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Bush's mock news stories revive familiar technique (Infoganda) by G Nunberg Posted on Sun, Apr. 04, 2004 
Bush's mock news stories revive familiar technique By Geoffrey Nunberg 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 recently announced an investigation into the legality of the government's using the same techniques to promote Bush's prescription drug plan. The department had sent broadcasters videos that featured ``interviews'' with government officials and voice-overs by people posing as reporters. The mock news stories extolled the virtues of the new, and controversial, Medicare drug benefit. The spots wound up being broadcast as straight news by more than 50 TV stations. On Comedy Central's ``The Daily Show,'' one of Jon 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. Shortly after that, the New York Times' Frank Rich extended ``infoganda'' to refer to the range of ploys the administration has used to spin news coverage, from the manipulation of the Jessica Lynch story and the president's ``Mission Accomplished'' photo op aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln to the TV blitz by Condoleezza Rice and others aimed at discrediting former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke. As it happens, ``infoganda'' has been around for a while -- it first appeared in the media during the 1991 Persian Gulf War to describe the reports and footage the Pentagon was furnishing to journalists. But the word could 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 cable's ``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 covered by ``propaganda'' -- a genre that has always worked best when it could pass itself off as something else. ``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 World War I, when the British and Germans began to use the new techniques of mass advertising and public relations to rouse popular support for their causes. 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.'' Americans got into the propaganda business when the country entered the war in 1917. President Wilson set up the Committee on Public Information, modeled on the British Department of Information. 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. By the end of the war, they had given 750,000 speeches, not just in English, but in Italian, Yiddish and Sioux. Those appeals were heavily emotional, laced with phrases like ``bombs or bondage'' and ``If you don't come across, the Kaiser will.'' But the committee's chairman, former journalist George Creel, denied it 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.'' As time went on, public suspicion of propaganda increased. One 1930s poll showed 40 percent of Americans blamed propaganda for the U.S. entry into World War I. In response, propagandists took greater pains to disguise their product. In 1938, one New York newspaper 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. Masquerading as news 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 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted to drum up support for increasing American aid to the British effort in World War II, he set up an Office of Facts and Figures, headed by the poet Archibald MacLeish. Some isolationist senators accused the administration of trying to set up a centralized propaganda bureau, but New York's Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, 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.'' But 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.' '' By 1942, the Office of Facts and Figures had become part of the Office of War Information, which also camouflaged its work, encouraging Hollywood to make movies that roused patriotic sentiments without seeming too preachy. In the words of the agency's director, 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.'' Ultimately, the American propagandists' greatest victory was to discredit the word ``propaganda'' itself. By the time of the Cold War, ``propaganda'' referred only 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 fulminated about ``imperialist lackeys'' and opened with the Red Army Chorus, not with Stan Kenton. A decline and rebirth 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 past five years, the word has been only a tenth as common in the media as it was in its Cold War heyday. That may be why people have felt the need to coin the new word ``infoganda'' to describe the fake news shows and contrived photos that are designed to blend seamlessly into the media background. There may be nothing new about these techniques, but the Bush administration has exploited them more deftly than any administration since Roosevelt's. And the administration has found fertile ground for its plantings in the modern media setting, where the lines between journalism and advocacy and reality and fiction are already blurred. As a Department of Health and Human Services spokesman said in defending the fake news spots about the prescription-drug law, ``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 imposture more? GEOFFREY NUNBERG is a linguist at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information. His new book, ``Going Nucular,'' will be published next month. He adapted this article for Perspective from a commentary that aired on NPR's ``Fresh Air.'' |