Wasburn and Burke (1997)

[Linnea Micciulla]

Hi everyone,

I received a response to the Wasburn and Burke posts from someone who wants
to remain anonymous - I thought it contained quite a bit of food for
thought, so I asked for permission to re-post it here:

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Incidentally I just saw the interesting question on the discourse list about
Russians expecting propaganda in their media while Americans don’t. I’m
pretty shy about expressing opinions publicly so I’m not going to post, but
I’ll privately offer what I think is a very likely answer. In Russia (as in
most of the Eastern Bloc), there is a long history of explicit propaganda
that existed during the communist regime. This mistrust of the media was
very well founded and is hard to completely overturn in the relatively short
period of time that communism has been absent. The scale of propaganda is
also completely different between Russia/the Eastern bloc and the US. I find
it extremely uncomfortable and misleading to use the word propaganda for
both. One emerged out of a regime which explicitly and deliberately set out
to deceive the public. The other emerged from a system which explicitly and
deliberately made efforts not to. Of course the best laid plans
and all
that. But I think that in practical terms, the historical difference has a
huge effect. In one case all media was government regulated and there were
severe penalties for deviating from the government agenda. In the other case
there are many media sources, some push some agendas, others push other
agendas, and we’re free to choose, to read between the lines, to look
elsewhere for information 
 with no penalties. That’s a huge difference to
me. I realize I’m describing a time that has passed, but again, I think this
historical relationship between media and society is very relevant and
changes slowly. 

Just my two cents. 

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