , University of Bath

Are calls to cancel two Palestinian writers from Adelaide Writers’ Week justified?

Denis Muller , The University of Melbourne

Ukraine war: casualty counts from either side can be potent weapons and shouldn’t always be believed

Lily Hamourtziadou , Birmingham City University

Rory Cormac’s How to Stage a Coup is an entertaining critique, not a how-to  manual

Brendon O'Connor , University of Sydney

Citizens’ social media, like Mastodon, can provide an antidote to propaganda and disinformation

Robert W. Gehl , York University, Canada

Friday essay: George Orwell is everywhere, but Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a reliable guide to contemporary politics

Chris Fleming , Western Sydney University and Jane Goodall , Western Sydney University

The war in Ukraine shows how libraries play a vital role in challenging disinformation

Ksenya Kiebuzinski , University of Toronto

US and Russia engage in a digital battle for hearts and minds

Jennifer Grygiel , Syracuse University

Putin’s propaganda is rooted in Russian history – and that’s why it works

Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager , Colorado State University and Evgeniya Pyatovskaya , University of South Florida

Ukrainian propaganda: how Zelensky is winning the information war against Russia

Paul Baines , University of Leicester

Debate: In Ukraine, the West cannot allow itself to sleepwalk into another Syrian catastrophe

Nicolas Tenzer , Sciences Po

Manifesto published in Russian media reflects Putin regime’s ruthless plans in Ukraine

Susanne Sternthal , Texas State University

#PolandFirstToHelp: How Poland is using humanitarianism to boost its propaganda

Yvonne Su , York University, Canada

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Propaganda Education for a Digital Age

• Posted March 4, 2021
• By Jill Anderson
• Moral, Civic, and Ethical Education
• Teachers and Teaching
• Technology and Media

While most of us don’t think about propaganda as something occurring today, it is everywhere. Propaganda is part of our news, entertainment, education, social media, and more. In order to understand the complexities of propaganda, we have to teach it, says Renee Hobbs , Ed.D.’85, director of the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island.

“When you start to learn about propaganda, you inevitably realize the value and the importance of multiperspectival thinking,” she says. “The ability to think about a topic from a range of different points of view turns out to be incredibly powerful, to activate intellectual curiosity, to promote reasoning, to encourage genuine value judgements.”

Hobbs shares that understanding propaganda and being able to analyze, critique, and create it can strengthen democracy and impact the growing polarization in the country. In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, Hobbs shares how to revitalize propaganda education in the digital age.

• Propaganda education can fit in across all parts of the curriculum.
• A key goal of propaganda education is how to interpret messages while being mindful and strategic. Use familiar and inquiry-oriented pedagogies to help reflect and make meaning. Layer these practices in different subjects being studied. No matter what the subject, Hobbs contends that propaganda can be richly explored.
• Reinforce basic media literacy education practices in the home. Have conversations about who is the author of this message, what is their purpose, when we're playing a game, when we're reading a picture book, when we're checking out the Facebook feed, and when we're talking with grandma on the Zoom. Who's the author, what's the purpose tends to be a really great way to help kids understand that messages are created by people who have motives and purposes.

Jill Anderson: I'm Jill Anderson, this is The Harvard EdCast.

Most of us hear the word propaganda and don't think about it as a modern occurrence. Professor Renee Hobbs says we encounter propaganda at least once an hour in the news, entertainment, social media, and more. She is an expert in digital and media literacy who's been studying propaganda for decades. She believes learning to identify and understand propaganda is crucial for our democracy and also in navigating the overwhelming digital world we live. Yet, propaganda is often missing from school curriculums or is taught in outdated ways. I wanted to know more about propaganda education, but first, I asked Renee what propaganda is today and how we encounter it.

Renee Hobbs: Many different forms of expression that your listeners encounter every single day can be understood as propaganda, even though we might use words like clickbait, sponsored content, memes, social media posts, personalized search, and many other practices. The definition of propaganda changes as society changes. I like to think about propaganda's essential elements as having to do with intentional and strategic influence of public opinion. That's a really broad definition, but it really fits the contemporary era where propaganda can be found in news and journalism, in advertising and public relations, in government, in entertainment, in information, and even in education.

Jill Anderson: Our society and our world and our technology are really good at creating intentional and non-intentional things that we cannot even differentiate what's real and what's not.

Renee Hobbs: Yeah, it turns out that we've known for a long time that you can bypass people's critical thinking by activating strong emotions and responding to audience's deepest hopes, fears, and dreams by simplifying information. In fact, simplifying information has kind of become essential in an age where there's so much information. To break through the clutter, you have to have a snappy headline, it has to be shorter. Concision is a value of journalism as you know, but those are also practices that can lead to the bypassing of critical thinking. In some ways, we now encounter a lot of different messages where our feelings are activated, where we think we know what the story is because it's got a simple headline and it somehow appeals to our core values so we accept it, but we don't engage in the practice of critically analyzing it. My work in propaganda is in relation to my passionate efforts to bring media literacy education into American elementary and secondary schools.

Jill Anderson: Tell me a little bit about how learning about propaganda is a way to navigate this complex media environment that we're all engaging in.

Renee Hobbs: One of the claims I make is the idea that propaganda is in the eye of the beholder, that you might see that funny comedy, the interview about the goofy journalists who are sent out to assassinate a world leader, you might see that as entertainment, but when I watch it, I see something that looks darkly, darkly like a form of imperialistic propaganda. To me, it looks awfully devious to have the good guys go out and commit a political assassination, even if it's done in a very, very humorous way.

When you start to learn about propaganda, you inevitably realize the value and the importance of multiperspectival thinking. The ability to think about a topic from a range of different points of view turns out to be incredibly powerful, to activate intellectual curiosity, to promote reasoning, to encourage genuine value judgements. But multiperspectival thinking is hard. Looking at propaganda creates these fun ways to recognize that messages can be understood in many different ways, there's no one right answer. That's partly why I think it's so exciting to study propaganda with students because the discovery that it's the active interpretation that creates the meaning, well, that's a huge aha for studying anything. Literature, science, mathematics, philosophy, the arts, everything hinges on that in some ways.

Jill Anderson: Where are we in terms of how, and if, this is actually being taught in schools?

Renee Hobbs: Well, here comes the bad news, Jill. I started doing my work in propaganda in 2007 when I had a consultancy with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. They had a special exhibit at that time called The State of Deception, it was about the history of Nazi propaganda. They wanted to help people make connections between the past historical propaganda of the 20th century Germany and bring it into contemporary times.

That inquiry led me to ask the same question that you just posed to me, where is propaganda taught in American public schools? What I learned is that it's only taught in history class and it's only taught in the context of Nazi Germany. Sometimes, if you go to a very good school, you'll get a study of propaganda in the context of learning about World War II, but that's it. It's only studied as a historical topic.

That led me to wonder, well, why is propaganda not studied in English language arts, because it used to be. I discovered that back in the 1930s, English teachers were indeed teaching about propaganda, during the 1930s, as antisemitism was rising in the United States and as radio personalities were on the radio saying all manner of idiotic things, dangerous and idiotic things. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, in 1937, spent over a million dollars in 1930s money, with support from businessman, Edward Filene of Filene's Department Store. This was a really influential effort as this lesson plans and curriculum materials were brought into thousands and thousands of American high schools.

Many of the concepts that were introduced in the 1930s are the same concepts that are used in high schools today. For instance, if you look at an example of propaganda and you identify it as a glittering generality, or if you say, "Oh, it looks like they want everybody to do it. Everybody's doing it, so you should too," that's called the bandwagon effect. Well, those concepts are 70 years old and they were designed for radio, to analyze radio and news media.

That led me to wonder what happened. It turned out that right around the time of the 1990s, there was a little bit of attention to persuasive genres, studying persuasive genres in English class, but then along came the Common Core State Standards. The Common Core State Standards shifted the way English teachers thought about the relationship between logos, pathos, and ethos. The Common Core Standards redefined persuasion as argumentation and said that the only legitimate form of persuasion to study in schools was the logical kind, the one with reasoning and evidence and arguments. The other kind of persuasion, the one that activated strong feelings, the one that tapped into your deepest hopes, fears and dreams, the one that attacks opponents, well, that's not the kind of persuasive content you study in schools. Common Core State Standards redefined what counts as persuasion, and therefore, only a very narrow band of persuasive texts were studied.

A scholar named David Fleming wrote a really powerful essay tracing this historical trajectory in a publication for English educators. I found it very compelling because, essentially, conflating argumentation and propaganda, conflating argumentation as the only form of persuasive discourse leaves kids at a real disadvantage, given that most of the persuasive messaging they encounter in the world outside of school, well, it isn't logical at all. It's emotional, it's based on the credibility and character of the speaker. So kids end up with a real deficit in their understanding right now.

Jill Anderson: Are you actually seeing some restoration of this back into the curriculum in places or-

Renee Hobbs: Oh, absolutely. In fact, one of the most important moves happened in the National Council of Teachers of English, the national membership organization for English educators with more than 25,000 members. In 2019, they issued a really important resolution. It was called the Resolution on English Education for Critical Literacy in Politics. This is a formal statement approved by the NCTE membership that says, unfortunately, this post-truth society, which is characterized by the routine use of political lying, where we come to accept as routine lies that are not condemned, if we're living in a society where that's our reality, then we need to be able to interrogate the new types of texts that are circulating in culture. They offer a set of resolutions that suggest that students be able to learn to analyze and evaluate sophisticated persuasive techniques in all texts, genres, and types of media, and that they resist attempts to influence discussion through falsehoods or through stereotypes or attempts to shame or silence, that they recognize what are the forms of deliberative dialogue that promote democratic practice and what are the forms of communication and expression that shut them down.

This, I think, is issuing in a little bit of a call to action as English teachers take up the challenge. Of course it is a challenge, Jill, because, well, bringing controversial texts into the classroom for discussion can be challenging for teachers, in this culture where some teachers have gotten criticized for bringing in the New York Times. Imagine that. It takes courage and good pedagogical strategy to teach about propaganda in the climate of polarization that we are now living in.

Jill Anderson: For a lot of teachers, I imagine it's challenging to know how to handle this. Also, you have the challenge of adults struggling themselves with navigating these issues as well. What do you recommend for teachers who are feeling a little bit scared to do this on how to take those steps without maybe losing their jobs.

Renee Hobbs: Right.

Jill Anderson: Or getting that angry letter from a parent or email or something.

Renee Hobbs: Right. There are 70 stories in this book of educators that I've interviewed or met or read about their work who are doing propaganda education in really simple and innovative ways. Like the art teacher at Charlemont Academy, who has her students create lithograph posters as they learn to create propaganda as a means to begin thinking about how propaganda works, why it works, what its visual appeal is, and how it persuades. Or the school library media specialist from Deerfield, Massachusetts, who introduces teaching about propaganda by using one of the Mo Willems books, Pigeon Wants a Puppy. Pigeon is so trying to get a puppy that sometimes he persuades with facts and sometimes he persuades with feelings. Even young children, as young as five or six years old, can understand the different ways that people try to influence each other to get what they want.

Jill Anderson: As a parent, it's hard for me to imagine introducing some of these concepts to a young child. What can parents and caregivers do at home to help teach their children about this?

Renee Hobbs: I think basic media literacy education is a perfect way to engage in these practices in the home. We generally say to parents, "Look, there are so many opportunities to have conversations about who is the author of this message, what is their purpose," when we're playing a game, when we're reading a picture book, when we're checking out the Facebook feed, and when we're talking with grandma on the Zoom. Who's the author, what's the purpose tends to be a really great way to help kids understand that messages are created by people who have motives and purposes.

It's harder and harder for parents to engage in co-viewing practices because kids now have their own devices very early, we're all in a very hyper specialized way, but the idea of reflecting on our pleasures and noticing what attracts and holds our attention. Even young children can begin to say, "I like this game because it does X, Y, and Z." A kid who can come up with a sentence like that is more media literate than a kid who says, "I like it because it's funny." The idea of helping kids build the practice of reasoning about one's pleasures and choices and preferences, this is a very simple way to introduce media literacy in the home. Jill, I'm guessing that you do that all the time with your kid, right?

Jill Anderson: I have to say yes, of course.

Renee Hobbs: Yes, because as a trained media professional, you've internalized media literacy. Of course you think about the purpose, the author, and the point of view, but not everybody does.

Jill Anderson: I mean, on some level we do at home. I think we do a lot of discussions about commercials in my house, even though in a lot of ways it's always subtly there in some way, advertising.

Renee Hobbs: I'm so glad you're talking about that, Jill, because in fact, that is the best way to introduce propaganda education to young children. Learning about advertising is a developmentally-appropriate set of knowledge and skills for children in the elementary grades. You don't want to introduce young children to disinformation and harmful propaganda, but you sure do want to help them recognize how advertising persuades, right?

Jill Anderson: Right.

Renee Hobbs: You also want to talk about how activists use images and symbols and emotional appeals to persuade. I mean, Greta Thunberg is perhaps the most famous teenage propagandist of all time and she's brilliant at it, but let's be clear, it's a form of beneficial propaganda. Her efforts to hold us grown-ups accountable to the devastation of our ecological destruction is argued beautifully as she uses reasoning and evidence and facts, but as she uses the power of emotional appeals and her character, she's a very effective propagandist. I think right now, many young people who are looking to make change, make a difference, fix some of the many, many issues and challenges we face in society, I think they well understand the value of positive propaganda to address those big social challenges.

Jill Anderson: I'm glad you mentioned her as an example, because I think a lot of us, myself included, come from that lens of looking at propaganda solely as a bad thing because a lot of us learn it that way. You have said that this is propaganda doesn't have to be something that's negative.

Renee Hobbs: Propaganda is an essential part of the democratic process. Propaganda is how citizens use the power of communication and information to make a difference in the world. We couldn't have free and fair elections if we didn't have election propaganda, because people make decisions about who their leaders are based on logos, ethos, and pathos. Once you open up your thinking beyond thinking of propaganda as a smear word, you discover how relevant it is to every aspect of our social, political, cultural, educational lives.

Jill Anderson: But I think there's so many people right now looking at the world, thinking we've got all these threats of fake news that get thrown out there and growing conspiracies, and we're very divided. Propaganda education is one way to help us better understand that and maybe close the divide?

Renee Hobbs: Propaganda is both the cause and the cure for what ails us in society. Propaganda has helped to widen the polarization and the strategy of attacking opponents is really good at that, right?

Jill Anderson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Renee Hobbs: You create an us versus them feeling, you reinforce tribalism, and all of a sudden people see each other as enemies to be feared. But propaganda is also the only way that we come together as a society. It's the one way that we are induced to act together. Good propaganda can help us recognize the similarities that exist between us, the common values that bind us together as a people, and the deeper truths, the emotional and moral truths, that all human beings share.

The original meaning of the word propaganda, remember, is in spreading the gospel of love and forgiveness. We're going to need a heck of a lot of love and forgiveness if we're going to move forward. The cure for polarization is going to have to involve a great bit of critical thinking and an awful lot of love and forgiveness, because the way love and forgiveness come into cure us from this disease of polarization is if I'm willing to acknowledge that my understanding of the world is selective and incomplete, I don't have the whole story. I can't state for certain what is capital T truth, and I'm not going to find it through fact checking or experts or any of that. It's going to be a collaborative enterprise. I'm going to need a little help from my friends. The intellectual humility of acknowledging that we need each other to come to consensus, it's actually really liberating.

Jill Anderson: Yeah, and it sounds like everybody could benefit from having some propaganda education because this is only going to probably get more complex as media continues to evolve.

Renee Hobbs: Yeah, and at the same time, I would say that the pedagogies for teaching propaganda are not brand new pedagogies that you've never heard of, right?

Renee Hobbs: It's basically this practice of being metacognitive about how you interpret messages and being mindful and strategic in reflecting on the meaning making that you're doing. The pedagogies are very familiar, they're inquiry-oriented, they're rooted in reflection and meaning making, so it's not that hard to include them, to layer them into your science class. If you're studying the environment, you should darn well be studying environmental propaganda. If you're studying literature, you should be looking at language as propaganda. If you're studying art, Banksy is a must. You have to study art as propaganda.

Propaganda fits across the curriculum everywhere, with pedagogies that are familiar to teachers. All those great teachers that I found who were doing it made me realize that if we change our attitude about propaganda, we can in fact have a big influence in bringing media literacy competencies to all Americans.

Jill Anderson: Professor Renee Hobbs is the founder and director of the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island. She's the author of numerous books about media literacy, including Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education for a Digital Age.

I'm Jill Anderson. This is The Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.

Hobbs' new book, Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education for a Digital Age is the winner of the AAP PROSE Award for Excellence in Social Sciences for 2021. She also created a variety of digital resources to accompany the book , including the Propaganda Gallery, a crowdsourced collection of over 3,500 examples of contemporary propaganda suitable for educational use.

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World War II Propaganda in the United States: Shaping the Home Front and Beyond

How it works

Introduction

World War II, a global conflict of unprecedented scale and consequence, necessitated the mobilization of not just military forces but also the hearts and minds of the American people. Propaganda emerged as a potent tool in the United States, shaping public opinion, inspiring patriotism, and galvanizing support for the war effort. This essay explores the role of World War II propaganda in the United States, shedding light on its diverse forms, impact, and the enduring legacy it left on the nation's psyche.

The Arsenal of Democracy: Mainstreaming Propaganda

As the United States entered World War II in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously declared the nation the "Arsenal of Democracy." To fuel this arsenal and rally public support, the government launched an extensive propaganda campaign. The primary goal was to instill a sense of duty, sacrifice, and unity among the American populace.

Propaganda was disseminated through various mediums, including posters, radio broadcasts, films, and print media. Iconic posters like "Uncle Sam Wants You" featuring the stern visage of Uncle Sam pointing directly at the viewer became emblematic of the era. These images evoked a call to action, urging citizens to enlist, buy war bonds, conserve resources, and support the troops.

Mobilizing the Workforce: Women and Minorities in the Spotlight

World War II propaganda did more than just encourage military enlistment; it also played a crucial role in reshaping societal norms and expectations. The shortage of manpower on the home front prompted propaganda efforts to encourage women to join the workforce in unprecedented numbers. Iconic posters depicted "Rosie the Riveter," a symbol of female empowerment and industriousness, encouraging women to take on roles traditionally held by men.

Minorities, particularly African Americans, also saw themselves featured in propaganda materials. While the U.S. military was racially segregated at the time, posters like "Double V for Victory" encouraged African Americans to support the war effort abroad while simultaneously advocating for civil rights and equality on the home front.

Racial tensions and discrimination persisted, but these propaganda efforts laid the groundwork for future civil rights movements and the eventual desegregation of the U.S. military.

Fear of the "Other": The Demonization of the Axis Powers

Propaganda during World War II also played a role in shaping perceptions of the enemy. The Axis powers, primarily Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, were portrayed as menacing threats to democracy and freedom. Nazi propaganda was depicted as oppressive, aggressive, and cruel, while Japanese propaganda was often characterized as fanatical and treacherous.

These portrayals were instrumental in dehumanizing the enemy and galvanizing the American public against a perceived threat. While propaganda undoubtedly served a purpose in maintaining morale, it also contributed to the perpetuation of stereotypes and biases.

Legacy and Reflections

The propaganda of World War II left an indelible mark on American culture and society. It had a profound impact on shaping attitudes toward the war, influencing recruitment and mobilization efforts, and encouraging societal change.

The portrayal of women and minorities in wartime propaganda laid the foundation for subsequent movements for gender and civil rights. Rosie the Riveter remains an enduring symbol of female empowerment, and the Double V campaign foreshadowed the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

However, it is important to recognize that wartime propaganda also had its limitations and shortcomings. It often perpetuated stereotypes and biases, and it sometimes blurred the line between necessary mobilization and the infringement on civil liberties.

World War II propaganda in the United States was a multifaceted and influential phenomenon that played a crucial role in shaping the home front and the nation's perception of the war. It harnessed the power of imagery, media, and messaging to inspire patriotism, encourage sacrifice, and mobilize the American people.

While the legacy of wartime propaganda is complex and multifaceted, it remains an essential chapter in the history of World War II and the United States. It reminds us of the power of communication and persuasion during times of conflict, as well as the enduring impact of propaganda on the collective memory and values of a nation.

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The Hyper-Polarization Challenge to the Conflict Resolution Field: A Joint BI/CRQ Discussion BI and the Conflict Resolution Quarterly invite you to participate in an online exploration of what those with conflict and peacebuilding expertise can do to help defend liberal democracies and encourage them live up to their ideals.

Follow BI and the Hyper-Polarization Discussion on BI's New Substack Newsletter .

Hyper-Polarization, COVID, Racism, and the Constructive Conflict Initiative Read about (and contribute to) the  Constructive Conflict Initiative  and its associated Blog —our effort to assemble what we collectively know about how to move beyond our hyperpolarized politics and start solving society's problems. 

By Eric Brahm

August 2006  

The term propaganda has a nearly universally negative connotation. Walter Lippmann described it as inherently "deceptive" and therefore evil.[1] Propaganda is more an exercise of deception rather than persuasion. Partisans often use the label to dismiss any claims made by their opponents while at the same time professing to never employ propaganda themselves. It is akin to advertising and public relations, but with political purpose. Although propaganda has been utilized for centuries, the term was first used in 1622 when Pope Gregory XV issued the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide to counter the growing Protestant threat in order "to reconquer by spiritual arms" those areas "lost to the Church in the debacle of the sixteenth century."[2] Propaganda has become a common element of politics and war. As new communications technologies have developed, propagandists have developed new methods to reach increasingly large audiences in order to shape their views. The shift to targeting mass audiences and not just elite publics has been called by some as "new propaganda."[3] This essay aims to provide a brief overview of the concept of propaganda, various propaganda techniques, and related topics.

In a nutshell, propaganda is designed to manipulate others' beliefs and induce action in the interest of the propagator by drilling the message into the listeners' heads. It involves the use of images, slogans and symbols to play on prejudices and emotions. The ultimate goal of propaganda is to entice the recipient of the message to come to 'voluntarily' accept the propagandist's position as if it was one's own. Propaganda may be aimed at one's own people or at members of other groups. It can be designed to agitate the population or to pacify it. We often think of propaganda as false information that is meant to reassure those who already believe. Believing what is false can create cognitive dissonance, which people are eager to eliminate. Therefore, propaganda is often directed at those who are already sympathetic to the message in order to help overcome this discomfort. One the one hand, then, propaganda generally aims to construct the self as a noble, strong persona to which individuals in the domestic population can feel connected. At the same time, propaganda often attempts to rally the domestic public to action creating fear, confusion, and hatred by portraying the antagonist as an abominable figure.[4] Typically, the Other is demonized or dehumanized.[5] Stereotyping and scapegoating are common tactics in this regard. At its most extreme, propaganda is intended to overcome a reluctance to kill. In its modern usage, propaganda also tends to be characterized by some degree of institutionalization, mass distribution, and repetition of the message. [6]

Propagandists often conceal their purpose, even their identity, in order to distract the public. White propaganda, for instance, is from a correctly identified source and is not intentionally deceptive. Black propaganda, by contrast, is purposefully deceptive in giving the impression that the source is friendly.[7] Finally, the term gray propaganda has been used to describe propaganda that falls somewhere in between.

Although the range of propaganda techniques is seemingly limitless, space permits only an abbreviated discussion.[8] One common technique is bandwagoning, in other words appealing to people's desire to belong especially to the winning side, rather than the rightness of the position. Doublespeak involves the use of language that is deliberately constructed to disguise or distort its actual meaning. Examples might include downsizing, extraordinary rendition, or the coalition of the willing. These may take the form of euphemisms, which are used to make something sound better than it is such as the term collateral damage. Another strategy is to appeal to authority. For instance, the World War II-era series This is War! emphasized how FDR's leadership qualities were similar to greats like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.[9] At other times, testimonials may be effective. Propaganda is also often heavily laced with rationalization and oversimplification. On the latter point, glittering generalities are words that, while they may have different positive meaning for individual, are linked to concepts that are highly valued by the group. Therefore, when these words are invoked, they demand approval without thinking, simply because such an important concept is involved. For example, when a person is asked to do something in 'defense of democracy' they are more likely to agree. The concept of democracy has a positive connotation to them because it is linked to a concept that they value. Propagandists sometimes use simple name-calling to draw a vague equivalence between a concept and a person, group, or idea. At other times, they may use "plain folks rhetoric" in order to convince the audience that they, and their ideas, are "of the people." Finally, propaganda often tries to at least implicitly gain the approval of respected and revered social institutions such as church or nation in order to transfer its authority and prestige to the propagandist's program.

Overall, many have pointed out that the most effective propaganda campaigns rely heavily on selective truth-telling, the confusion of means and ends, and the presentation of a simple idyllic vision that glosses over uncomfortable realities.[10] Psychologists Pratkanis and Aronson recommend four strategies for a successful propaganda campaign.[11] The first point is the importance of pre-persuasion. The propagandist should attempt to create a climate in which the message is more likely to be believed. Second is the credibility of the source. He/she should be a likable or authoritative communicator. Third, the message should be focused on simple, achievable goals. Finally, the message should arouse the emotions of the recipient and provide a targeted response.

It is unclear whether technological developments are making propaganda efforts easier or not. On the one hand, advances in communications technologies may be reducing government control over information.[12] Through the internet and satellite television, people need no longer rely solely on their governments for information. On the other hand, technology may make propaganda more effective. For example, it can make the experience of war more superficial and distort the lessons of prior conflict.[13] In addition, one can get overwhelmed with the amount of information on the internet, making it difficult to determine whether a particular source is credible. What is more, there appears to be significant 'virtual Balkanization' in which like-minded individuals form closed communities in which other viewpoints are not sought after.

Whether for scholars or the average person, Jowett and O'Donnell offer a 10 point checklist for analyzing propaganda:[14]

• The ideology and purpose of the propaganda campaign,
• The context in which the campaign occurs (for example, history or the ideological and social mileu),
• Identification of the propagandist,
• The structure of the propaganda organization (for example, identifying the leadership, organizational goals, and the form of media utilized),
• The target audience,
• Media utilization techniques,
• Special techniques to maximize effect (which include creating resonance with the audience, establishing the credibility of the source, using opinion leaders, using face-to-face contact, drawing upon group norms, using rewards and punishment, employing visual symbols of power, language usage, music usage, and arousing emotions),
• Audience reaction to various techniques,
• Counterpropaganda (if present),
• Effects and evaluation.

Psychological Operations (PSYOPs)

PSYOPs are a military tactic that also involves the use of propaganda. Rather than build support amongst one's citizenry, the goal is to demoralize one's opponent and create confusion. Since World War II, most wars have seen the creation of radio stations that broadcast music and news meant to hurt morale of the opposition. Dropping leaflets over enemy lines and even amongst the civilian population of one's opponents is also common. These techniques are designed to promote dissension and defections from enemy combat units as well as emboldening dissident groups within the country. PSYOPs can also provide cover and deception for one's own operations. Finally, PSYOPs may have the added benefit boosting the morale of one's own troops as well as amongst resistance groups behind enemy lines.

Public Diplomacy

More generally, public diplomacy involves the attempt to influence foreign publics without the use of force. The now-defunct U.S. Information Agency defined public diplomacy as "promoting the national interest and the national security of the United States through understanding, informing, and influencing foreign publics and broadening dialogue between American citizens and institutions and their counterparts abroad."[15] The areas of public diplomacy used to influence foreign target audiences are media diplomacy, public information, internal broadcasting, education and cultural programs, and political action. The idea of public diplomacy emerged from the Office of War Information, which existed during WWII. During the early part of the Cold War, a succession of offices within the U.S. Department of State had responsibility for the dissemination of information abroad. During the Eisenhower Administration, an independent agency was created for the purpose. The agency was later abolished by President Carter and its functions folded into the newly created International Communication Agency (ICA) in 1978 (later redesignated US Information Agency, or USIA, in 1982 during the Reagan Administration). In the 1990s, USIA and the Voice of America (VOA) were incorporated back into the State Department. Most recently, the White House established its own Office of Global Communications in 2001 to formulate and coordinate messages to foreign audiences. Other significant agencies include the International Broadcasting Bureau and the National Endowment for Democracy.

One observer has suggested a list of best practices in the conduct of public diplomacy, at least from the perspective of the United States.[16]

• First, the primary goal is policy advocacy, in other words, to ensure that foreign publics understand US policies and motivations. As such, public diplomacy must be incorporated into foreign policy and it should involve coordination amongst a number of government agencies.
• Second, public diplomacy must be rooted in American culture and values.
• Third, the messages conveyed need to be consistent, truthful, and credible.
• Fourth, it is important to tailor messages to a particular audience.
• Fifth, a strategy needs to reach not only to opinion leaders, but also the mass public through national and global media outlets.
• Sixth, there are a number of nonstate actors such as MNCs, the expatriot community, and humanitarian organizations that can serve as partners to help deliver the message accurately.
• Finally, the US needs to recognize public diplomacy is a dialogue and to also listen to sentiment in other countries.

The Internet has become a major tool for information dissemination and interactive communication between the US government and their target populations as well as developing links with civil society actors around the world. Arquilla and Ronfeldt have described the strategy as 'noopolitik' as opposed to state-centered realpolitik . The former involves the use of soft power to shape ideas, values, norms, laws, and ethics.[17]

Cultural and educational programs, such as the Fulbright program, seek to provide a deeper understanding of a country's society, values, institutions and motives for forming the positions it takes. While funding of arts and cultural exchange was a prominent part of the ideological battle between the US and USSR, support has declined since the end of the Cold War.[18]

Propaganda and the War on Terror

The United States' War on Terror is but one of the most recent iterations of the use of propaganda in conflict. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has used fundamentalist discourse dominated by the binaries of good-evil and security-peril as well as appealing to a missionary obligation to spread freedom, while at the same time not broaching dissent.[19] This has had some resonance with segments of the American population. However, in this era of globalization, bad news in Iraq have obstructed the message and it has also been received very differently abroad. The US military has also utilized the practice of embedding journalists, which the British first learned during the Falklands war could be an effective government strategy because it creates sympathy for the troops on the part of the journalist.[20]

Despite gaffs of referring to the War on Terror as a crusade, the administration quickly recognized the importance of shoring up its image around the world, and the Middle East in particular. Within a month of 9/11, Charlotte Beers, a pioneer of branding strategies who had previously led Ogilvy & Mather and J. Walter Thompson, two of the largest advertising firms in the world, was named to the post of Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Beers was later replaced by Karen Hughes. Upon Beers' appointment, Secretary of State Colin Powell described her role in these terms: "We are selling a product. There is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something. We need someone who can rebrand American policy"[21] The administration did just that, undertaking a "brand America" campaign in the Middle East. Amongst Beers' initiatives were a glossy brochure depicting the carnage of 9/11 and the "Shared Values" campaign that consisted of a series of short videos of Muslims describing their lives in the US. The latter portrayed an American egalitarian culture, that the US was wronged and a victim. The videos showed successful Muslims. They tried to enhance their authenticity by showing Muslims doing 'traditional' things. The US made a particularly concerted effort to reach young Arabs. Many argue that the use of public diplomacy can be an important tool to offer desperate youth, particularly in the Arab world, a compelling ideological alternative to extremism.[22] To the present, however, the American propaganda campaign has failed in Iraq on all four of Pratkanis and Aronson's counts.[23] To be effective, some argue for the importance of a greater recognition amongst policymakers and politicians that public diplomacy is a long-term effort. In addition, some have called for a strengthened agency that has independent reporting, an increased budget, as well as greater training.[24] There is also a need for better organization and a better articulation of an overarching strategy in the conduct of public diplomacy.[25]

Political Communication

Propaganda itself is a subcategory of political communication, which encompasses a wide range of communicative behaviors that have political ends. One element encompasses the conduct of an effective election campaign, to disseminate the candidate's message and to counter the message of one's opponents. Governments, too, employ various techniques, including as we have seen propaganda, to build support for policies and stifle dissent. Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model of the media[26] "depicts the media system as having a series of five successive filters through which the "raw material of news" must pass, leaving a "cleansed residue" of what "news is fit to print, marginaliz[ing] dissent, and allow[ing] the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public." In brief paraphrase, these filters are (a) a focus on profitability by an increasingly concentrated industry that has close ties to the government and is in a position by sheer volume to overwhelm dissenting media voices, (b) the dependence of these media organizations on funding through advertising, leading them to favor content likely to appeal to the affluent and making concessions to commercial sponsors, (c) the dependence of journalists who work for the media on information from sources that constitute, collectively, a powerful and prestigious establishment; (d) commercial interests that make the media vulnerable to "flak" and criticism from groups and institutions with the power to generate criticism and protest to which they respond with caution; and, finally, (e) "anticommunism" (or some ideological equivalent) that those who produce content have internalized, thus conjoining them to frame the news in a dichotomous fashion, applying one standard to those on "our" side and a quite different one to "enemies." Most recently, the "war against terrorism" has served as a non-ideological substitute…. The propaganda model assigns to the media system just one major function to which everything else is subordinate. That function is the "manufacture of consent" for government policies that advance the goals of corporations and preserve the capitalist system."[27]

Some argue that evolving communications technologies and advertising and marketing techniques are damaging democratic practice by replacing thoughtful discussion with simplistic soundbites and manipulative messages.[28] Campaigns play on our deepest fears and most irrational hopes with the result being that we have a skewed view of the world. That said, media effects on politics are not uniform around the world. Rather, they are the product of the types of media technologies, the structure of the media market, the legal and regulatory framework, the nature of political institutions, and the characteristics of individual citizens.[29] What is more, others argue, by contrast, that "blaming the messenger" overlooks deep-rooted flaws in the systems of representative democracy that are responsible for the sorry condition of political discussion.[30] There is also much discussion about whether the internet is a positive for American democracy.[31] With respect to often delicate peace processes, the role of the media in the Rwandan genocide has given the news media a tarnished reputation. However, in some instances, the news media has sometimes played a constructive role in sustaining peace efforts.[32]

[1] Lippmann, W. A Preface to Morals . New York: Macmillan, 1929. 281.

[2] Guilday, Peter. "The Sacred Congregation De Propaganda Fide." Catholic Historical Review 6. 480. See also: Jowett, Garth S. and Victoria O'Donnell. Propaganda and Persuasion . 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999. 72-73.

[3] Combs, J.E. and D. Nimmo. The New Propaganda: The Dictatorship of Palaver in Contemporary Politics . New York: Longman, 1993.

[4] Kimble, James J. "Whither Propaganda? Agonism and 'The Engineering of Consent'." Quarterly Journal of Speech 91.2 (May 2005).

[5] Link, Jurgen. "Fanatics, Fundamentalists, Lunatics, and Drug Traffickers: The New Southern Enemy Image." Cultural Critique 19 (Fall 1991): 33-53.

[6] Kimble, 203.

[7] Jowett, Garth S. and Victoria O'Donnell. Propaganda and Persuasion . 4th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006.

[8] For further discussion, see: Center for Media and Democracy. "Propaganda Techniques." < http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Propaganda-techniques> .

[9] Horten, Gerd. Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda During World War II . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.

[10] Cunningham, S.B. The Idea of Propaganda: A Reconstruction . Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.; Ellul, J. "The Ethics of Propaganda: Propaganda, Innocence and Amorality." Communication 6 (1981): 159-175.; Plaisance, Patrick Lee. 2005. "The Propaganda War on Terrorism: An Analysis of the United States' 'Shared Values' Public-Diplomacy Campaign After September 11, 2001." Journal of Mass Media Ethics 20.4 (2005): 250-268.

[11] Pratkanis, Anthony and Elliot Aronson. Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion . Owl Books, 2001.

[12] Deibert, R. "International Plug 'n' Play: Citizen Activism, the Internet and Global Public Policy." International Studies Perspectives 1.3 (2000): 255-272.; Rothkopf, D. "The Disinformation Age." Foreign Policy 114 (1999): 82-96.; Volkmer, I. News in the Global Sphere . Luton: University of Luton Press, 1999.

[13] Hoskins, Andrew. Televising War: From Vietnam to Iraq . London and New York: Continuum, 2004.

[14] Jowett and O'Donnell (2006), 270.

[15] U.S. Information Agency Alumni Association. "What is Public Diplomacy?" 1 Sep 2002. 2 Apr 2003. < http://www.publicdiplomacy.org/1.htm> .

[16] Ross, Christopher. "Pillars of Public Diplomacy." Harvard Review Aug 2003. Available at: < http://www.iwar.org.uk/news-archive/2003/08-21-3.htm> .

[17] Arquilla, J. and D. Ronfeldt. The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward an American Information Strategy . Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1999. w13. < http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR 1033/ MR1033.pdf/MR1033.chap3.pdf>.

[18] Smith, Pamela. "What Is Public Diplomacy?" Address before the Mediterranean Academy of Diplomacy, Malta, 2000. < http://diplo.diplomacy.edu/Books/mdiplomacy-book/smith/p.h.%20smith.htm> .

[19] Domke, David. God Willing? Political Fundamentalism In The White House, The War On Terror And The Echoing Press . London: Pluto Press, 2004.

[20] Knightley, Philip. The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Iraq . London: André Deutsch, 2003.; Miller, David (ed.) Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq . London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2004.

[21] Klein, N. "The Problem is the U.S. Product." Seattle Post-Intelligencer 28 Jan 2003: B5.

[22] Finn, Helena K. "The Case for Cultural Diplomacy: Engaging Foreign Audiences." Foreign Affairs 82.6 (Nov-Dec 2003): 15.

[23] McKay, Floyd. "Propaganda: America's Psychological Warriors." The Seattle Times , 19 Feb 2006. < http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0219-24.htm> .

[24] Johnson, Stephen and Helle Dale. "How to Reinvigorate U.S. Public Diplomacy." The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder 1645 (23 Apr 2003). < http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/loader.cfm?url=/common... .

[25] GAO Report on Public Diplomacy. 2003. < http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d03951.pdf> .

[26] Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media . New York: Pantheon, 2002. Excepts of a previous edition available at < http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufac-Consent-Prop-Model.h... .

[27] Lang, Kurt and Gladys Engel Lang. "Noam Chomsky and the Manufacture of Consent for American Foreign Policy." Political Communication 21.93 (2004): 94.

[28] Bennett, W. Lance and Robert Entman (eds.) 2000. Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy . Cambridge University Press, 2000.; Pratkanis, Anthony and Elliot Aronson. Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion . Owl Books, 2001.

[29] Gunther, Richard and Anthony Mughan (eds.) Democracy and the Media . Cambridge University Press, 2000.; Hallin, Daniel C. and Paolo Mancini. Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics . Cambridge University Press, 2004.

[30] Norris, Pippa. A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Post-Industrial Democracies . Cambridge University Press, 2000.

[31] Bimber, Bruce. Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power . Cambridge University Press, 2003.

[32] Wolfsfeld, Gadi. Media and the Path to Peace . Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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Last updated 08 october 2014, propaganda at home (usa).

This article examines the role and activities of the Committee on Public Information (CPI) in mobilizing American public support for the war. As America’s first wartime propaganda agency, the CPI utilized all major media outlets of the day coupled with a sophisticated targeted audience strategy to sell the war to a divided and skeptical nation. The committee’s efforts were aided by a mostly compliant press; harsh government repression and censorship of dissent; and voluntary cooperation from various pro-war domestic groups.

Table of Contents

• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Committee on Public Information
• 3 Four Minute Men
• 4 Visual Propaganda
• 5 Self-Censorship
• 6 Civic Education
• 7 The CPI’s Legacy
• 8 Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

Introduction ↑.

Looking back at his wartime experience as head of the foreign division of the Committee on Public Information (CPI), journalist-turned-propagandist Will Irwin (1873-1948) referred to the period surrounding the Great War as ushering in “an age of lies.” [1] The extensive CPI wartime propaganda efforts directed at the American public as well as foreign audiences would prove to be the basis for enduring historical controversy. Despite a few defenders of the CPI, [2] most commentary and analysis tend toward a critical assessment of America’s wartime propaganda program during World War I.

In some respects, the overall historical significance of the CPI may in fact be substantially greater than that of subsequent propaganda efforts. The First World War turned out to be a watershed event in the development of modern propaganda. The world’s first experience with total war became wedded with the United States’ first systematic and institutionalized national program of propaganda. In a classic work on propaganda, Harold Lasswell (1902-1978) noted, "the [First] World War led to the discovery of propaganda by both the man in the street and the man in the study." [3]

This essay will describe the organizational structure and activities of the Committee on Public Information and will note the role of private agencies in formulating propaganda messages for the home front. Since a substantial number of private social and civic organizations provided critical support for the war, with many enthusiastically cooperating with the CPI or acting on their own initiative, it is necessary to locate the governmentally directed propaganda campaign within a wider societal context that is linked with a variety of powerful private sources of propaganda. The public-private cooperative enterprise that mobilized the American public during World War I became an important development in facilitating enhanced state penetration into the lives of citizens in democratic societies. [4]

The Committee on Public Information ↑

The Committee on Public Information was created via executive order one week following the American declaration of war. George Creel (1876-1953) , a progressive journalist and long-time Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) supporter, was selected to be the civilian chair of the CPI. The Secretaries of State, War, and Navy rounded out the executive committee membership. The personnel of the CPI consisted of some of the nation’s most prominent progressives and other liberal and socialist reformers. Since many public intellectuals and journalists associated with the Progressive movement saw the war as an opportunity for further reform of society, the ideological composition of the committee helped to shape the CPI’s approach and techniques. For progressive intellectuals and reformers, the CPI could be both an instrument to mobilize the country for war and an educational tool of domestic reform. In this context democracy promotion abroad became extrinsically linked with the democratic reform movement at home.

In addition to the CPI, other federal agencies and departments such as the Treasury and the Food Administration played substantial roles in the campaign to mobilize public opinion. According to one scholar, the propaganda activities of the Food Administration, "at times rivaled the CPI in volume and in its reach into American homes." [5] Furthermore, the national effort was dependent upon considerable voluntary cooperation from state and local authorities. But without question it was the CPI under the leadership of its energetic chair, George Creel, which was the national agency of greatest significance in generating and organizing support for the war. [6]

Organizationally, the CPI consisted of two sections: one domestic and one foreign. The foreign section was the larger of the two and was concerned with directing American propaganda activities overseas where it had established offices in over thirty countries. [7] The domestic section was composed of a variety of specialized divisions to mobilize the home front. The exact number of domestic divisions changed over time as new ones were added and others were consolidated as the need arose. At its peak, one estimate places the total number of CPI employees at 150,000. [8] The title and subtitle of Creel’s own 1920 account of the committee’s activities, How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information That Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe, reveals much about the purpose and goals that underpinned the thinking at the CPI. Creel thought he was not engaged in propaganda, but was merely publicizing the truth. Spreading the "gospel of Americanism" around the world reflected Creel’s and the CPI’s sincere idealism and view that the war was a moral crusade. Paradoxically, this moral certainty would lead President Wilson to warn in June 1917, "woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way." [9]

In his post-war report to Congress, Creel describes the approach adopted by the CPI as follows:

Thus, one of the ways the CPI attempted to influence public opinion was through the spoken word. The Speaking Division and the Division of Four Minute Men both played prominent roles in achieving this task, since a considerable segment of the population was semi-literate or did not read at all. Typically, the Speakers Division recruited prominent national or foreign personalities to tour and speak across the country. In the era before radio, inspirational speakers could attract large audiences and have a significant impact on public opinion.

Four Minute Men ↑

The Division of Four Minute Men is one of the more fascinating innovations in mass propaganda from World War I. The idea for the Four Minute Men originated with a group of Chicago businessmen who hit upon the idea of speaking during intermission in movie theaters as a way to communicate with large audiences concerning war issues. There was a double meaning to the term Four Minute Men. Four minutes was the time made available to a speaker at intermission because that was the amount of time it took to change a movie reel. Additionally, the term minute man evoked the patriotic symbol from the American Revolutionary War. Once the United States entered the war, the Chicago organizers suggested the concept of the Four Minute Men to George Creel, who immediately created a national program under the auspices of the CPI. It is estimated that by war’s end 75,000 Four Minute Men speakers had been recruited; they gave over 755,000 speeches to audiences totaling more than 314,454,000 persons. [11]

Part of the success of the Four Minute Men must also be attributed to the care with which the speakers were recruited and supervised. Each speaker was screened by local members of the community and only those who were thought to possess good public speaking skills were selected. The four-minute time limit was strictly enforced, so as not to alienate theater patrons or theater managers. Finally, even though each speaker was allowed to compose their four-minute talk in their own words, the CPI provided periodic bulletins to suggest specific topics for the Four Minute Men as particular needs arose. These bulletins (forty-six were published in all) were at the “heart” of the Four Minute Men activities by providing centralized guidance to local speakers. [12] Most significantly, the Four Minute Men speakers were local residents speaking to local audiences in their own words, but participating in a nationally coordinated propaganda message campaign. Consequently, the Four Minute Men have been characterized as the "shock troops" of American propaganda. [13]

Visual Propaganda ↑

Some of the country’s leading illustrators were recruited to the Division of Pictorial Publicity to produce war posters and advertisements. This division had been created in part through the efforts of a group of pro-war artists known as the Vigilantes. [14] The primary function of this division was the production of propaganda posters that were to blanket public spaces. With over 300 artists creating designs, this division had an astonishing record both in terms of quality and quantity of the art it produced. [15] Many iconic images such as James Montgomery Flagg’s (1877-1960) "Uncle Sam Wants You" poster were created to spur recruitment, promote food conservation, vilify alleged German atrocities , and sell war bonds. The United States produced more war posters - over 20 million in total - than all of the other nations at war combined. [16]

Even the country’s cartoonists were not beyond the reach of the CPI through its Bureau of Cartoons. In both posters and cartoons , the creators drew upon familiar and comfortable cultural symbols. The nation was often symbolized through the image of Lady Columbia or the Statue of Liberty, while women were portrayed in the traditionally safe roles of mother, nurse, or war victim. [17] Romantic images of war as an adventure and the transformative effect it would have on young boys maturing into men were sentimental themes often used in posters and cartoons.

In addition to the spoken and written word, the CPI sought to utilize film and photography to promote the war. To this end, the CPI created the Division of Films and the Division of Pictures. The CPI promoted exhibitions of war photos and captured German war equipment through its Bureau of War Exhibition and Bureau of State Fair Exhibits. The latter exhibits drew up to 7 million visitors. [18] Although the CPI had a slow start in using films, Creel was eventually able to secure an agreement from the Secretary of War that the CPI would be the sole distribution agency for Signal Corps photographs and motion pictures of the war. This agreement provided the foundation for the CPI’s film and photography activities. The Division of Films produced a weekly newsreel entitled Official War Review and even produced some feature length films later in the war. Two of the more noteworthy feature length films produced by the CPI included Pershing’s Crusaders and America’s Answer . By the end of the war, the Division of Films was one of the largest and most successful divisions within the CPI. [19]

Self-Censorship ↑

A News Division was established to coordinate the government’s release of war-related information. The CPI’s Division of News pioneered the use of the “handout” or news release. Harry O’Higgins (1876-1929) , associate director of the CPI, wrote “The Daily German Lie” press releases from August to November 1918 in an effort to kill rumors that questioned the credibility of CPI propaganda themes. [20] This division also published a daily newspaper, the Official Bulletin , and the War News Digest . Although the CPI did not engage in censorship directly, self-censorship was the common response by the press; the fear of prosecution by the Justice Department under such measures as the Sedition and Espionage Acts, or denial of postal privileges by a zealous Postmaster General always loomed in the background. Voluntary self-censorship was a routine practice in libraries. As the director of an Iowa library bluntly put it, “during the past summer and fall we had a number of pro-German books donated, but I burned them as they came.” [21]

For those members of the public who did not regularly read daily news accounts of the war, a Division of Syndicated Features was created to generate inclusion of war information in the feature sections of Sunday newspapers. A Foreign Language Newspaper Division to oversee the foreign language press was also established by the CPI. In sum, the CPI was quite aggressive in shaping and controlling the content of press coverage of the war. [22]

Civic Education ↑

The CPI had a stable of talented academic writers who made significant contributions to the propaganda program through the Division of Civic and Educational Cooperation. This division was responsible for the famous Red, White and Blue and War Information Series pamphlets. Millions of these pamphlets were distributed at home and around the world. Some 200-300 scholars worked in this division writing books and pamphlets justifying the war. The Division of Civic and Educational Cooperation also published a bi-monthly bulletin designed to promote patriotism among school children. According to the bulletin’s managing editor, the National School Service was sent to public schools throughout the country in an effort to assist teachers in making “every school pupil a messenger for Uncle Sam.” [23] Editors of children’s magazines, also recipients of CPI propaganda, peppered their issues with war-related themes specifically directed at informing children about the benefits of war and how they could assist with the war effort. [24]

The CPI also created the Division of Advertising in order to help the government take advantage of the advertising industry’s skills to develop advertisement copy and utilize space donated from newspapers and magazines. The success of the CPI in forging links with the private advertising industry and facilitating non-governmental sources of propaganda suggests a complex narrative surrounding the totality of America’s propaganda campaign. The Division of Advertising not only serviced the advertising needs of the CPI, but assisted in the campaigns of several agencies, including the Young Men’s Christian Association , Red Cross , the Fuel and Food Administrations, and the Departments of War, Treasury, and Agriculture. The Division of Advertising in collaboration with the Division of Pictorial Publicity was instrumental in arousing nationalistic sentiment among the public in favor of a variety of war related causes, from war loan drives to food and fuel conservation. For obvious reasons, this division was one of the most critical in communicating the CPI’s war messages.

The CPI had specific concerns about generating support for the war among women, immigrants, and labor. Consequently, the CPI set up a Division of Women’s War Work, Division of Work with the Foreign Born, and a Division of Industrial Relations in order to encourage support for the war among these groups. The latter division was later transferred to the Department of Labor, which flooded American factories with pro-war messages. Additionally, the CPI funded the pro-war labor organization, the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy. [25]

President Wilson also personally contributed to the propaganda campaign. As a very talented communicator in his own right, the CPI published and widely distributed many of Wilson’s speeches. The impact of Wilson’s contribution to the propaganda effort was substantial as described below by Harold Lasswell in his pioneering work on the topic:

This summary and overview of the organizational structure and activities of the CPI suggests an extensive and comprehensive effort to propagandize the American public during the First World War. Few, if any, communications media of the day were ignored by George Creel and his staff, nor were any major social groups neglected in the CPI’s focused appeals. Women , farmers, children , workers, ethnic groups, and immigrants were all specifically targeted in a nationally coordinated propaganda campaign.

The CPI’s Legacy ↑

In the short term, the CPI was successful in unifying a nation at war and, in Creel’s words, turning the American people into "one white-hot mass...with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination." [27] But this national unity came with an extravagant price tag. Not only was truth often casually dismissed, but the repression of dissent and hatred of all things German were also casualties of American’s propaganda campaign. [28] Once the propaganda induced fog of war was lifted, all that remained was butchery. And that deception, according to one war critic, was what makes propaganda such a serious matter. [29] The powerful legacy of World War I propaganda haunts us still. One contemporary student of the war notes how the conflict led Americans to fundamentally redefine their relationship with the state. The foundational structures of state power for surveillance and coercion that we live with today were constructed during World War I. [30] President Wilson was not unaware of the heavy price that the CPI’s propaganda would eventually extract. On the voyage to the Paris Peace Conference he confided to Creel that, "It is a great thing you have done, but I am wondering if you have not unconsciously spun a net for me from which there is no escape." [31]

Conclusion ↑

The CPI is historically important because it represents the birthplace of modern American wartime propaganda. While the key objective of the domestic propaganda program was to mobilize and sustain support for the war, there was also little hesitation to silence critics of government policy. Despite their genuine idealism and noble intentions to make the "world safe for democracy," American propagandists during the First World War contributed to the backlash of disillusionment and isolationism that followed.

Robert A. Wells, Thiel College

Section Editor: Edward G. Lengel

• ↑ Irwin, Will: An Age of Lies. How the Propagandist Attacks the Foundation of Public Opinion, in: Sunset 43 (1919), pp. 23-25, 54-56; See also, King, Erika G.: Exposing “the Age of Lies.” The Propaganda Menace as Portrayed by Magazines in the Aftermath of World War I, in: Journal of American Culture 12 (1989), pp. 35-40.
• ↑ George Creel and Edward Bernays were two of the CPI’s most steadfast defenders after the war.
• ↑ Lasswell, Harold D.: Forward, in: Buntz, George (ed.): Allied Propaganda and the Collapse of the German Empire in 1918, Stanford 1938, p. v.
• ↑ Coventry, Michael T.: “Editorials at a Glance.” Cultural Policy, Gender and Modernity in the World War I Bureau of Cartoons, in: Review of Policy Research 24 (2007), p. 99.
• ↑ Ponder, Stephen: Popular Propaganda. The Food Administration in World War I, in: Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 72 (1995), p. 539.
• ↑ Vaughn, Stephen: Holding Fast the Inner Lines. Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information, Chapel Hill 1980; See also, Ross, Stewart Halsey: Propaganda for War. How the United States Was Conditioned to Fight the Great War of 1914-1918, Jefferson, NC 1996.
• ↑ Ford, Guy Stanton: The Committee on Public Information, in: Historical Outlook 11 (1920), p. 99.
• ↑ Brown, John: The Anti-Propaganda Tradition in the United States, issued by Public Diplomacy Alumni Association, online: http://www.publicdiplomacy.org/19.htm (retrieved: 1 May 2013).
• ↑ Quoted in Kennedy, David M.: Over Here. The First World War and American Society, New York 1980, p. 46.
• ↑ Creel, George: Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on Public Information, 1917, 1918, 1919, Washington 1920, p. 47.
• ↑ Cornebise, Alfred: War as Advertised. The Four Minute Men and America’s Crusade, 1917-1918, Philadelphia 1984, p. 154.
• ↑ Ibid, p. 15
• ↑ Ibid, p. 25
• ↑ Kennedy, Over Here 1980, p. 41.
• ↑ Van Schaack, Eric: The Division of Pictorial Publicity in World War I, in: Design Issues 22 (2006), p. 45.
• ↑ Brewer, Susan A.: Why America Fights. Patriotism and Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq, New York 2009, p. 60.
• ↑ Coventry, Editorials at a Glance 2007, pp. 104-109; See also, Shover, Michele J.: Roles and Images of Women in World War I Propaganda, in Politics and Society 5 (1975), pp. 469-486.
• ↑ Vaughn, Holding Fast 1980, p. 32.
• ↑ Ward, Larry Wayne: The Motion Picture Goes to War. The U.S. Government Film Effort during World War I, Ann Arbor, MI 1985, p. 94.
• ↑ Sweeny, Michael S.: Harvey O’Higgins and “The Daily German Lie,” in: American Journalism 23 (2006), p. 9.
• ↑ Quoted in Weigand, Wayne: “An Active Instrument for Propaganda.” The American Public Library During World War I, New York 1989, p. 87.
• ↑ However, not all news organizations simply reproduced CPI propaganda. See Zacher, Dale E.: The Scripps Newspapers Go to War, 1914-1918, Urbana, IL 2008.
• ↑ Quoted in Vaughn, Holding Fast 1980, p. 103.
• ↑ Collins, Ross F.: This is Your Propaganda, Kids. Building a War Myth for World War I Children, in: Journalism History 38 (2012), pp. 13-22; Kingsbury, Celia: For Home and Country. World War I Propaganda on the Home Front, Lincoln 2010, pp. 169-217.
• ↑ Kennedy, Over Here 1980, p. 72.
• ↑ Lasswell, Harold D.: Propaganda Technique in the World War, New York 1927, p. 217.
• ↑ Creel, George: How We Advertised America. The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information That Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe, New York 1920, p. 5.
• ↑ See, for example, Knightley, Phillip: The First Casualty, From the Crimea to Vietnam. The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker, New York 1975; Sonntag, Mark: Fighting Everything German in Texas, 1917-1919, in: Historian 56 (1994), pp. 655-670; McKillen, Elizabeth: Pacifist Brawn and Silk Stocking Militarism. Labor, Gender, and Anti-War Politics, 1914-1918, in: Peace and Change 33 (2008), pp. 388-425.
• ↑ Ponsonby, Arthur: Falsehood in War Time. Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War, New York 1928, p. 26.
• ↑ Capozzola, Christopher: Uncle Sam Wants You. World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen, New York 2008, pp. 209-214.
• ↑ Creel, George: Rebel at Large. Recollections of Fifty Crowded Years, New York 1947, p. 206.
• Brewer, Susan A.: Why America fights. Patriotism and war propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq , Oxford et al. 2011: Oxford University Press.
• Cornebise, Alfred E.: War as advertised. The Four Minute Men and America's crusade, 1917-1918 , Philadelphia 1984: American Philosophical Society.
• Creel, George: How we advertised America. The first telling of the amazing story of the Committee on Public Information that carried the gospel of Americanism to every corner of the globe , New York; London 1920: Harper & Brothers.
• Creel, George: The Creel report. Complete report of the Chairman of the Committee on Public Information, 1917-1918-1919 , New York 1972: Da Capo Press.
• Kennedy, David M.: Over here. The First World War and American society , New York 1980: Oxford University Press.
• Kingsbury, Celia Malone: For home and country. World War I propaganda on the home front , Lincoln 2010: University of Nebraska Press.
• Knightley, Phillip: The first casualty. From the Crimea to Vietnam. The war correspondent as hero, propagandist, and myth maker , New York 1975: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
• Lasswell, Harold D.: Propaganda technique in the World War , New York 1927: Kegan Paul.
• Ponsonby, Arthur Ponsonby: Falsehood in wartime. Propaganda lies of the First World War , Costa Mesa 1991: Institute for Historical Review.
• Ross, Stewart Halsey: Propaganda for war. How the United States was conditioned to fight the Great War of 1914-1918 , Jefferson 1996: McFarland.
• Vaughn, Stephen: Holding fast the inner lines. Democracy, nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information , Chapel Hill 1980: University of North Carolina Press.
• Ward, Larry Wayne: The motion picture goes to war. The U.S. government film effort during World War I , Ann Arbor 1985: UMI Research Press.
• Wiegand, Wayne A.: An active instrument for propaganda. The American public library during World War I , New York 1989: Greenwood Press.

Wells, Robert A.: Propaganda at Home (USA) , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI : 10.15463/ie1418.10360 .

This text is licensed under: CC by-NC-ND 3.0 Germany - Attribution, Non-commercial, No Derivative Works.

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Propaganda During World War II Essay

The Second World War was a complicated time for both the general public and the authorities since while the former worried for their safety, family, and homeland, the latter needed to maintain the national spirit and support the soldiers at the front. For such purposes, posters were implemented involving colorful images with strong words. However, while some might think that posters from the 20th century served as inspiration or plea, they were aimed to influence people psychologically.

The first propaganda poster Every minute counts! represents the influence of lost time on the battlefield failures of their soldiers. The technique used in this poster involves fear, through which the authorities strive to scare individuals working at manufacturing factories, urging them to work harder. In this sense, the poster incorporates statistics and figures, implying that every ten minutes that are lost will lead to less ammunition and weaponry, which will, in turn, postpone the victory.

Another poster, Air defense is home defense uses the technique of connecting with the audience. In their attempt to recruit as many individuals into air defense, the authorities aim to incorporate a heart-warming illustration of a family that looks in the sky and admires the national military plane. In a way, stereotypes in posters were common during wartime (Brewer 26). Here, the objective is to emphasize the pride in national defense and show the general public endorsement of the air forces.

The last poster, England expects, incorporates the technique of calling to action via bright colors, illustration of the national flag, and words. The phrase national service is written in bold red color that is contrasted by the dark blue background, which is used to catch the attention of the audience. Moreover, the number of people illustrated in the poster serves to show the national spirit, urging others to join the forces.

Hence, while some individuals might mistakenly believe that 20th-century posters acted as calls to action or acts of inspiration, their true purpose was to affect the audience psychologically. Every minute counts! is a propaganda poster that employs the technique of fear to illustrate the impact of wasted time on their soldiers’ failures on the battlefield. Another poster, Air defense is home defense , employs the audience-connection strategy. The final poster, England expects , employs the strategy of urging action via the use of bold colors, an image of the national flag, and text.

Brewer, Susan A. To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States During World War II . Cornell University Press, 2019.

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IvyPanda . 2023. "Propaganda During World War II." September 21, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/propaganda-during-world-war-ii/.

1. IvyPanda . "Propaganda During World War II." September 21, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/propaganda-during-world-war-ii/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Propaganda During World War II." September 21, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/propaganda-during-world-war-ii/.

• World War II Propaganda Posters in America
• The Bonds or Bondage World War II Poster Analysis
• The World War II Propaganda Techniques
• "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet Jacobs: Urging Abolitionism Movements
• World War II Propaganda and Its Effects
• Anti-Japanese Propaganda During World War II
• "And Our Flag Was Still There" by B. Kingsolver
• American Homefront During World War II
• Media Propaganda: Poster Advertisement
• War on Terror: Propaganda and Freedom of the Press in the US
• The Office of Strategic Services Operational Groups in World War II
• Warfare: Ethical and Moral Issues
• The Result Japan’s Fall in World War II
• The Role of Propaganda During World War II
• The Effectiveness of WWII Bombing Campaigns

JONATHAN TURLEY

Npr editor blasts the public-funded company for political bias and activism.

Beliner details how NPR, like many media outlets, became openly activist after the election of Donald Trump to the point that the company now employs 87 registered Democrats in editorial positions but not a single Republican in its Washington, DC, headquarters.

Berliner says that he was rebuffed in seeking a modicum of balance in the coverage about the coronavirus “lab leak theory,” the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the 2016 Russia hoax.

As discussed on this blog, NPR repeated false stories like the claims from the Lafayette Park riot . Berliner gives an account that is strikingly familiar for many of us who have raised the purging of conservative or libertarian voices from our faculties in higher education:

“So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star. In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive told me that she had been “skewered” for bringing up diversity of thought   when she arrived at NPR. So, she said, “I want to be careful how we discuss this publicly.” For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our coverage has gone off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news leaders, sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. On March 10, 2022, I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word  gay . I pushed to set the record straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate— Latinx . On March 31, 2022, I was invited to a managers’ meeting to present my observations”

Former NPR analyst Juan Williams stated in an interview this week that, as a strong liberal voice (now at Fox), he found the same bias at NPR. Williams was fired by NPR as this shift seemed to go into high gear toward greater intolerance for opposing views.

Despite these criticisms, NPR has doubled down on its activism. For example, when it came time to select a new CEO, NPR could have tacked to the center to address the growing criticism. Instead, the new CEO became instant news over social media postings that she deleted before the recent announcement of her selection. Katherine Maher is the former CEO of Wikipedia and sought to remove controversial postings on subjects ranging from looters to Trump. Those deleted postings included a 2018 declaration that “Donald Trump is a racist” and a variety of race-based commentary. They also included a statement that appeared to excuse looting.

NPR has abandoned core policies on neutrality as its newsroom has become more activist and strident. For example, NPR  declared  that it would allow employees to participate in political protests when the editors believe the causes advance the “freedom and dignity of human beings.”

The rule itself shows how impressionistic and unprofessional media has become in the woke era. NPR does not try to define what causes constitute advocacy for the “freedom and dignity of human beings.” How about climate change and environmental protection? Would it be prohibited to protest for a forest but okay if it is framed as “environmental justice”?

NPR seems to intentionally keep such questions vague while only citing such good causes as Black Lives Matter and gay rights:

“Is it OK to march in a demonstration and say, ‘Black lives matter’? What about a Pride parade? In theory, the answer today is, “Yes.” But in practice, NPR journalists will have to discuss specific decisions with their bosses, who in turn will have to ask a lot of questions.”

So the editors will have the power to choose between acceptable and unacceptable causes.

The bias seemed to snowball into a type of willful blindness in the coverage of the outlet, which is supported by federal funds.

After the New York Post first reported on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020, NPR declared that it would not cover the story. It actually issued a statement that seemed to proudly refuse to pursue the story, which was found to be legitimate:

“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

Berliner’s account is reminiscent of the recent disclosures from within the New York Times. Former editors have described that same open intolerance for opposing views and a refusal to balance coverage.

Former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet has finally spoken publicly about his role in one of the most disgraceful chapters in American journalism:  the Times’ cringing apology for running a 2020 column by Sen. Tom Cotton . Bennet said publisher AG Sulzberger “set me on fire and threw me in the garbage” to appease the mob.

Former New York Times editor Adam Rubenstein  also wrote a lengthy essay at The Atlantic that pulled back the curtain on the newspaper and its alleged bias in its coverage. The essay follows similar pieces from former editors and writers that range from Bari Weiss to his former colleague James Bennet . The essay describes a similar work environment where even his passing reference to liking Chick-Fil-A sandwiches led to a condemnation of shocked colleagues.

None of this is likely to change the culture at NPR any more than such discussions have changed faculties in higher education. Raising the virtual elimination of conservative or Republican voices on faculties is met by the same forced expressions of disbelief. While mild concern is expressed, it is often over the “perception” of those of us who view universities as intolerant or orthodox.

Of course, there remains the question of why the public should give huge amounts of money to a media outlet that is so politically biased. News outlets have every right to pursue such political agendas, but none but NPR claim public support, including from half of the country that embraces the viewpoints that it routinely omits from its airways.

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Trump’s Pivot On Abortion

Donald Trump is pragmatic in determining abortion is a loser at the ballot box. Therefore Trump has good cause to worry that state supreme court decisions in Florida and Arizona could alter the election.

Florida’s court ruled Monday that a 6 week abortion ban is constitutional. Yet the court also gave the go-ahead to a ballot initiative guaranteeing abortion in the state constitution.

These conflicting decisions are a witche’s brew for November from a Republican standpoint. If Republican women vote for the ballot initiative, will they still support Republican candidates?

Then Wednesday the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that anti-abortion legislation from the 1860’s can properly take effect.

This was too much for Donald Trump. Florida and Arizona are now hostage to women’s votes. Angry women in those two states could threaten Republicans!

So now Trump is telling Republicans to shut up on abortion. He told Lindsay Graham to shut-up by way of Truth Social. And word went out to Arizona where Kari Lake was informed.

Trump’s triangulation on this issue is sure to be noticed by Christian Conservatives. They might finally ask themselves, after all these years, if Trump was ‘ever’ serious with regards to abortion.

This moment of reflection coincides with Trump’s hush money trial in NYC now scheduled for next week. Christian Conservatives will hear Trump was seeing a porno star at the time Melania gave birth to Barron.

Will Christian Conservatives blow off this infidelity at a time when Trump is dodging abortion? Or might they now see Trump as debauched?

Trump has not pivoted.

Radical Leftists like you are not aware Trump has always been a Democrat. Its just that by 2010 the radical left took over the Democrat Party, and People like President Trump found their beliefs meant they were centrist Republicans

Sorry to say but npr has shown a bias since the 60s

NPR, National Panhandler Radio, is Left-biased propaganda . Like a sink bug, don’t feed it—eradicate it!

For those interested in what might turn out to be the imminent onset of World War III, RT — Russia Today (which Turley troll UpstateFarmer has never heard of — LOL)— is reporting the likelihood of an Iranian response to Israel having killed a couple of Iranian generals at the Iranian Consulate in Syria:

“Iran strike on Israel ‘imminent’ – media” https://www.rt.com/news/595715-iran-israel-imminent-strike/

This is apparently information originating at Bloomberg News, but since one needs a paid account to read Bloomberg News (because lord knows Michael Bloomberg doesn’t already have enough money), the next best thing is RT’s FREE reporting of what Bloomberg is reporting.

Why is our government made up of 100% a’h0les? Couldn’t we get maybe 5% good people? But no, with the Biden administration it’s wall to wall a’h0les. As libs like to say, no exceptions.

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1778112068622721172

The Interview With Uri Berliner

Berliner gave an interview yesterday to The Free Press. And ‘yes’, he is highly critical of NPR. It sounds as though more than a few Bernie Bros are working there. But this one paragraph below underlines a fundamental problem the media has in covering Donald Trump. ***

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.

https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust …………………………………………

KEY PASSAGE FROM ABOVE:

“But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president.. ***

How does mainstream media cover a president who routinely utters falsehoods and has no regard for facts or science?

Trump also has a habit of ‘kidding around’ at inappropriate moments. Like that press conference where he wondered out loud if injecting bleach might prevent Covid.

Then Trump doubles-down on falsehoods when any rational president would simply admit the error. Like that time he mistakenly warned that a hurricane would hit Alabama. Meteorologists at the National Weather Bureau were actually cautioned by political appointees ‘not’ to contradict.

Trump is notoriously thin-skinned and obsessed with retribution. That too becomes a problem for journalists. How can they not take notice when Trump openly threatens people on social media?

Until Donald Trump, almost every U.S. President had either been Vice President, Senator, Governor or General. And in those positions, future presidents learned how to measure their words for public consumption.

But Donald Trump’s last job before the presidency had been reality TV star. In that position, Trump routinely uttered rash statements to create vital tension. That’s what drives reality shows: tension, drama and conflict.

But tension, drama and conflict are totally undesirable with regards to the presidency. A man who keeps churning trouble out of habit is ‘last’ person the country needs as Commandeer In Chief.

Therefore mainstream has no idea how to cover a president like Trump without sounding biased against him. Because reporting Trump, as he really is, sounds naturally terrible.

REGARDING ABOVE:

“ How does mainstream media cover a president who routinely utters falsehoods and has no regard for facts or science?”

the same way you report on every president. They all lie, distract, gaslight. All politicians do.

It’s the job of reporters to investigate and expose those lies or half-truths, not just to publish the press releases or quotes that public figures hand out.

That is a worthy and honorable profession, if done well.

But you’re struggling with reporting “Trump, as he really is” because he “sounds naturally terrible” that shows that you’re not reporting, you’re FEELING.

Are you going to tell me Biden doesn’t sound “naturally terrible?” I don’t know how old you are, but I’ve been watching this guy for decades. When he was younger (and better able to communicate), he was arrogant and often rude. As full of himself as Trump. Bidden’s sounded “naturally terrible” many times!

Yet no one’s wringing their hands over him—even now, when half the words he speaks are slurred. .

^^Paid DNC troll. Ignore.

NPR won’t tell you that AA support for Trump is surging. Not only are they sick of Bidenomics, open borders and out-of-control crime, this is heartwarming – “I don’t care what the media tells you, we support you”:

https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1778114112444309718

No wonder the far-right is mad at npr, if they point out the lies from the right, npr gets accused of being unfair to the liars.

The only people mad at NPR is NPR staff for one of their own, rightfully, calling them out for their lies, overt bias, wokeism and slanted reporting. Others who might be mad at NPR, is the 10% of those employees who got laid off. Why did they get laid off? Plunging donations from their listeners and corporate sponsorship. The rest of us who used to be NPR listeners quit listening for their lies, overt bias, wokeism and slanted reporting.

You must be really mad that RT tv is off the air.

Fishstick, I have no idea who or what RT TV is. As I have stated on more than a few occasions on the good professor’s blog, I do not watch TV. I READ, independent media or watch independent media like Sharyl Attkisson’s Full Measure. Or Glenn Greenwald’s System Update. Matt Taibbi’s podcasts. Or Honestly with Bari Weiss. Your lame attempts to associate me with whatever RT TV is, fails once again. As usual.

“… I have no idea who or what RT TV is.”

LOL — Nice confession of ignorance, Captain “Well Said.” I’m quite certain that Sharyl Attkisson, Glenn Greewald, Matt Taibbi, AND Bari Weiss — whom you CLAIM to follow — know who/what RT is and have mentioned RT many times.

RT — Russia Today — has broken some pretty big stories over the years, including the May 20, 2013, article involving the Hillary Clinton Benghazi scandal involving emails between Hillary and her sleazy associate, Sidney Blumentthal:

“Hillary Clinton’s ‘hacked’ Benghazi emails: FULL RELEASE” https://www.rt.com/usa/complete-emails-guccifer-clinton-554/

Note the date of that article — YEARS before the US media caught on to what Hillary was and wasn’t doing.

I am mad about that. I liked RT TV. One of the few places you could hear honest news.

Agreed. RT was actually better than much of our American ‘fake news’ propaganda press.

Thank you FW (F*ckWad???) for reminding me about RT TV! They may not be on the air, but they are still on the net!

Andrey Sushentsov: Americans can’t tell us who blew up Nord Stream, but they solved the Moscow terror attack case in 15 minutes?

The United States of America is trying to control and manipulate the media and political interpretation of the tragic terrorist attack in Moscow last month. In the Western information space, Washington is forming a narrative to try to distract attention from its proxy, Ukraine.

At certain points, ISIS was a useful tool for the Americans in Syria. There is published evidence suggesting that the US operated in parallel with the terrorist group against the Syrian government. The fact that Washington was ready to offer a coherent version of events from the first minutes after the attack in Moscow is in itself extremely paradoxical.

Consider this. The Americans have spent decades trying to determine the cause of crimes on their own soil, such as the assassinations of leading US political figures. They lack the resources, attention and enthusiasm to determine who was behind the sabotage of pan-European energy infrastructure: the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

However, within 15 minutes, they provided “accurate” information about who organized the terrorist attack in Moscow.

https://www.rt.com/russia/595712-sushentsov-interpretation-tragedy-crocus/

Floyd, it’s amusing to see American commies channeling Joe McCarthy, no?

Fishy de facto refers to the American Founders as “far-right.”

Everything the Founders established was conservative.

Nothing the Founders conceived and implemented was liberal.

Karl Marx conjured the Communist Manifesto 59 years after the Constitution precisely because Karl Marx opposed the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Fishy de facto possess a “far-left,” aka communist, perspective.

America, by Constitution, is an extremely conservative, restricted-vote republic, and distinctly not a one man, one vote democracy, which constitutes the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Fishy is a direct and mortal enemy of the American thesis of Freedom and Self-Reliance, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, actual Americans, and America.

Turley has absolutely nothing to say about Fox paying $800,000,000 in damages to Dominion Voting Systems and admitting in court documents that they KNOWINGLY lied about the election being rigged.

“We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false,” the [Fox] statement said.

Not just simple bias by Fox. They outright lied and paid the price.

You can read all about it here: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/18/1170339114/fox-news-settles-blockbuster-defamation-lawsuit-with-dominion-voting-systems

Hannity also admitted in his sworn deposition that he lied about the election being rigged.

“Fox News host Sean Hannity admitted under oath that he “did not believe” for “one second” there was mass voter fraud in the election.”

Read all about it here: https://thehill.com/homenews/3785645-sean-hannity-admits-in-deposition-he-didnt-believe-trump-voter-fraud-claims/

AMERICA MUST BE DONE WITH NPR

National Public Radio (NPR) is a direct and mortal enemy of the American thesis of Freedom and Self-Reliance, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, actual Americans, and America. 

NPR is a sham.

NPR is distinctly not any form or rendition of a patriotic NATIONAL radio of America. 

NPR has no relationship to the American thesis of Freedom and Self-Reliance. 

NPR falsely exists under and deleteriously promotes the principles of the Communist Manifesto. 

Taxpayer funding for NPR is counterintuitive, preposterous, seditious, and unconstitutional. 

Congress has the power to tax ONLY for debt, defense, and general Welfare (i.e. security and basic infrastructure).

Congress has no power to tax for, fund, operate, or function as a free market enterprise or any aspect or facet of the free market free press.

Governmental broadcasting and publication is brainwashing, propaganda, and indoctrination used with great effect in communist countries, and, through NPR, in America.

Congress has the power to regulate ONLY the value of money, commerce among the States to preclude bias by one over another, and land and naval Forces. 

Period.  Full Stop.  Read it.

The Communications Act of 1934 and the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 were and remain flagrantly unconstitutional, enjoying no legal or constitutional basis while abridging and denying the 1st Amendment freedom of the press.

NPR must have been immediately struck down by the judicial branch, with emphasis on the Supreme Court, five decades ago, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) earlier.

To the absent, subjective, partial, and biased communist Supreme Court, READ IT; you traitors are “adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort,” per Article 3, Section 3.   _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Article 1, Section 8

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

To establish Post Offices and post Roads;

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;—And

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

Ahh bias at a news organization, who woulda thought.

Meanwhile, Another close trump aid bites the dust. Ahh can you image that, someone who worked for trump is a convicted perjury. https://www.alternet.org/allen-weisselberg-jail-trump/

Is Fani Willis one of Trump’s associates?

And Benedict Arnold worked for George Washington, prior to his failure of fealty and sub-rosa duplicity.

I can’t wait for the chickens coming home to roost. You lawfare maggots will rot in hell with your chicom owners.

It should not be difficult for anyone to report the news, including some explanation of the positions on either side of an issue, in an unbiased manner. It becoming less of a conservative vs. liberal matter, more of whether or not to allow Americans to have enough information to form their own opinions or, in accordance with the founding fathers, allow more information to counter “misinformation.” Having conducted a number of investigations to determine how Americans communicate with each other and form opinions about political matters, Adam Schiff is definitely in the camp that believes that information should be carefully controlled by a cabal of privileged “disinformation experts,” the “beautiful people” with intelligence agency backgrounds.

The opaque, black hole nobody in journalism wants to discuss is news selection. There are no standards for how a news org selects what deserves to be covered and what ignored. Nothing is ever written down in an attempt to standardize or improve how news is prioritized. All we have a are lame aphorisms (“if it bleeds, it leads”).

There was a time when network TV news was a cost-center, and newspapers were supported by local advertising, news selection was a balanced mixture of “human interest”, crime, politics, and good-news stories, with opinion pieces clearly marked as such. It’s always been the case that there is simply way too much going on to give press coverage to — and editors, producers and execs with their teams tossed around priorities for coverage, and made the calls. Somewhere in that mix was the notion of serving the public interest — providing info that would be helpful to know and not throwaway infotainment.

All that changed with privatization of media and profit-centered news orgs. Instant audience metrics came not too long after that, which laid bare the base instincts of the audience toward instant gratification and stimulus-accretion (yep, as in an addict’s need for greater dosage over time). This lead to the current news format of alarmist sensationalism — tricking the audience into thinking their world is on the verge of collapse in order to keep their attention glued. Then, came social media, anyone-can-publish, Twitter, and fracture of the audience into liberal and conservative info-bubbles.

Under this tribalistic media cleavage, news relevance devolves into 1) that which makes the opposition look bad including grievances (many speculative) about what “they” did to “us”, and 2) that which makes “us” look good.

Only when the audience grows sick of being pandered to in this manner, and abandons the alarmist-sensationalism format and its purveyors, will things change for the better. The audience holds the power to discipline media journalism, but only after each news consumer becomes a standards-setting body guided by conscious choice, and much less a creature of consumption habit.

Well said. The “disinformation experts” are way more dangerous than the disinformation they claim to be worried about.

Whether or not NPR receives funding from the government is irrelevant. The only standards for a news organization are to tell the truth.

The truth is that Criminal Defendant Trump and his Republican minions are a clear and present danger to the Republic and indeed to democracy. They provably spread Russian propaganda and side with our enemies. Just today it was reported that Republican Rep. Ken Buck revealed that many of his republican colleagues privately refer to Marjorie Taylor Greene as “Moscow Marjorie”.

This is the truth. This is what NPR reports. Compare this with the lies and propaganda spewing out of Fox.

The truth matters, and all news organizations have an obligation to report it regardless of their source of funding.

^^ Paid DNC troll. Ignore.

What was posted that is not true?

Can you trust trump and anything he says? trumps long time accountant is heading to jail for perjury.

Can you trust anything Biden says? Oh wait, let me rephrase that: can you trust anything Biden slurs?

As RFK Jr. said, Biden is a bigger threat to “democracy” than Trump.

Edwardmahl, Well said. No other president has weaponized government agencies to prosecute their political opponents more than the Biden admin.

To Anonymous:

Are Democrats perfect?

Is there never anything negative to say about any Democrat?

You miss the point: it’s fine to report on Marjorie Taylor Greene, as long as you cover the hatred and garbage spewed by Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Corrie Bush, AOC, et al

Seth Goldstein

Whom you referring to when you say, “OUR ENEMIES THE RUSSIANS”

They’re not MY enemies. I am a nobody out here in flyover land, a native born white male peasant nobody.

My enemies mostly live in 3 locations: Hollywood, DC, and Manhattan.

And no they’re not POOOTIN or the dreaded Chinese SEE SEE PEE

So who’s the boogeyman now, that old Soros is nearing his exit?

I think Larry Fink is probably a good picl. He is an ANTITRUST LAW VIOLATING RACKETEER. LOCK HIM UP!

The donor class. The plutocracy. As a group. That’s it. The exceptions prove the rule.

How are your Truth Social shares doing?

He’s probably buying more. I mean it’s a bargain right? And besides, trump needs the money to pay his lawyers, so they can get lawyers, to keep all his followers, and lawyers, out of jail.

Maybe you should leave your enemies behind and move to Russia to join your friends.

By “white male,” you mean American, just as the American Founders meant American when they employed the phrase “…free white person…” within the year of the adoption of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.  __________________________________

Naturalization Acts of 1790, 1795, 1798, and 1802

United States Congress, “An act to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” March 26, 1790

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof…

Rep. Ken Buck revealed that many of his republican

The only rigorous process we have for getting to the truth is legally in Courts of Law, with adversarial conflict, strict rules of evidence, a neutral Judge forcing a timetable, punishment for perjury, and a Jury of peers as the ultimate deciders-of-fact. This system took centuries to evolve, and yes, there were many failures at justice, but this system is the best it’s ever been (despite what crybaby Trump wants you to believe).

The legal process provides truth-finding, conflict-resolution and closure in a manner that is impossible with the lesser tools of journalism and the “court of public opinion”. In that latter venue, people can lie and cover-up, and cleverness in crafting false narratives is the coin of the realm. Example: How Tony Blinken and Mike Morrell chose to cover-up Hunter’s laptop in the last 3 weeks of the 2020 campaign.

We should be expanding the ability to challenge Public Frauds, especially those waged for political advantage, through Civil torts, the same way defamation can be challenged, and the truth forced upon deceitful infowarriors.

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Propaganda in War

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House intelligence chair says Republicans are ‘absolutely’ repeating Russian propaganda

Mike Turner, the Ohio Republican, echoes a similar claim made recently by another rightwing American lawmaker

Mike Turner, the chairperson of the US House intelligence committee, says some of his fellow Republicans are “absolutely” repeating Russian propaganda on the chamber floor, echoing a similar claim made recently by another rightwing American lawmaker.

“It is absolutely true we see, directly coming from Russia, attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” the Ohio congressman told CNN’s State of the Union show.

Turner maintained that one high-profile instance of such misinformation centered on cases where federal lawmakers have sought to portray Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a war between Nato and Vladimir Putin’s forces.

“Of course it is not,” Turner said. “To the extent that this propaganda takes hold, it makes it more difficult for us to really see this as an authoritarian versus democracy battle.”

Turner has openly advocated for continuing to provide US aid to Ukraine in its efforts to fend off Russia’s invasion. His comments Sunday came days after Michael McCaul, chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, told Puck News that misinformation in favor of Russian interests had found a foothold among his fellow Republicans.

“Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base,” McCaul said to Puck.

Both Turner and McCaul in their respective interviews suggested that pro-Putin propaganda was as hostile to the US’s position on the world stage as the threats posed by the regimes of Xi Jinping, China’s president, and Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader.

Though Turner did not single out any members of Congress or his party Sunday, his remarks came after Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia representative, recently filed a motion to oust Mike Johnson from his role as House speaker if the Louisiana Republican moved forward with a Ukraine aid bill.

She was also upset that he relied on Democratic aid to pass a $1.2tn spending bill aimed at avoiding a federal government shutdown.

The US Senate in February authorized a $95bn foreign aid bill, which included assistance for Ukraine. But Johnson has not brought the package for a vote in the House. And in turn Greene as of Monday had not forced a vote on her motion calling for Johnson’s removal.

Turner on Sunday expressed his belief that Johnson was not at “any risk” of having the speaker’s gavel wrested from him by what he called members of the “chaos caucus … who are seeking attention for themselves and trying to stop all of the important work in Congress”.

A member of Congress since 2003, Turner advanced from a Republican primary in March and is seeking another term in a November general election that is not among those the Cook Political Report considers to be competitive.

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Top Republican warns pro-Russia messages are echoed ‘on the House floor’

The latest remarks come after another gop member said russian propaganda has ‘infected’ the republican base.

Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said Sunday that it was “absolutely true” that some Republican members of Congress were repeating Russian propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine instigated by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Turner did not specify which members he was referring to, but he said he agreed with House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), who said in an interview with Puck News last week that Russian propaganda had “infected a good chunk of my party’s base” and suggested that conservative media was to blame.

When asked on Sunday, Turner said he agreed with McCaul’s sentiments.

“We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages — some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” Turner said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The pro-Russia messaging, Turner said, has made it harder for Ukraine’s supporters in the GOP to frame the conflict as “an authoritarian-versus-democracy battle.” “Ukraine needs our help and assistance now, and this is a very critical time for the U.S. Congress to step up and provide that aid,” Turner added.

Billions of dollars in badly needed military funding for Ukraine has stalled in Congress for months, amid growing opposition from Republicans, and particular vehemence from the GOP’s right flank. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has proposed forging a “peace treaty with Russia” in lieu of supporting Ukraine, has vowed to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) should he move forward with a vote on an aid package.

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in December traveled to Washington to try to secure a breakthrough for additional U.S. military aid, Greene said she was opposed.

Greene wrote on X , “Why doesn’t anyone in Washington talk about a peace treaty with Russia?? A deal with Putin promising he will not continue any further invasions. Answer: Washington wants war, not peace.”

U.S. allies and NATO members are also growing increasingly worried about future Russian aggression. The Washington Post reported this weekend that if Donald Trump wins the November election, he is proposing to push Ukraine to cede wide swaths of its territory to Russia, thus expanding the reach of Putin’s dictatorship.

Still, some lawmakers are more optimistic about getting some type of deal passed. Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.), an outspoken Republican supporter of Ukraine aid, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he believed Johnson will prioritize passing supplemental security assistance for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan after Congress returns on Tuesday from a two-week recess.

“I believe he’s fully committed to bringing it up to the floor immediately” after addressing the reauthorization of a contentious national security surveillance program when Congress returns to work, Hill said.

The Senate earlier this year approved a $95.3 billion funding package. Many senators have echoed the White House’s warnings that without a fresh infusion of weapons from the United States, Ukraine risks ceding its war to Russia.

But Johnson, amid fierce opposition from his far-right flank, has so far refused to bring the Senate package to a vote on the House floor.

Hill, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, hinted Sunday that Johnson would probably introduce a version of the supplemental national security package that includes an additional provision to redirect certain frozen Russian assets toward paying for Ukraine’s reconstruction.

However, any changes to the legislation in the House would necessitate significant further delays to the provision of aid, by forcing the chambers to reconcile and approve the differences. But Hill said he believed there is widespread bipartisan support for the new provision, known as the REPO Act.

What to know about Ukraine’s counteroffensive

The latest: The Ukrainian military has launched a long-anticipated counteroffensive against occupying Russian forces , opening a crucial phase in the war aimed at restoring Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty and preserving Western support in its fight against Moscow.

The fight: Ukrainian troops have intensified their attacks on the front line in the southeast region, according to multiple individuals in the country’s armed forces, in a significant push toward Russian-occupied territory.

The front line: The Washington Post has mapped out the 600-mile front line between Ukrainian and Russian forces .

How you can help: Here are ways those in the United States can support the Ukrainian people as well as what people around the world have been donating.

Read our full coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war . Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for updates and exclusive video .

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Everyone Wants to Seize Russia’s Money. It’s a Terrible Idea.

By Christopher Caldwell

Mr. Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”

The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, has brought a glimmer of hope to supporters of the Ukrainian war effort. He suggested to Fox News on March 31 that he would try to rally his divided party behind the REPO Act . That piece of legislation would allow President Biden, working with European allies, to seize Russian currency reserves frozen in the West and use them to aid Ukraine.

Grabbing these reserves would be politically convenient. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the United States and its allies have thrown more than a quarter-trillion dollars into the war, to little ultimate effect. Ukraine has lately suffered a string of battlefield defeats. Prolonging the war is a project that Americans of all political leanings have been steadily less willing to fund through taxes.

Mr. Johnson backs Ukraine’s war effort and sees supporting it as a responsibility of American leadership. But his caucus — more in tune with the Republican voter base — has stymied him. The REPO Act might offer both Mr. Johnson and Mr. Biden a way to duck controversy.

Thus far, the idea of supplying Ukraine through a spending bill has brought scorn from congressional Republicans who wonder whether Americans’ taxes wouldn’t be better spent on defending the U.S.-Mexico border. The REPO Act, by contrast, could make “Russia foot the bill for its own aggression,” as a group of Brookings Institution scholars puts it . Mr. Johnson calls it “pure poetry.” It is a tempting idea.

But it is a bad one. In any free country there is a constitutional wariness of allowing the government to do anything without levying taxes, for good reason. Taxes and accountability go together. Generally, if citizens aren’t paying for a government program through taxes, they are paying for it in some less straightforward way — by taking on debt, for instance, or permitting an outsize governmental role for some corporation or other private interest.

The REPO Act carries additional risks. The very act of seizing Russian assets would pose dangers to the U.S. economy, because other countries, not just Russia, would view it as an act of brigandage. This could weaken the dollar’s status as the main global reserve currency.

The dollar is probably the most valuable strategic asset the United States has. We exercise a degree of control over the world economy because the world, for trading purposes, allows its transactions to pass through our currency. This leaves us with cheaper transaction costs and lighter financial burdens. It gives us leeway to run up debt ($34 trillion of it so far) that other countries lack.

If Russia, China and other diplomatic rivals were to decide that their dollar assets were vulnerable and that they could no longer trust the dollar as a means of exchange, we would feel the pain of that $34 trillion in debt in a way that we don’t now. Retaining the advantages of a reserve currency depends on our behaving as a trustworthy and neutral custodian of others’ assets. If we start stealing people’s money, that could change.

At the start of the war, Russia had about $600 billion in reserves. That means securities denominated in euros, dollars, British pounds, yen and various other stable, convertible currencies, along with gold. In normal times, Russia, like other countries, holds those currencies to facilitate trade and stabilize its own currency. Little of that money — a few billion dollars — is in the United States. Most talk of seizing Russian assets concerns the roughly $300 billion held in Europe, the bulk of it at a depository in Belgium called Euroclear.

Although Europeans regulate this money, they have mostly followed America’s lead on diplomatic and strategic matters since the start of the war. Individual European countries, above all Germany, have urged caution before laying hands on Russia’s reserves, fearing that such a move would jeopardize the euro’s status as a (lesser) reserve currency. The REPO Act could goad them to act more aggressively.

The European Union has proposed a compromise between leaving the money alone and seizing it all. It has asked Euroclear to hold in separate accounts the profits generated by its Russian assets. These profits could then be taxed at a high rate and the proceeds delivered to Ukraine — an accounting maneuver expected to yield about $3 billion a year.

Other Europeans have proposed a more reckless course. They argue that Russia’s hundreds of billions of dollars should be used as collateral for a large Western war loan to Ukraine, to be repaid out of anticipated reparations, for which the European Union could replace Ukraine as the claimant.

These debates come down to the difference between freezing assets and seizing them. For the past few months, Mr. Biden and his administration have called for seizing the Russian reserves outright and using them to fund the war against Russia — a move that would be, if not entirely unprecedented, at least radical. Freezing reserves happens. Actually seizing them has been done only in drastic circumstances and then only in a limited way.

The United States froze Iranian assets in the opening days of the hostage crisis of 1979, but most of these were unfrozen two years later. Frozen assets were used to pay war reparations to Kuwaiti victims of Iraq’s 1990 invasion, but that was according to a plan approved by the U.N. Security Council the following year. The United States seized about $1.7 billion from Iraq in 2003, but that was in the midst of war. And last September Mr. Biden returned a few billion dollars of frozen assets to Iran as part of a deal that saw the repatriation of Americans imprisoned there. Freezing has generally not meant seizing.

Things started changing, though, with the disorderly withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. In the aftermath, the Biden administration froze the country’s $7 billion in reserves, earmarking half of it for a compensation fund for the families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. Even though it was arguably a wartime measure, this kind of seizure was irregular and surprising. Few viewed it as a precedent: Russia’s central bank was not hiding its reserves through shell companies or other trickery on the eve of its Ukraine invasion. No one seems to have considered the possibility that a foreign banking authority might simply take the money.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Johnson, in their different ways, are claiming the mantle of moral leadership for their respective parties. “American leadership is what holds the world together,” Mr. Biden said last fall, and walking away from Ukraine, he contends, would put that leadership at risk. Mr. Johnson has accused Mr. Biden of “projecting weakness” in his foreign policy and is presenting an alternative.

The larger worry is not moral but practical. If the REPO Act is enacted, then currency seizures, now seen as a tool of last resort, might turn into standard operating procedure, to America’s detriment. Any foreign government liable to having an American voting bloc riled up against it — China, for starters — would think twice before parking its assets in the United States or with one of its NATO allies.

That is not yet a probability, but it is a possibility that no politician of either party should lose sight of. For decades now, the United States has been deferring hard decisions at home and abroad and papering over partisan divisions with the tens of trillions of dollars that our advantageous international position has allowed us to borrow. Our options, though, are narrowing. If Mr. Johnson thinks the United States is “projecting weakness” now, wait till he sees it without its reserve currency.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer for The Times and a contributing editor at The Claremont Review of Books. He is the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West” and “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”

'Stand up for democracy': GOP lawmaker accuses some of his fellow Republicans of echoing Russian propaganda

WASHINGTON – A Republican congressman said some of his GOP colleagues are echoing Russian propaganda in opposing additional U.S. military aid to Ukraine .

"We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages – some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor," said Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio , speaking Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union."

Turner said he agreed with Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Tex ., who told Puck News last week that Russian propaganda has "infected a good chunk of my party's base."

Neither Turner nor McCall named any names, but opponents have long criticized 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump over his relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

A growing number of Republican lawmakers have publicly opposed sending additional U.S. aid to Ukraine, or putting stipulations on funding for the war-torn country . Many of Trump's supporters in Congress, such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., have balked at giving more support to Ukraine, saying the conflict with Russia could suck the United States into a world war.

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For example, Greene last week protested a proposal to make Ukraine a member of the NATO military alliance, sharing on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, "Making Ukraine a member of NATO means that the U.S. will be going to war against Russia as mandated by Article 5. 70% of Americans are AGAINST this!! All we want is our own border secured, but Ukraine is more important to them. The start of WWIII..."

The Republican opposition is making it difficult to get an updated Ukraine aid package out of Congress. But despite qualms from a wide range of lawmakers, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is expected to turn his focus to Ukraine soon, potentially working with Democrats and Senate lawmakers to negotiate a package.

Turner on Sunday told CNN that Russia is succeeding in getting Republicans to cast the invasion of Ukraine as being about NATO , the U.S-Europe military alliance that is helping Ukraine resist the invasion by Russia.

"To the extent that this propaganda takes hold," Turner said, "it makes it more difficult for us to really see this as an authoritarian-versus-democracy battle, which is what it is."

He added: "We need to stand up for democracy. We need to make certain that we know that authoritarian regimes never stop when they start an aggression."

Special Issue: Propaganda

This essay was published as part of the Special Issue “Propaganda Analysis Revisited”, guest-edited by Dr. A. J. Bauer (Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism and Creative Media, University of Alabama) and Dr. Anthony Nadler (Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Media Studies, Ursinus College).

Peer Reviewed

Propaganda, obviously: How propaganda analysis fixates on the hidden and misses the conspicuous

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Propaganda analysis has long focused on revealing the rhetorical tricks and hidden special interests behind persuasion campaigns. But what are critics to do when propaganda is obvious? In the late 1930s the Institute for Propaganda Analysis faced this question while investigating the public politicking of A&P, then the largest retailer in the United States. While contemporary critics lambasted A&P for their secretive campaign, particularly their use of front groups, A&P used many relatively overt methods of propaganda to win political victories. Propaganda analysis then, as now, fixated on the concealed, failing to adequately critique conspicuous communicative power.

Department of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University, USA

Research Questions

How did the public’s misrecognition of propaganda become a defining and enduring problem for the field of propaganda analysis?

Essay Summary

• U.S.-based propaganda analysis has plied exposé as a preferred critical maneuver for almost a century. However, the presumption that audiences are fooled by propaganda mainly because they fail to recognize its provenance, tactics, or intent is an inhibiting conceptual myopia.
• Drawing on archival research, this article examines the retailer A&P’s late-1930s publicity campaign against chain store taxation. Led by the public relations firm of Carl Byoir & Associates, the campaign used relatively blatant tactics. In fact, Byoir and his contemporaries emphasized the dangers of unseen persuaders and touted their own work as a transparent alternative to that of foreign agents, charlatans, and political provocateurs.
• Propaganda analysis today continues to largely overlook the ways propagandists have co-opted transparency as a strategic tool. Critics must rein in their overreliance on exposé to craft policies and activist practices capable of opposing propaganda in its most overt forms. 

Implications 

“We are fooled by propaganda chiefly because we don’t recognize it when we see it.”

In November 1937 the above sentence opened the monthly pamphlet of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), a New York-based organization devoted to exposing the tactics of propagandists. For the ensuing four years this coalition of educators, researchers, journalists, and benefactors provided an institutional home for progressive thinkers to confront issues of mass persuasion (Sproule, 1997, p. 177). The line quoted above was meant to give readers a sense of the fledgling Institute’s work but could just as aptly summarize a core analytic framework of the intervening eight decades of propaganda studies. 1 The term “propaganda” carries hefty semantic baggage and has been subject to many competing definitions (L’Etang, 2006). For the purposes of this essay, I use the term in a broad sense, considering propaganda as any large-scale, coordinated public communication effort working towards pre-determined ends or interests. This sense of the term encompasses advertising, public relations, and other communications industries, and thus includes professionals who would likely not define their own work as propagandistic. I consider critical research taking these fields as objects of study to be “propaganda analysis.” Whether attending to the rhetoric of texts (Hobbs & McGee, 2014), psychology of audiences (Jowett & O’Donnell, 2019), or political-economic contexts of propaganda (Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Silverstein, 1987), scholars have devoted themselves to uncovering the unseen interests and strategies of persuasive campaigns. This focus is inscribed in the very titles of critical works in this tradition, with accounts of  Hidden Persuaders  (Packard, 1957),  The Unseen Power  (Cutlip, 1994),  Dark Money  (J. Mayer, 2016), and  Stealth Communications  (Jansen, 2017) resting on the IPA’s enduring premise: Propaganda works best when its audiences don’t identify it as such.

Exposés of propaganda abide and abound because they have practical value. No audience is immune to misdirection (Davis, 2013, p. 193), thus ferreting out the tactics and hidden interests of persuasive campaigns helps the public evaluate information more lucidly. Furthermore, unveiling covert influence is compatible with a host of aims at the heart of propaganda studies, as revealing opaque persuaders might stoke collective pushes for media ownership reform, new norms of online platform governance, or even strategic counterpropaganda. Exposing hidden propaganda can be a means towards these worthwhile ends.   

When it comes to deploying exposé, however, propaganda studies tend to suffer from too much of a good thing. Strenuous attention to the public’s misrecognition of propaganda often acts as an inhibiting myopia, one this field of study has proven largely unable to overcome. To illuminate this claim, I turn to the IPA’s published exposés, specifically their account of the public relations efforts of The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, better known as A&P, in the late 1930s. A&P, then the largest grocer in the United States, sought to stymie proposed taxes on chain store ownership that would undermine their profitability. Hiring the public relations firm of Carl Byoir & Associates to head their campaign, the company forged partnerships with unions, farmers associations, consumer movement groups, and a host of other allies (Levinson, 2011). The IPA, in response, published an analysis of A&P’s politicking, seeking to unveil the behind-the-scenes interests backing the campaign.

The problem with the IPA’s critique, one often mirrored in today’s dominant approaches to the study of propaganda, is that A&P’s work was largely “hidden” in plain sight. The partnerships A&P forged, the professional communicators they hired, and the persuasive messages they crafted were typically matters of public record. There were elements of misdirection in A&P’s campaign, to be sure, but claims that the public was fooled by A&P’s messaging because they misrecognized the company’s propagandistic intent do not hold up to empirical scrutiny. 

This insight is significant because propaganda analysis today continues to fixate on the unseen. This preoccupation shows itself most noticeably in concerns over special interests’ appropriation of grassroots political participation. Terms like “front group” and “astroturf organization” are mainstays in critics’ lexicons, fastening updated names to strategies common in A&P’s era. While this language offers sharp rhetorical weaponry (R. N. Mayer, 2007), it also presumes that propagandists elicit public support by concealing the interests behind their campaigns. This diagnosis has shaped proposed policy responses to both front groups specifically (Durkee, 2017; Scott, 2019) and misinformation more broadly (Glaeser & Ujhelyi, 2010), with critics touting tougher disclosure laws for funders of grassroots political organizations. Because critics have diagnosed opacity as a key problem, they frame revelation as the prudent solution.

Just as A&P’s backing of “front groups” was often transparent, however, companies today commonly sponsor citizen advocacy groups openly. If anything, this trend has become more pronounced, with oil companies, 2 Since 2009 the American Petroleum Institute, the largest U.S.-based oil and gas trade group, has run an advocacy organization known as Energy Citizens. While the campaign was relatively tight-lipped about its sponsors initially, the Energy Citizens homepage has for years announced that the campaign is “paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.”  soda makers, 3 Fighting proposed taxes on sugar-laden sodas in San Francisco, California, in 2014, beverage makers sponsored the Coalition for an Affordable City, launching a campaign known variously as Stop Unfair Beverage Taxes and No San Francisco Beverage Tax. The campaign’s homepage stated that their actions were “Paid for by the American Beverage Association,” the industry’s largest trade group.  and pharmaceutical giants 4 The Partnership for Safe Medicines is run by a coalition of pharmaceutical interests, including the industry’s largest U.S. trade group, the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America. Ostensibly aimed at combating trade in counterfeit prescription drugs, the group has fought to block importation of inexpensive medications to the U.S. from foreign nations (Kopp & Bluth, 2018). The organization’s website provides a full list of its members.  candidly mentioning their sponsorship of citizen-centered political organizations. Open grassroots advocacy by corporations was a common ad hoc strategy in the era of A&P; today it is a full-fledged sub-industry (Walker, 2014). Policies demanding greater financial exposure of advocacy will do little to rein in such efforts.  

Likewise, unveiling the sources of propagandistic campaigns, even misleading ones, will not inherently lessen their force. Studies show that emphasizing the original source of misinformation online does not dissuade people from sharing or believing the content (Dias, Pennycook, & Rand, 2020). Research on anti-vaccine advocates (Ortiz-Sánchez et al., 2020), climate change deniers (Krishna, 2021), and QAnon conspiracy theorists (Zuckerman, 2019) demonstrates that exposing truths is not sufficient to dispel false information. 

Clandestine propaganda campaigns do dot the public sphere. The IPA’s impulse to raise public awareness of such efforts is one the field of propaganda analysis rightfully continues to cultivate. However, when advocacy campaigns are open about their tactics and finances, they render propaganda studies’ longstanding reliance on exposé somewhat moot. Critics and policymakers must also oppose raw forms of institutional power and exercises of propaganda that sit in plain sight. 

Findings 

In the late 1930s, A&P was both flourishing and fragile. While the grocer’s low prices had made it the nation’s largest retailer, the company raised the ire of small business advocates, who viewed A&P’s economies of scale as a threat to local mom and pop competitors (Levinson, 2011). These criticisms came to a legislative head in 1936 with the passing of the Robinson-Patman Act, 5 The bill was proposed as an amendment to the Clayton Anti-Trust Act. crafted to counter the monopolistic tendencies of chain stores. This legislation was a harbinger of things to come: By late 1938 nineteen states had enacted anti-chain store statutes and U.S. Representative Wright Patman of Texas, co-sponsor of the earlier bill, was pushing to impose new federal taxes designed to drive large chains out of business (Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1938, p. 7).

In response, A&P hired Carl Byoir & Associates in September 1937 to run a public relations campaign against the proposed taxes. This effort leapt into the public eye in September of 1938 when A&P financed a nationwide newspaper advertisement laying out the company’s position against chain store taxation (Bennett, 1968, p. 203). This publicity drew critical scrutiny to the A&P’s campaign, in particular their formation of third-party advocacy organizations—what would today be called front groups. These groups figured prominently, for instance, in the IPA’s analysis of the A&P campaign, which was mailed to subscribers in December of 1938. The IPA noted that 

“Mr. Byoir helped to set up the Emergency Consumers Tax Council of New Jersey, an organization representing women shoppers in more than 100 communities. To help it get on its feet, he gave it $2,000 of A. & P.’s money. To keep it there, and feed it with fact and figures, he formed Business Organization, Inc., whose job it will be not only to advise the Tax Council but also to organize similar groups elsewhere.” (Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1938, p. 10)

The IPA did not use the term front group, but their analysis was nonetheless framed as exposé, shining a light on A&P’s sponsorship of citizen-centered advocacy. 

Judges and politicians also inveighed against A&P’s front groups. In 1940, U.S. Representative Patman decried A&P’s campaign to Congress, accusing Byoir of founding “dummy organizations” and “propaganda outfits” (86 Cong. Rec. 6951, 1940). 6 Patman, whose legislative agenda repeatedly pit him against A&P, went much further in his criticism. In the same address Patman claimed that Carl Byoir was “the real brain trust of Nazi propaganda in America,” accusing Byoir of using his influence over A&P to pursue a clandestine fascist agenda (86 Cong. Rec. 6951, 1940). Although Byoir would be fully exonerated   of these claims after an FBI investigation, Patman’s remarks were covered widely in the press, causing embarrassment to Byoir and A&P.  Byoir also faced legal ramifications for his A&P work, convicted in 1945 under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of supporting monopolistic practices. The trial judge framed the third-party organizations Byoir founded as ethically dubious, suggesting “the public could not have been and was not aware of the full extent of their sponsorship or the A&P’s responsibility” for the groups. 7 The crimes of which Byoir was convicted pertained narrowly to his role in organizing a monopolistic cooperative of agricultural shippers. His founding of purported front groups was not a clear factor in his legal culpability. For an excellent review of the case, see Bennett (1968, pp. 225–277).    

It is not clear, however, who was fooled by Byoir’s efforts, as no empirical evidence of audiences’ confusion was offered by the judge or the IPA. More to the point, it does not seem that subterfuge was the campaign’s main intention. After all, the advertisement A&P published to announce their campaign explicitly mentioned the company’s hiring of Carl Byoir & Associates as public relations counsel (The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, 1938). Furthermore, the ad laid out the company’s strategy, avowing A&P would invest in creating supportive “groups among consumers, farmers and workers.” While sponsorship of particular groups was not acknowledged in the ad, A&P’s intention to run a grassroots campaign was unmistakable. 

Among the third-party groups Byoir formed, A&P supported many openly. The two groups named by the IPA provide illustrative examples. Byoir & Associates announced the creation of the Emergency Consumers Tax Council of New Jersey in a widely circulated press release, with full disclosure of A&P’s status as benefactors. The announcement was picked up by journalists, with newspapers such as the  Wall Street Journal  covering the story (“A&P gives $2,000,” 1938); Byoir’s role in Business Organization, Inc., created to undertake consumer research for A&P, was less publicized, but was sufficiently well-known to receive laurels in the pages of  Public Opinion Quarterly , with the group’s links to Byoir and A&P duly noted (Roat, 1939). While the public at large were unlikely to subscribe to this specialist journal, this evidence suggests the success of the A&P campaign did not hinge entirely on the company’s sponsorship of grassroots groups remaining secret. 

To be clear, I am not arguing for the ethical bona fides of A&P’s approach. Their transparency was both partial and strategic. I am suggesting, however, that the A&P campaign was both generally discernable as propaganda and, by all accounts, succeeded despite this. The IPA’s conviction that “we are fooled by propaganda chiefly because we don’t recognize it” seems ill-equipped to explain how A&P’s conspicuous campaign earned backers and ultimately won legislative victories. 

Why then was the IPA so committed to exposing the A&P campaign? Why reveal what is already visible? In part, the IPA’s work played to public anxieties about propaganda lingering from WWI, which saw even liberal free speech advocates tout increasingly illiberal measures to curb the supposed threat of propaganda (Gary, 1999). By amplifying these anxieties, the IPA fueled interest in their own denunciatory work and aimed to rouse their readers to be vigilant of persuasive campaigns.   

The IPA were not alone in stoking fears of hidden persuaders, however. Public relations practitioners used these same anxieties to validate their status as experts. The most infamous self-proclaimed propagandists of the early 20 th  century such as Carl Byoir, Edward Bernays, and Ivy Lee promoted not only clients, but also their nascent profession, combatting portrayals of public relations as a field “populated by plaid-suited, megaphone-toting hacks […] or sweet young things who flirted their clients’ way onto the news pages” (Zoch, Supa, & VanTuyll, 2014, p. 723). To do so, they framed their own work as a transparent and rationalized alternative to the pernicious propaganda of foreign agents, charlatans, and others who might have hidden interests. 8 Byoir, for instance, asserted “false propaganda can only temporarily mislead any great number of people and only then when the other side is not fully and adequately presented” (quoted in Bennett, 1968, p. 418); Bernays suggested that while propaganda might be produced “largely by men we have never heard of,” the proper response was exposé, the demand that all propaganda be “clearly labeled as to source” (Bernays, 1928/2005, pp. 37, 70); Lee proposed that “the essential evil of propaganda […] is the  failure to disclose the source  of the information,” waxing poetical to suggest “unseen assassins are dangerous, whether they use stilettos of steel in the dark or seek to poison our minds with falsehoods and half-truths coming we know not whence and aimed at we know not what” (Lee, 1934, pp. 10–11). All three professionals frequently framed their own work as an exercise in transparent public discourse.  While Byoir’s ilk often failed to meet the standards of openness they extolled, they nonetheless fueled notions that revelation was the solution to the lurking peril of covert influence. While the IPA clamored for exposés of propaganda, Byoir and his contemporaries trumpeted propaganda as exposé. 

It is striking that in the early 20 th  century both public relations’ most famous professionals and their harshest critics petitioned with equal fervor for the need to make propaganda recognizable to the public. This unanimity hints at an underlying ideological consensus which, amid the surface-level disagreement of political battles, took exposé as a peerless method of mitigating harmful public persuasion. The core tenet of early propaganda analysis—“we are fooled by propaganda chiefly because we don’t recognize it when we see it”—served the very different normative visions of the IPA and public relations practitioners equally well. 

The case of the A&P, then, suggests at least two caveats that ought to accompany propaganda studies’ time-honored concern with public misrecognition of propaganda. First, propaganda is often strategically overt, with persuaders using undisguised communication to lend legitimacy to their work. In these instances, critical exposé is of little use. Second, the act of exposé does not necessarily lessen the persuasive force of propaganda, as the public may maintain fealty to either particular propagandists or the ideas they espouse.

Our media environment is a far cry from that navigated by Byoir, A&P, and the IPA almost a century ago. Thus, studies of networked propaganda have much to show us about the ways transparency is strategically deployed by today’s propagandists and the ways audiences respond to contemporary persuasion campaigns. The case of the A&P, however, offers a historical reminder that exposé is often a necessary but not sufficient counter to propaganda. Reflecting upon the A&P campaign ought to prompt those analyzing propaganda today to overcome reliance on revelation, instead crafting policies and activist practices capable of offsetting the obvious communicative power of large companies and other propagandists. 

Methods 

This article investigates how public misrecognition of propaganda became a defining and enduring problem for the field of propaganda analysis. The A&P’s late-1930s campaign against chain store taxation provides a useful case study for this exploration for two reasons. First, the contested nature of the campaign demands thinking in relational terms about the power of propagandists and their critics. Too often disciplinary divides coax scholars to study either public relations campaigns or activist advocacy in relative isolation. The direct clash between A&P and the IPA makes such siloing untenable. Instead, this case prompts us to view public relations as a “socially embedded profession,” whose strategies and political efficacy are influenced by other fields of practice (Edwards, 2006, p. 229). 

Second, A&P’s campaign against chain store taxation is a particularly productive object of analysis for its notoriety. As Pooley (2008) has argued, the historiography of communications research has often rehearsed Whiggish narratives of the early 20 th century’s march towards scientistic studies of propaganda. These accounts suppose that the era’s research evolved from naïve condemnations of propaganda’s unfettered power towards more ostensibly measured empirical approaches. Subsequent scholarship has done much to challenge this portrayal; however, communication studies, even more than other fields, requires fresh appraisals of familiar historical objects. Byoir’s work for A&P is often taken as a watershed moment in cultural and legal considerations of front groups and thus presents an opportune case for rethinking basic presumptions about the power of exposé as a counter to propaganda.   

This essay draws from archival records at the New York Historical Society Museum & Library, including the Henry R. Luce papers; the Wisconsin Historical Society Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections, particularly the Gerry Swinehart papers; and New York University’s Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. Historical research always relies on the wisdom of archivists, but I am especially indebted to the staff at each of these institutions. The research for this project was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic and would not have been possible without their efforts to provide safe access to archival materials. 

This project also relied on electronic reproductions of newspapers from ProQuest, including  The   New York Times ,  Los Angeles Times ,  The   Washington Post , and  The   Wall Street Journal . Materials were collected using separate searches for the terms “Byoir,” “A&P,” “Emergency Consumers Tax Council of New Jersey,” and “Business Organization, Inc.” 

Research materials were intentionally chosen to scrutinize not only publicly circulated propaganda texts, but also the processes through which propagandists and critics undertook their work. As Logan (2014) argues, professional communicators mobilize dominant ideologies both to craft messages for their clients and to buttress support for their profession. Because of this, public relations is not simply a tactical reservoir for actors with political or economic agendas, but a field that has dramatically shaped the contours of U.S. political discourse as such (Aronczyk & Espinoza, forthcoming). The archival sources from which my research draws were selected to provide insight into how the rationales, ideologies, and interests of communications practitioners in the late 1930s were inscribed into professional practice.

• / Public Relations

Cite this Essay

Wood, T. (2021). Propaganda, obviously: How propaganda analysis fixates on the hidden and misses the conspicuous. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-63

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The author received no specific funding for this work.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

This research did not involve human subjects and thus was not subject to approval from an institutional review board. The use and copyright restrictions of all archived and published materials were followed.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.

Data Availability

All data was collected from the archives and sources outlined above. For details on data, please contact the author at [email protected].