While
America has gone a century and a half without being “war-torn” in
the conventional sense, the damage of war is not limited to that
inflicted by guns and bombs.
by
Whitney Webb
Part
4 - Propaganda: getting everyone on board for war
In
addition to intimidating the public and curbing speech in
increasingly fascist attempts to limit dissent, World War I also saw
the advent of a new government agency aimed at the mass distribution
of propaganda in order to drum up support for the war.
The
Committee on Public Information (CPI), established by Wilson through
an executive order, put journalist George Creel – a fervent
supporter of Wilson and the war – in charge of the first state
propaganda bureau in the country’s history. In addition to Creel,
the members of the committee were the Secretaries of State, War and
the Navy.
The idea
for the CPI was not Wilson’s, it was Creel’s. Creel had heard
many military leaders call for strong censorship of criticism of the
war and subsequently sought to convince Wilson that “expression,
not suppression” of a controlled press could help the war effort.
He urged Wilson to create an agency that would disseminate “not
propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true
sense of the word, meaning the ‘propagation of faith.’”
The CPI
brought powerful businessmen, media personalities, scholars,
novelists and artists into its fold, creating a propaganda machine
that blended marketing techniques with human psychology. It became
the primary conduit for information regarding the war, leading Creel
to assert that – in any given week – more than 20,000 newspaper
columns across the country were filled with information provided by
CPI handouts. Towards the latter half of the war, much of the content
produced by the CPI was hateful and xenophobic, adopting slogans like
“Stop the Hun!” on posters that showed German soldiers
terrorizing women and young children. Its film division produced such
titles as The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin and Wolves of Kultur.
The CPI
was also remarkably thorough in its control of dissenting narratives.
According to historian Michael Sweeney, “every war story
[against the government narrative] had been censored somewhere along
the line — at the source, in transit, or in the newspaper offices
in accordance with ‘voluntary’ rules established by the CPI.”
The CPI was also a global operation, with offices in nine countries,
and used its propaganda to great effect in Europe, Latin America and
elsewhere.
The CPI
was dissolved soon after the war and the domestic (but not foreign)
distribution of propaganda was made illegal by the Smith-Mundt Act of
1948.
However,
in 2013, then-President Barack Obama signed the 2013 National
Defense and Authorization Act (NDAA) into law, which contained a
piece of legislation, known as “The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act
of 2012,” that completely lifted the propaganda ban. The act’s
co-authors asserted at the time that removing the domestic propaganda
ban was necessary in order to combat “al-Qaeda’s and other
violent extremists’ influence among populations.”
Five
years later, the result of the lifting of the ban can be seen in the
era of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” in which false
narratives have become commonplace and largely normalized, as those
who publish demonstrably false claims face minimal, if any,
accountability.
Meanwhile,
alternative media sources that provide dissenting narratives are
rapidly being silenced and those journalists and citizens who offer
different perspectives on key issues are dismissed as “regime
apologists” and “Russian bots.” Were war to break out,
surely the current efforts under way to control the narrative would
only grow.
Source,
links:
Comments
Post a Comment