In an episode of the popular sitcom Seinfeld entitled "The Race," one can see
a scene in which Kramer, the eccentric and easily agitated mainstay character
played by Michael Richards, attempts to indoctrinate a child, who just wants a
toy for Christmas, on the evils and injustices of the capitalist system while
working as a department store Santa Claus. The child got angry and and shouted
back: "You're a communist! You're telling me communist propaganda!" He
screamed the word propaganda with malice and contempt. Another example of
how Americans negatively view the word propaganda is the dispute between the
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and Accuracy in Media (AIM), a conservative
media observer, regarding AIM's allegation that PBS was transmitting
"propaganda" to the American public by refusing to televise an AIM-produced
documentary that uncovered the role of the news media in influencing the
unfavorable opinions Americans had toward the war in Vietnam ("AIM Claims" 1).
Why do Americans react adversely when they meet the word propaganda? I
believe that the antagonism displayed by Americans toward the word
propaganda is the outcome of their historical experience in World War I when
they later found out that propaganda was instrumental in luring them into war.
Americans perceive propaganda as a fraudulent form of communication
because it seeks to deceive intentionally by giving distorted information and
unsound arguments that incite emotion rather than reason, and it validates the
idea that the end justifies the means by "serving hidden motives, using
unscrupulous methods, and seeking disreputable purposes" (Giddens 1). The
public according to political scientist Carl Friedrich, considers propaganda full
of lies disguised as disinformation or misinformation (176). Americans conjure
images "of spies and secret police, of cynical reporters and biased magazines, of
lobbies and special privileges and lies" in their minds whenever they see or hear
the word propaganda (Hummel and Huntress 1).
American sociologist Michael Choukas, who was Chief of Plans and Production
of Morale Operations in the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the
modern Central Intelligence Agency), warns in the preface of his book
Propaganda Comes of Age that the United States is in a vulnerable position
internally and externally because both friends and foes alike bombard Americans
with propaganda on a daily basis, and to such a degree that it is almost impossible
to separate truth from falsity (iii). He defines propaganda "as the controlled
dissemination of deliberately distorted notions in an effort to induce action
favorable to predetermined ends of special interest groups". As a result,
Choukas concludes, the word propaganda, originally a reputable term, has gained a
corrupt and wicked significance in the United States(5). According to American
psychologist Leonard Doob, the most efficient way to offend and provoke
someone in American society is to expose that person as one who engages in
propaganda (231). As a consequence, Doob contends, the person who engages in
propaganda would like people to recognize him or her as an educator, a publicity
agent, a public relations consultant, an advertising agent, a sales agent, a
promoter, a preacher, a lecturer, or even a politician, but not as a propagandist
(231). Modern propagandists have at their disposal an impressive array of print,
electronic, television, and radio media to convey their agendas to their target
audience, but they do not want people to recognize them as "propaganda
conduit[s]" (Nelson ix). Authors Bennet and DiLorenzo report that the United
States federal government, which Advertising Age ranked ahead of General
Electric, Paramount Communication, IBM, and ITT in their 1991 list of leading
advertisers in the country (9), spends millions of tax payers' dollars annually
($304 million in 1991 alone) for propaganda purposes, but one can never find
propagandists in the entire government bureaucracy, only "information officers,"
faith to all heathen shores (Jackall 1). Therefore, Richard Lambert argues, the
first organization to use the word propaganda was a religious congregation
responsible for the missionary efforts of the Church (8). Lambert further
explains that the word propaganda slowly developed to mean the propagation of a
dogma or belief by any association, then it referred to the dogma or belief itself,
and finally it came to signify the methods and techniques used to circulate the
dogma or belief (8).
The 19th-century saw the rise of the modern phenomenon of propaganda with
the advent of national and international mass communication systems—newspapers,
magazines, intercontinental underwater cables, radio, and film—but the
nation-states did not realize the full potential of these media systems (Giddens
3). It was during this time that the word propaganda began getting its negative
reputation as lexicographer W.T. Brande reported in 1843: "Propaganda is
applied in modern political language as a term of reproach to secret
associations for the spread of opinions and principles which are viewed by most
governments with horror and aversion" (qtd. in Safire 152).
It was in World War I that the governments of the warring countries
extensively used propaganda to bolster the national morale and will at home and
to discredit their enemies abroad (Giddens 3). It was also in the Great War that
one can see the origin of American intolerance for propaganda (Giddens 4). The
British government used propaganda to lure the United States into the war by
exercising "pro-interventionist" tactics—their first act was to order their
covert operatives in Germany to cut all transatlantic cables to the United States
(Nelson 36). The British government undertool every effort to persuade the
American public that indifference to the Allied cause was "anti-American" and
opposition to Germany was "patriotic" (Peterson 35). The Encyclopedia of
American Facts and Dates gives a brief account of how Britain and Germany used
propaganda in the first phase of the war to alter public opinion, which leaned
toward isolation and neutrality:
Atrocity stories, almost all of them later disproved, were circulated
by both sides. Many rumors appeared in [the] American press and
were believed because strict German and British censorship of all
news dispatches from Europe had made all U.S. newspapers unreliable
as regards the war. The most persistent rumor was that a large
Russian army had left Archangel and, traveling by way of Scotland
and England, joined allied forces in the western front. There was never
the slightest truth in it, although U.S. newspapers carried
"eye-witness accounts" of bearded Russian soldiers in Glasgow or
London or Calais. (qtd. in Nelson 36)
The most effective atrocity story, however, that Americans universally accepted
was the gruesome eyewitness account of German soldiers chopping off the hands
of a Belgian baby (Ponsonby 181). This British propaganda ploy of using atrocity
stories to influence public opinion was so effective that in the next global
conflict people did not believe at first the atrocity stories coming out of Nazi
Germany (Tate 333). Moreover, the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania,
with 114 U.S. citizens aboard, on May 7, 1915 by a German U-Boat gave the
British government a perfect opportunity to start a round of German bashing in
the United States although the British ambassador lied to the U.S. Secretary of
State by maintaining that the ocean liner was not carrying concealed munitions,
and that a British Admiralty secret memorandum, that stated the benefits to be
reaped in swaying American public opinion if the Germans "torpedoed" a
passenger liner with American citizens onboard, did not exist (Nelson 37). On
February 24, 1917, U.S-German relations take a turn for the worst when British
intelligence reveals the Zimmermann telegram—a communiqué sent by the German
Foreign Ministry to the German ambassador in Mexico that allegedly exhorts an
immediate German-Mexican military alliance against the United States (Nelson
38). All these facts were revealed to the American people after the end of the
war, and this exposé only fueled their growing belief that the propaganda
machinery of the Allied governments had duped them into fighting. In fact, even
before the war ended, the New York Evening Post divulged, under extreme
pressure from the various governments involved not to publish this story, on
January 1918, the secret and true goals of the Allied nations in waging war and
the "underhand bargains" achieved through secret negotiations (Nelson 40).
Furthermore, the British government acknowledged in the House of Commons, on
December 2, 1925, that British propaganda agencies fabricated the atrocity
stories publicized during the war (Nelson 48). In the United States, American
historian Ralph H. Lutz wrote in 1933 that the charges of barbarism and cruelty
leveled against the German army were "falsifications designed to malign the
German nation in the interest of propaganda" (Horne and Kramer 2). So, we can
imagine the disgust and distrust that Americans, in view of the cost in human lives
and property, felt toward anything associated with propaganda when these
disclosures came out. Americans realized that during the war propaganda was
used as a mighty and evil tool to influence public opinion (Lincove 2). The proof
of this realization is the abundance of materials on propaganda after the war;
for example, the number of books on propaganda rose from a mere "handful" in
1924 to about 5,000 titles in 1935 (Laurie 29).
Consequently, the hatred that Americans show toward the word propaganda is
the product of their collective historical experience in World War I. And this
experience has shaped the present American view of the word propaganda.
Americans must understand, however, that propaganda itself is a neutral process;
the morality of propaganda depends upon the motives and purposes behind it.
Whether they call propaganda by any other name, it is still, essentially, a means
of persuasion. Furthermore, they must realize that propaganda is here to stay
since the world's mass communication systems are becoming more connected each
passing day. They must learn the tricks and techniques of the propagandist, so
that they can intelligently form their own opinions and not be manipulated
blindly.
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