Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 4 - 2005
Recent events reignite debate over value, limits of propaganda by A Pusey 
Posted on Mon, Dec. 26, 2005 Recent events reignite debate over value, limits of propaganda BY ALLEN PUSEY The Dallas Morning News WASHINGTON - On April 6, 1917, the nation entered World War I. It was not a popular decision, and one week later, President Woodrow Wilson launched one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in U.S. history. The fervor that followed bound a diverse population of European immigrants together as a dedicated fighting whole. It also stirred an Illinois mob to beat and lynch a German-American miner, provoked 14 states to ban the speaking of German in public schools and compelled newspapers to refer to outbreaks of "Liberty" measles among children. Within every war there is a war of words, a battle for hearts and minds designed both to bolster the morale on the home front and to deflate the enemy. And in recent weeks, that battle has come into focus for the Bush administration and its Iraq policy. The president's scrappy reiterations of his reasons for invading Iraq staunched faltering approval ratings in recent weeks. Even so, the day of his first speech, at Annapolis, it was revealed that the United States was paying for favorable treatment in the Iraqi press. While it's hard for many people to accept, experts say, both of these efforts can be considered part of a wartime propaganda campaign. Both involve efforts to gravitate people to a particular point of view. But they also reveal what works and what doesn't in an age of global communications and perpetual political spin. "Propaganda gets a bad rap," said P.J. Crowley, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former senior director of public affairs for the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. "The issue is not whether it's good or bad; it's a fact of life. ... It's whether or not it hurts or helps." "There is really a misconception about the value of propaganda, particularly in wartime. But it's an indispensable tool of modern war," said Aaron Delwiche, an expert on the subject at Trinity University in San Antonio. "There's no way any responsible commander would go to war without propaganda in the tool kit." "Information," says a 1996 U.S. Army field manual, "is the currency of victory." On the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers routinely distribute leaflets - both to warn and solicit the help of residents in various operations. Local language radio and television broadcast entertainment and news - developed by information specialists at Fort Bragg, N.C. - with the aim of softening resentment toward the American military presence. Likewise, at home, when President Bush argues that not "staying the course" would "send the wrong message to the enemy," he's not just attempting to win over uncertain Americans, said Crowley. He's also speaking directly to Iraqis and others who might question U.S. resolve. "Propaganda has an important purpose," Crowley said. "Wars are now fought live on television. It's important for the U.S. to purvey why it's doing what it's doing." In recent weeks, the Department of Defense acknowledged that it paid Iraqi journalists to write and place favorable accounts of U.S. operations in Iraqi newspapers. And that revelation has reignited debate about the value and limits of propaganda in the modern information age. There is nothing illegal about the military program, but it mirrors revelations earlier this year that government agencies paid journalists to write pieces for domestic consumption that were sympathetic to administration's efforts to support traditional marriage and "No Child Left Behind." Those attempts were deemed improper by government investigators. Both the foreign and domestic efforts were faulted because they obscured U.S. government involvement. Bush ordered the domestic practice stopped. The Pentagon, for its part, has promised to halt payments to Iraqi journalists. Victoria Clarke, a former Pentagon spokeswoman under Donald Rumsfeld, thinks that's a good thing. "I'm for every bit of deception and trick if you're directing it toward the bad guys. That's a good and useful thing to be doing," said Clarke, now a media consultant. "But paying journalists for favorable coverage? Absolutely not." Clarke says the revelations have undermined the goal of the overall mission: to create a free Iraq and free Iraqis. That can't happen if burgeoning Iraqi newspapers are seen as tools of the United States or anyone else. "I understand the frustration of the military. They thought they weren't getting the kind of good press they deserved," Clarke said. "But that is short-term thinking. You might have a good story for one day, but you aren't going to instill in the society you're hoping to create the kind of independent values that you want." Crowley, who headed public information efforts for NATO's forces in Kosovo, believes that establishing credibility, even at the cost of embarrassment, is both smart and proper in the propaganda wars. When NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, it was an error, said Crowley, and was ultimately reported as such. When Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic insisted that Kosovo Albanians were not being slaughtered, it proved to be a lie. Milosevic's regime fell under the weight of his misrepresentations. The term "propaganda" is derived from a 17th century Vatican program to "propagate the faith." Even before President Wilson's time, the aim of propaganda had been the same: persuasion of a target audience to a particular aim or view. The United States has a long history of wartime propaganda programs - promoting government bonds, recycling and homeland security. Many were clever and effective, but some of them were simply shameful, Delwiche said. It was patriot Samuel Adams who suggested calling a fatal brawl between colonists and British soldiers the "Boston Massacre" to demonize the British during the Revolutionary War. "That was good branding," Delwiche said. But a racially charged World War II program to demonize the Japanese promoted a widespread fear of Japanese-Americans that led to their internment. Sixty years later, the legacy of that program was invoked during debate on renewing Patriot Act. Since the early 1950s, appropriations bills by Congress have included a clause forbidding agencies to use any portion of their budget for domestic propaganda purposes. And still government agencies churn out massive numbers of printed reports, radio spots and video releases designed to persuade taxpayers to use or support a wide variety of government programs. But in a society inured with spin, spam and saturation advertising, the notion of government propaganda has been blurred by a more sophisticated view of "Information Operations" that clouds the distinction between propaganda and marketing. "Most of us think of propaganda as simply deceitful; or better yet, the other guy's argument," Delwiche said. "But the very best propaganda usually has the advantage of being grounded in some version of the truth." Crowley goes even further. He thinks global communications systems have rendered deceitful propaganda obsolete. He said a deceptive, or even thoughtless, propaganda claim almost anywhere in the world is bound to blow back in full, true view to U.S. readers and viewers. "Information knows no boundaries," said Crowley. "You have to start with the understanding that anything you put in the global environment is going to end up in the U.S." Crowley says the war in Iraq has evidenced both the best and the worst in the American talent for propaganda. While under-the-table payments to Iraqi journalists fall in the category of bad ideas, the embedding of journalists - a policy implemented by during Clarke's Pentagon tenure - helped world audiences better understand the ground-level realities of war, Crowley said. The other side has had its propaganda victories as well. Photos of American abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and stories of secret CIA detention facilities have provided limitless grist for those opposed to the U.S. invasion. And with savvy use of the Internet, even fleeing terrorists are able to take full advantage of every American misstep. Crowley said the quality of propaganda in Iraq depends on what happens there, not the other way around. "I understand the Pentagon's frustration over no good news, but the Iraqi people have the big picture right," Crowley said. "We've not been able to control the insurgency. It doesn't matter how many journalists we buy and how many stories we plant." |