Geoffrey Nunberg - on Propaganda

[P. Kerim Friedman]

<http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/propaganda.html>

(There is a graph referred to in the article, click on the above link
to see the graph in context.)

"Propaganda" Defeat

Geoff Nunberg

A shorter version of this commentary was broadcast on "Fresh Air,"
April 2, 2004

The public has gotten used to seeing advertisers ape news show formats
in TV infomercials. So the Department of Health and Human Services must
have been surprised when the General Accounting Office announced
recently that they'd be investigating the department's use of the same
techniques to promote the Administration's prescription-drug bill. The
department sent out a video news release to extol the virtues of the
bill, complete with fake reporters and a shot of President Bush
receiving a standing ovation as he signed the bill.

On Comedy Central's "Daily Show," one of John Stewart's
mock-correspondents described that kind of bogus newscast as
"infoganda," and worried that it might drive genuine fake newscasts
like Stewart's off the air. And in The New York Times last Sunday,
Frank Rich extended "infoganda" to the range of ploys the
Administration has used to spin news coverage, from the manipulation of
the Jessica Lynch story, the "Mission Accomplished" photo op aboard the
U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, and the editorial direction it offered to
Showtime's movie "DC 9/11" to the TV blitz by Condi Rice and others
aimed at discrediting Richard Clarke.

As it happens, "infoganda" has been around for a while -- it first
appeared in the press during the Gulf War of 1991 as a name for the
reports and footage that the Pentagon was furnishing to journalists.1
But the word may very well have been independently coined on several
occasions. It seems like a natural name for this sort of thing -- it
fits the pattern of those spliced-together portmanteau words like
"infotainment" and "docudrama." I think of those names as genre
benders. They're the media's version of "Junkyard Wars" -- there's
nothing new under the sun, apart from what you can cobble together from
the stuff that's lying around the shop.

But what's curious about "infoganda" is that anyone would feel the need
for a new word to describe those government-produced news videos. There
was a time when that territory would have been adequately covered by
"propaganda" -- a genre that has always worked best in drag.

"Propaganda" was originally coined by the Jesuits in the 17th century
as the name of the Vatican committee charged with propagating the
faith. But it didn't become part of the everyday vocabulary until the
time of the First World War, when the British and Germans began to use
the new techniques of mass advertising and public relations to rouse
popular support for their cause. As one journalist observed, "Before
1914, 'propaganda' belonged only to literate vocabularies and possessed
a reputable, dignified meaning… Two years later the word had come into
the vocabulary of peasants and ditchdiggers and had begun to acquire
its miasmic aura."2

Americans got into this game when the country entered the war in 1917.
President Wilson set up the Committee on Public Information, modeled on
the British Department of Information. It became known as the Creel
Committee after its chairman, the journalist George Creel. The
committee churned out posters, pamphlets, and press releases, and
enlisted 75,000 people to serve as "four minute men," who gave short
prepared speeches and lantern-slide shows at theaters and public
gatherings, urging people to enlist or buy liberty bonds.

Most of that material was pretty purple stuff, laced with phrases like
"bombs or bondage" and "If you don't come across, the Kaiser will." But
Creel denied that the committee was trafficking in propaganda, a word
he associated with "deceit and corruption." "Our effort," he said, "was
educational and informative throughout. No other argument was needed
than the simple, straightforward presentation of facts." 3

As time went on, public suspicion of propaganda turned it into an
orphan word that no one would own up to. In 1939, a poll showed 40
percent of Americans blamed propaganda for the US entry into the First
World War.

In that environment, propagandists took greater pains to disguise their
product. In 1938, one New York editor objected to the deluge of phony
press releases from the "news services" that had been set up by foreign
governments to win favorable coverage. He warned that they threatened
to break down the line of demarcation between news and propaganda,
particularly if papers began to rely on them to fill their pages.4

But of course that was the point of the exercise. By then it was clear
that propaganda was most effective when it masqueraded as objective
news. In 1941, when FDR wanted to drum up support for extending the
draft and increasing American aid to the British war effort, he
established an Office of Facts and Figures, headed by Archibald
Macleish.

Some isolationist senators accused the Administration of trying to set
up a centralized propaganda bureau, but New York's mayor Fiorello
LaGuardia, who had been an advocate of the program, reassured the
public that "the office is not a propaganda agency… We don't believe in
this country in artificially stimulated, high-pressure, doctored
nonsense." Even so, in a private memo to Roosevelt, LaGuardia admitted
that the agency's goal was to provide the public with what he called
"sugar coated, colored, ornamental matter, otherwise known as
'bunk,'..." 5

By 1942, the Office of Facts and Figures had become part of the Office
of War Information, which adopted the same principle in encouraging
Hollywood to make movies that roused patriotic sentiments. In the words
of the agency's director, the journalist Elmer Davis: "The easiest way
to inject a propaganda idea into most men's minds is to let it go in
through the medium of an entertainment picture."6

Ultimately, the American propagandists' greatest victory was to
discredit the word "propaganda" itself. By the time of the Cold War,
"propaganda" only referred to what the other side said -- and said
crudely, at that. The word conjured up the bombast and strident
language of the Soviets, not the soft-sell productions of our side.
Propaganda programs were the ones that played the Red Army Chorus in
the background, not the ones that played Stan Kenton.

So it isn't surprising that the use of "propaganda" declined with
détente, the end of the Vietnam war, and then the fall of Communism.
Over the past five years, the word has been only a tenth as common in
the press as it was in its Cold War heyday.

That may be why people felt the need to coin the new word "infoganda"
to describe the fake news shows and contrived photo ops that are
designed to blend seamlessly into the media background.

There may be nothing new about these techniques, but the current
administration has exploited them more deftly than anyone since
Roosevelt's day. And they've found a fertile ground for their plantings
in the modern media setting, which already blurs the lines between
journalism and advocacy and reality and fiction.

As a Department of Health and Human Services spokesman said in
defending the fake news spot about the prescription drug bill, "Anyone
who has questions about this practice needs to do some research on
modern public information tools." It's hard to argue with that. In a
world of infomercials, advertorials, and docudramas, what's one more
imposture?

Notes

1. "Like Keating, Australia at large felt a thrill of excitement and a
chill of dread when the war broke out. Our TV screens beamed urgent US
infoganda into our heads." The Sydney Morning Herald, July 26, 1991.
Return

2. Will Irwin, Propaganda and the News, 1936. Return

3. Quoted in Elmer E. Cornwall, Jr. "Wilson, Creel, and the
Presidency," Public Opinion Quarterly, 23-12, 1959. Return

4. Louis Minsky, "Propaganda Bureaus as News Services," Public Opinion
Quarterly, 2,4, 1938. Return

5. Quoted in Richard W. Steele, "Preparing the Public for War: Efforts
to Establish a National Propaganda Agency, 1940-41," The American
Historical Review, 75,6, 1970. Return

6. Quoted in Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, "What to Show the
World: The Office of War Information and Hollywood," The Journal of
American History, 64,1, 1977. Return