"Propaganda" is a big word right now because of Fahrenheit 9/11. It's the favorite word of the film's detractors and even Michael Moore hasn't tried too hard to run from the label "propagandist". It's a smart move for Moore because he's been open about the idea that his movie is all about getting out his point of view for the purpose of winning people over to his side. But what about the term "propaganda" and it's cousin, "infoganda"? There's a very good audio commentary by Geoffrey Nunberg, Fresh Air's linguist, during which he looks at the history of propaganda and considers the difference between it and infoganda.
Ultimately, the American propagandist's 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 Fascist and Communist, not the soft sell productions of our own side. Propaganda was stuff that played The Internationale in the background, not Stan Kenton. So it isn't surprising that the use of the word "propaganda" began to decline after the Vietnam War and tailed off sharply with the fall of Communism. Over the last five years it's been only a tenth as common in the press as it was in its Cold War hay day. That may be why people felt the need to coin a new word, "infoganda", to describe the fake news shows and contrived photo-ops that are designed to blend seamlessly into the media background.
Mr. Nunberg is exactly right. Propaganda has come to mean an overt and usually dishonest attempt to influence opinion, although the information used in propaganda isn't necessarily dishonest. What makes it propaganda is that there's no mistaking it for unbiased or balanced reporting. The propagandist doesn't bother to hide her agenda. It's honest in that regard. That's why Moore's films and, on the other side of the debate, some of Lionel Chetwynd's films, fit the bill so nicely. (most recently DC 9/11: Time of Crisis) Along those lines Jodi Wilgoren has a long piece in last Sunday's paper profiling George Butler and his forthcoming film biography of Sen. Kerry. The story uses "propaganda" or "propagandist" three times directly and at least twice obliquely. I'm not going to argue with that word choice, inflammatory as it is, since it is clear that Mr. Butler is on Sen. Kerry's team and wants to swing some votes. I'm more interested in what we should do with the more insidious infoganda that we've been victims of lately. For instance, what do we do with the fake Medicare news stories that BushCo put out earlier this year?
In the forgotten NYTimes story that reported the GAO's findings that the BushCo administration had in fact broken laws when they distributed the spots, the agency had to struggle to describe the tactic the HHS used:
The agency said the videos were a form of "covert propaganda" because the government was not identified as the source of the materials, broadcast by at least 40 television stations in 33 markets. The agency also expressed some concern about the content of the videos, but based its ruling on the lack of disclosure. (emph mine)
Jodi Wilgoren and the other NYTimes political reporters don't have much to say about this kind of 'covert propaganda'. That job falls to Frank Rich, who despite his talent, is not as widely read since he moved to the Sunday Arts section. He has had two recent stories on the idea of propaganda that hides its disseminators' agendas behind the cover of objective reporting (infoganda).
From the March 28, 2004 column: Operation Iraqi Infoganda
After 9/11, similar fake-news techniques helped speed us into "Operation Iraqi Freedom." [...] What few journalistic efforts were made to penetrate the trumped-up rationales for war were easily defeated by the administration's false news reports of impending biological attacks and mushroom clouds. To see how the faux journalism sausage was made, go to www.reform.house.gov/min, where a searchable database posted by Representative Henry Waxman identifies "237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell and National Security Adviser Rice in 125 separate public appearances."
In the second column, The Best Goebbels of All?, Mr. Rich doesn't use the term "infoganda", which is too bad because that ommission muddies the comparison he makes between Moore and Ashcroft:
Yet Goebbels is in fashion everywhere these days. As Mr. Moore implies that the Bush administration is in cahoots with the native country of 15 of the 9/11 hijackers, so the Bush administration has itself used a sustained campaign of insinuation to float the false claim that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with those hijackers, too.
And later regarding Ashcroft's warning about the seven most wanted terrorists:
Mr. Ashcroft's show looked plausible enough when it led the evening newscasts. Only on further examination did it prove to have more slanted evidence than "Fahrenheit 9/11." The seven individuals he had asked us to help track down are not believed to be in the United States, other officials soon told The New York Times. Six of the seven culprits, in fact, were recycled from previous warnings, one of them dating back to a similar Ashcroft press conference of 28 months earlier. Maybe C-Span 3 could be turned into a Justice Department TV Land to rerun the old Ashcroft episodes.
And about the timing of Ashcroft's infoganda:
Whether Mr. Ashcroft's alarming presentation led to the thwarting of a single terrorist remains unknown. What it did do was take our minds off Abu Ghraib and the rest of the metastasizing bad news from Iraq. Like a master Hollywood showman plotting the release schedule of a movie, Mr. Ashcroft always times his productions exquisitely. Two years ago he held off the announcement of the arrest of the supposed "dirty bomber," Jose Padilla, by a month, at which point that press conference fortuitously drowned out the stir created by Coleen Rowley, the F.B.I. agent who blew the whistle on the incompetence on Mr. Ashcroft's watch before 9/11. This month he changed the subject from Justice Department memos justifying torture by announcing that he had foiled a terrorist plot targeting a shopping mall in "the American heartland" (Ohio, coincidentally the Republicans' most crucial swing state ).
Mr. Rich is on the right track when he picks up on the right's comparison of Moore to Goebbels because the analogy is crucially flawed, as he points out with his own, more apt comparison between Goebbels and Ashcroft, who is part of a government as Goebbels was and is, therefore, automatically held to a different standard than entertainers, whose propaganda is necessarily overt. (Moore can be the left's Leni Riefenstahl in the addled world of right-wing radio.)
There's a real threat from infoganda because no matter how cynical we've become since whatever watershed historical moment you want to name, our government is not supposed to lie to us. They aren't supposed to secretly release fake news stories or conflate unrelated events to make their point or use terrifying matters of national security to distract us from their PR problems. Jeff at Notes on the Atrocities has some thoughts along these lines as well. I'll add that although it's fine for the NYTimes to take up space writing about propagandists like George Butler, Michael Moore and Lionel Chetwynd, we would be much better served if the paper would devote significant time and space to examining in detail what Mr. Rich has tried to stir up over in the Arts section.
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