propaganda

1. The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.
2. Material disseminated by the advocates or opponents of a doctrine or cause: wartime propaganda.
3. Propaganda Roman Catholic Church. A division of the Roman Curia that has authority in the matter of preaching the gospel, of establishing the Church in non-Christian countries, and of administering Church missions in territories where there is no properly organized hierarchy.

[Short for New Latin Sacra Congregātiō dē Prōpagandā Fidē, Sacred Congregation for Propagating the Faith (established 1622), from ablative feminine gerundive of Latin prōpāgāre, to propagate. See propagate.]

Message conveyed in order to support and spread a particular opinion or point of view, engaging both the intellect and the emotions of the audience. Propaganda may consist of an overt appeal such as most advertising copy or be non-overt such as the seller's participation in community events, company slogans and logos, special employee benefits and so forth. Ben & Jerry's ice cream has benefited from public knowledge of their corporate commitment to environmental causes and employee empowerment, despite the lack of any direct relevance of those things to their products. Tobacco companies use sponsorships of sporting events to counter their unhealthy image. See also one-sided message.

Definition: information which is false or twisted
Antonyms: truth

Propaganda is a word derived from the Vatican's establishment of the Sacre Congregatio de Propaganda Fide in 1622. It is a process of persuasion designed to induce ideas, opinions, or actions beneficial to the source. As a process, it is value-neutral although the word has acquired pejorative meaning. Analysis of propaganda would more profitably benefit by examination of intentions. In, for example, the case of combat propaganda, more usually termed psychological warfare, the intention is to persuade enemy soldiers to defect, desert, surrender, or otherwise influence their behaviour on the battlefield with a view to defeating them. As such, these ‘munitions of the mind’ have become increasingly more sophisticated with advances in psychology and communications, especially during the course of the 20th century.

Before 1914, propaganda was usually associated with religion and the implanting of ideas to be cultivated in support of existing beliefs and ‘faith’. Its wartime applications, in the Napoleonic or the American independence wars, were confined largely to calls to arms, lampooning the enemy, glorifying victory, and sustaining morale. The intention by the few to impress the many can be traced back to the ancient world in art, architecture, and symbolism. The advent of printing in the 14th century shifted the emphasis from script to print. In wars of religion, propaganda from the pulpit remained a potent method of swaying emotions, hence the Vatican's Sacre Congregatio. Massive advances in communications technologies in the 19th century, the development of a global cable network, and the arrival of the mass media by the end of the century extended propaganda to a global audience.

The Great War of 1914-18, a total war which industrialized warfare and made the home front as important as the fighting front, altered the nature of popular involvement and introduced domestic morale as a military asset. It also discredited the word ‘propaganda’ which henceforth came to be associated with the manipulation of opinion, by foul means rather than fair, with lies or half-truths, and with deceit. In particular, the popularization of atrocity propaganda through the relatively new mass-circulation press and the increasingly popular silent cinema discredited the relationship between propaganda and ‘truth’. It was this manipulative power over human emotions which Hitler identified as being a weapon that could be of enormous value for his purposes.

In the new USSR also, propaganda was seized upon as a device that could serve the state, by extending revolutionary ideas to the illiterate masses and, more innovatively, into the international class struggle. With the advent of radio broadcasting in the 1920s, the ability to transmit propaganda across frontiers and appeal directly to foreign audiences undermined traditional notions about non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. A series of radio ‘wars’ prompted the League of Nations in 1936 to pass a convention attempting to outlaw the use of broadcasting for these purposes. More honoured in the breach as the Nazi and Fascist regimes positioned propaganda as a central feature of their domestic and foreign policies, the BBC ideal that ‘Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation’ fell victim to the ideological conflict that was to produce both WW II and the subsequent Cold War.

By the outbreak of WW II, the sound cinema had also become an important medium for disseminating propaganda. The British Ministry of Information (the choice of words reflecting the nervousness of democratic countries in eschewing propaganda) recognized that ‘for the film to be good propaganda it must also be good entertainment’. Once the USA entered the war, the formidable American motion-picture industry (‘Hollywood’) was mobilized in support of wartime propaganda themes: ‘why we fight’, ‘know your enemy’, ‘unity is strength’, and so on. The wartime democratic alliance evolved a ‘Strategy of Truth’ towards their propaganda, which did not mean that the whole truth was told. But the reputation for credibility which organizations like the BBC were able to develop in their broadcasts to Nazi-occupied Europe was a serious corrective to the propaganda output of Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment encapsulated by the phrase the ‘Big Lie’.

While propaganda by press, poster, radio, and film was used extensively on the domestic fronts to sustain popular morale through the harsh realities of war, bombing, rationing, victories, and defeats, on the fighting fronts it was used as an adjunct to military tactics. Millions of leaflets were dropped over enemy lines, mobile loudspeaker teams shouted out messages, and radio transmissions attempted to sow seeds of confusion, doubt, and defeatism. It is axiomatic that successful propaganda must go hand in hand with policy. The Allies in this respect shot themselves in the foot with the insistence on unconditional surrender following the Casablanca Conference of 1942. By announcing that all Germans in defeat would be treated in exactly the same way, this policy fused the fate of the German people with that of the Nazi Party in a way undreamed of by a grateful Goebbels. It enabled him to launch his own drive for total war, it pre-empted the Allied use of such inducements as ‘surrender or die’ since any German soldier would be treated as a war criminal, and it partly helps to explain why the German people kept fighting to the bitter end.

Words by themselves did not win the war. But in the ideological confrontation between the USSR and the USA in the years that followed, they were to become significant weapons in the Cold War. Overt propaganda by the US Information Agency or by Radio Moscow was supplemented by covert activity and disinformation by the CIA and KGB. Propaganda continued to be employed in the low-intensity conflicts of Korea or in the ‘hearts and minds’ campaign in the Malayan emergency, but it was its escalation into a strategic weapon in the global battle for allegiances in disputes over nuclear weapons, the space race, even medical advances or the Olympic Games, which made it an all-pervasive feature of the Cold War.

With the advent of television in the 1950s and 1960s, a new medium of enormous propaganda potential was quickly recognized. The Vietnam war was fought out nightly in the living rooms of middle America and, as the ‘first television war’, raised the spectre of whether democracies would be able to sustain popular support in wartime under its prying lens. A myth emerged that the US military lost the Vietnam war not due to military incompetence but because it had been stabbed in the back by a hostile media on the home front. It is important to remember that Vietnam was the most uncensored war of recent military history and, in light of the lack of restrictions imposed on journalists, the tendency was to shoot the messenger for the bad news it carried.

Nonetheless, the belief that the media could become (to use Churchill's phrase about the BBC) an ‘enemy within the gates’ for democracies, which would always therefore be at a disadvantage in conflicts against authoritarian regimes, gave rise to the belief that restrictions on reporting were essential in wartime. In the 1980s, as the system of media ‘pools’ was being developed, the British showed the way during the Falklands war. Only 30 journalists (all British) were allowed to accompany the Task Force and they were dependent on the military not only for transportation to the combat theatre but also for communications from it. Indeed, it took longer for one Independent Television News despatch to reach London than it had taken one of William Howard Russell's despatches for The Times 150 years earlier during the Crimean war.

Developments in new communications technologies during the 1980s, such as the portable satellite phone, the laptop computer, and digital data transmission meant that such military control of the information environment would never be possible again. However, as the Gulf war of 1991 indicated, propaganda had not been confined to the dustbin of history. An increasingly sophisticated US military information policy was able to secure a desired view of warfare through the release of videotapes showing missiles hitting (not missing) their targets with unprecedented accuracy, and through live television press conferences which bypassed the traditional role of the media as mediator. Despite the unprecedented effort by the Iraqis to counter this propaganda of a ‘clean’ and ‘smart’ high-tech war by permitting correspondents from Coalition countries to stay behind in the enemy capital under fire, the military information agenda succeeded in dominating the media coverage. Democracies had indeed demonstrated that they could wage war in the presence of more than 1, 500 journalists, and thereby sustain public support in the process.

The Gulf war has been described as the first ‘information war’. Indeed, the emphasis in contemporary military thinking on ‘Command and Control Warfare’ places great emphasis on information warfare or ‘information operations’. As such, propaganda is redefined as a non-lethal weapon, a combat force multiplier which saves lives and empowers the individual to make decisions he/she might not otherwise have done—all to the benefit of the source.

Bibliography

• Ellul, J., Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (New York, 1965).
• Pratkanis, A., and Aronson, E., Age of Propaganda (New York, 1991).
• Taylor, Philip M., Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era (Manchester, 1995)

— Philip M. Taylor

n. any form of communication in support of national objectives designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Originating in an office of the Roman Catholic Church charged with propagation of the faith (de propaganda fidei), the word entered common usage in the second quarter of the twentieth century to describe attempts by totalitarian regimes to achieve comprehensive subordination of knowledge to state policy. Based in the desire of fascists, Nazis, and Bolsheviks to develop legitimacy and social control by overcoming the broadly based cultural hegemony of antecedent regimes, propaganda soon came to be directed toward the populations of other states, provoking reactions from the industrialized democracies. As war approached in the late 1930s Britain established its own Ministry, not of Propaganda but of Information, its very title an exercise in rhetoric. This employed print, radio, film, and the spoken word to put the best gloss on state policy and the fortunes of British arms (white propaganda) while also running down and misrepresenting the Axis powers (black propaganda). Still important in international relations during the Cold War through radio stations such as Voice of America, propaganda both at home and abroad was frequently crude and ineffective, especially in communist states lacking the technical skills of advertising, marketing, and communications developed within the private sectors of a consumerist Western culture with largely unrestricted media. It has, however, been brought to a fine art in the advanced industrial economies in recent years, where the presentation of state policy and legislation has often received as much attention as its content and drafting.

— Charles Jones

For more information on propaganda, visit Britannica.com.

Propaganda can be defined as any message intended to modify the attitudes and behaviour of people at whom it is directed, primarily by appealing to their emotions. Its use is not confined to dictatorships and authoritarian organizations. Democracies have employed it extensively in wartime. In peacetime it plays a significant role in electoral politics, and in public-service campaigns relating to social problems. Messages may range from simple verbal texts to elaborate combinations of aural and visual signals (e.g. television commercials). The media used have included print, graphic art, film, radio, television, and architecture, from baroque palaces to fascist monuments.

Photographs have also featured widely in modern propaganda, because of their reproducibility, manipulability, and, undoubtedly, because of the popular assumption that ‘the camera never lies’.

The promotion of photography by Napoleon III and his government as a means of publicizing the achievements of the Second Empire (1852-70) can be described as propagandistic. But more explicitly so was use of the camera in France after the empire's collapse. Early examples related to the Paris Commune, most notably the efforts of Eugène Appert (1830-91) to recreate Communard atrocities by means of elaborate photomontages. Later, photographic propaganda was used on a large scale by right-wing opponents of the Third Republic, including Bonapartists, royalists, and the military demagogue General Boulanger, and, at the turn of the century, by both sides in the Dreyfus Affair.

In the First World War propaganda was used extensively by all belligerents. Although graphic art and, increasingly, motion pictures probably had greater impact, huge numbers of war photographs were exhibited and published. However, the war's greatest contribution to the history of propaganda was the emergence of large organizations with the task of bombarding soldiers, civilians, the enemy, and neutrals with carefully designed, emotive messages over long periods of time. Government-sponsored mass communication, using sophisticated methods, was to play a major role in left-and right-wing dictatorships, and the war efforts of democratic states, over the next several decades.

Visual communication was at a premium in Soviet Russia, given the country's high level of illiteracy and multitude of linguistic groups. In the 1920s, before the consolidation of Stalin's dictatorship and the imposition of Socialist Realism, the new regime mobilized many talented photographers and designers—including Max Alpert, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Arkadi Shaikhet, and Gyorgy Zelma—who shared its utopian vision and created dynamic, modernistic images of industrialization and social renewal. Western imports like the photo-essay, exemplified by A Day in the Life of a Moscow Worker (1931) and Rodchenko's images of the White Sea-Baltic Canal (1933), were adapted for Russia's urban public and sympathizers abroad. Even after the suppression of avant-garde styles as ‘bourgeois deviationism’ in the 1930s, photography continued to play a major role in the visual rhetoric of ‘democratic centralism’, collectivism, and ‘Socialism in one country’.

Leadership imagery became increasingly important. Portraitist-in-chief to Lenin was Pyotr Otsup, whose photographs were still circulating in their millions at the end of the 1920s. A range of photographers depicted Lenin's unphotogenic and camera-shy successor Stalin, who by the 1930s was shown with declining frequency alongside Vladimir Ilyich (or a bust or statue of him), and in monumental isolation from other Politburo members. Every medium and format was used to project his image, from postcards to gigantic posters. On 1 May 1932 Sverdlov Square in Moscow was decorated with matching photo posters of Lenin and Stalin, each 25 m high by 9 wide (82 × 29 1/2 ft), and copious information about the problems overcome and the quantities of materials used appeared in the press. Other techniques included the conversion of photographs of Stalin into paintings, and the superimposition of his image on pictures of industrial or military subjects or, in 1949, of crowds celebrating his 70th birthday.

Long before Stalin's death in 1953 a comprehensive technical and iconographical repertoire had developed that continued to be used in other communist states, including China. There were variations from country to country. Whereas Stalin, for example, was rarely photographed interacting with ordinary people, Walter Ulbricht in the GDR was regularly depicted playing volleyball or eating in factory canteens. In general, however, photographers had to work with a palette of approved images: low-angle shots of Red Army soldiers, high-angle ones of applauding crowds, lyrical views of the homeland, and suitably impressive (but not avant-gardistic) pictures of mills, dams, power stations, and naval manoeuvres. Physical manipulation was used to rejuvenate geriatric leaders, eliminate bottles and cigarette butts from official meetings, and, as with Trotsky in the 1920s, weed ‘unpersons’ out of leadership photographs. Particularly sinister and surreal in this regard was a picture, c. 1968, of the Czech reformer Alexander Dubček and President Svoboda surrounded by enthusiastic, camera-wielding youth. In a second version, Svoboda appears larger and more prominent, but Dubček has been eliminated (but not, presumably, from the onlookers' family albums).

The balance between official and grass-roots photography was more interesting in Nazi Germany (1933-45), which had a richer photographic culture than other large totalitarian states. Germany in the 1920s had a major photographic industry, a mature illustrated press, and a large camera-owning population. By 1933 both Nazis and communists were adept at photographic propaganda, from photomontage to the recycling of historical images (e.g. of the German Revolution (1918-19)). During the Third Reich, notwithstanding the establishment of a Propaganda Ministry under Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Hoffmann, as Hitler's long-standing crony and personal photographer, remained the leading figure in the photographic firmament, and maintained a near-monopoly of Führer images until 1945. He helped to form the ‘Hitler myth’ that was one of the unequivocal successes of Nazi propaganda. Hitler pictures were distributed in saturation quantities as postage stamps, postcards, cigarette cards, posters, press illustrations, and in the albums published by Hoffmann. Two of the most successful of these, Hitler wie ihn keiner kennt (The Hitler Nobody Knows; 1932) and Hitler in seinen Bergen (Hitler in his Mountains; 1935), which presented their subject as reassuringly benign and ordinary, continued to sell well even after Hitler's official image, from c. 1936, became that of an increasingly remote ‘man of destiny’. Other branches of photographic propaganda were handled by the Propaganda Ministry. Like press coverage generally, photojournalism was ‘tuned’ and regulated according to political needs, with shifting emphases (e.g. on anti-Semitism, Soviet Russia) and predictable taboos (train crashes, indiscretions by Party bosses). Prestige photographic exhibitions such as Deutschland (1936) and Gebt uns vier Jahre Zeit (Give Us Four Years; 1937) were also organized by the Ministry, as was coverage of propaganda events like the 1936 Olympics. In photography, as in other media, only those deemed politically and racially sound could belong to professional organizations and, therefore, work.

Amateur photography was another matter. Although all clubs were ideologically ‘coordinated’, individuals could generally be relied upon to convey a positive impression of life in the new Germany. Pets, babies, holidays, and landscapes continued to dominate exhibitions and family albums. Notable from this perspective were the photographic courses organized on the vacation cruises sponsored by the official leisure organization, Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy), which evidently aimed to spread the practice of self-generating photographic propaganda among the working class. Amateur activity continued to be encouraged in the first half of the war, but dwindled from 1943 as materials became scarce and wartime reality more grim.

Germany's democratic opponents made extensive use of photographic propaganda in the Second World War. Much more than in 1914-18, photography was the basis for posters, designed by advertising experts like the American Victor Keppler. Accredited press photographers, subject to censorship and other pressures, fed the illustrated press, whose role was both to inform and encourage. Official photographers supplied vast numbers of images (some staged) for use in the innumerable publications of the US Office of War Information and British Ministry of Information, covering every aspect of the Allied war effort. Commercial publishers illustrated their books with pictures by civilian photographers—men like John Hinde—whose wartime work can be described as propagandistic.

In peacetime democratic politics, management of photographic coverage is as important as the production of images. Politicians, whether in office or candidates for office, must not only disseminate photographs to convey a chosen message but endeavour to head off negative representation. (Frank Capra's 1939 comedy about a political ingénu on Capitol Hill, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, satirized the perils of photography.) Ulrich Keller and others have argued that photography became important in American politics during the successful presidential campaigns of William McKinley in 1896 and 1900, when large-scale process reproduction became a reality. It was subsequently used to good effect by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. However, systematic image management came of age under Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45). Although by this time radio and newsreels were probably perceived as more important, Roosevelt's press secretary Stephen Early successfully imposed ‘unwritten rules’ on White House photographers in order to get favourable pictures (and, among other things, avoid depiction of the President's disability). This system was continually refined later on, so that by Ronald Reagan's presidency (1981-9) White House photo opportunities were governed, on pain of exclusion, by detailed rules about photographers' pecking order, the functional separation of photographers and reporters, and the kinds of pictures that could be taken. Yet even in this controlled environment embarrassing images were made, notably during the Iran-contra scandal in late 1986. (Richard Nixon had suffered similar mishaps). Outside the White House, and other controlled venues like Downing Street or the Élysée Palace, meticulous planning is needed to maximize positive coverage. An interesting 21st-century example was President George W. Bush's Iraq War victory speech aboard USS Abraham Lincoln on 1 May 2003. In fact the carrier was reachable from southern California by helicopter, from which Bush would have emerged in civilian clothes. However, he was flown in a fixed-wing aircraft, a decision that allowed him to appear before the cameras in a military flying suit, a warrior among warriors. Such calculations, using the media's known habits to generate suitable pictures, are fundamental to modern political management.

— Rolf Sachsse/Robin Lenman

Bibliography

• English, D. E., Political Uses of Photography in the Third French Republic, 1871-1914 (1984).
• Jaubert, A., Le Commissariat aux archives (1986).
• Winfield, B., FDR and the News Media (1990).
• Squiers, C., “‘Picturing Scandal: Iranscam, the Reagan White House, and the Photo Opportunity’”, in C. Squiers (ed.), The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography (1990).
• Herz, R., Loiperdinger, M., and Pohlmann, U. (eds.), Führerbilder: Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Stalin in Fotografie und Film (1995).
• King, D., The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia (1997)

The active manipulation of opinion by means that include distortion or concealment of the truth. It is useful to distinguish agitation propaganda, that seeks to change attitudes, from integration propaganda, that seeks to reinforce already existing attitudes. The borderline between education and indoctrination, or objective statement and political speech, can be hard to define both in practice and theory.

The deliberate use of information, images, and ideas to affect public opinion, propaganda is a policy tool deployed by all governments, although its effectiveness is widely debated by scholars. The term acquired a pejorative connotation because of the exaggerated atrocity stories peddled by all sides fighting in World War I, and the horrifying accomplishments of the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda of Nazi Germany's Joseph Goebbels. Since then, most Western governments have eschewed the term in favor of "public information," "public diplomacy," and other similar euphemisms when discussing their own practices of attempted persuasion, and have applied the word exclusively to the statements of rival regimes.

Information analysts often classify propaganda into three categories: black, gray, and white. Black or covert propaganda consists of outright falsehoods or material falsely attributed to a source. Gray propaganda is unattributed material of questionable validity. White propaganda is the overt spreading of true information in the service of a cause. During the twentieth century, the U.S. government engaged in all three types of propaganda at various times.

The first official U.S. agency charged with developing and distributing propaganda was the Committee on Public Information (CPI), created by order of President Woodrow Wilson on April 6, 1917, within a week of American entry into World War I. George Creel, a journalist who had written pamphlets for Wilson's 1916 re-election campaign, was made chairman. Creel hired reporters, novelists, and advertising copywriters for his sprawling organization that produced a daily newspaper, the Official Bulletin, with a circulation of 100,000, as well as press releases and editorials distributed to regular newspapers throughout the United States. The CPI printed millions of pamphlets for worldwide distribution of messages favorable to the United States, and sent 75,000 volunteers dubbed "Four Minute Men" to give patriotic speeches in movie houses. Other divisions of the CPI produced cartoons, drawings, and films, all designed to recruit soldiers, sell war bonds, and foster support for the war effort. In a military counterpart to the CPI, the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Division created a unit for psychological warfare, dropping leaflets behind German lines to demoralize enemy troops.

World War II

Postwar disillusionment soured the public on government sponsored information programs, and it was not until World War II that a successor agency to the CPI was created. On June 13, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the Office of War Information (OWI) to present government policies to the public both at home and abroad. The OWI engaged in activities similar to the CPI, producing printed materials, films, and newspapers; but it went beyond the CPI's legacy to introduce regular broadcasts over the government radio station, the Voice of America (VOA), and worked with Hollywood to ensure that privately produced movies were in harmony with government aims in the war. The OWI soon had twenty-six overseas posts known as the U.S. Information Service (USIS). On the military side, psychological warfare was the purview of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), headed by William D. ("Wild Bill") Donovan. In addition to sabotage and intelligence work, the OSS engaged in propaganda in support of military operations, including spreading disinformation. In Latin America, Nelson Rockefeller directed an ambitious information campaign to shore up support for the Allies, placing articles in U.S. and Latin American periodicals and distributing approved films through the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA).

The end of the war again brought about severe cutbacks in these agencies, and President Harry S. Truman eliminated OWI altogether, placing the VOA under the State Department. But the anti-Communist campaign of the Cold War required a continuing government information program. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), successor to the OSS, took over covert propaganda efforts, using black and gray propaganda to undermine the appeal of the French and Italian Communist Parties in elections. CIA funds supported the British magazines Encounter and New Leader, the French Preuves, the Spanish Cuadernos, the Italian Tempo Presente, and the Austrian Forum. A CIA front organization, the National Committee for a Free Europe, created Radio Free Europe (RFE) in 1949 for broadcasting to Eastern Europe; another CIA front set up Radio Liberty (RL) two years later. The Agency also funded Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) directed at East Germany, and created a covert radio station as part of its successful operation to overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala in 1954.

Domestic Propaganda

Despite its mandate not to engage in domestic intelligence work, from the late 1940s at least until the mid-1970s, the CIA also placed propaganda in the American media, either directly or by sponsoring research and paying publication costs. CIA material was delivered, wittingly or unwittingly, by major television networks, wire service agencies, and major newspapers. Between 1947 and 1967, more than 1,000 books were written on behalf of the CIA, and published by reputable houses both in America and abroad.

In 1950, President Truman persuaded Congress to back a "Campaign of Truth" to wage psychological warfare against the Soviet bloc. He created the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) within the National Security Council (NSC) to coordinate propaganda efforts from the Departments of State and Defense as well as CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Although the PSB's struggles for bureaucratic control were resisted by the individual departments, government information programs grew in scope. The VOA broadcast radio programs to one hundred countries in forty-six languages, and ten thousand foreign newspapers received daily materials from the U.S. press service.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the United States Information Agency (USIA) on June 1, 1953, as an independent agency controlling the VOA and other overt information programs formerly in the State Department. The USIA touted some of Eisenhower's favorite programs, such as Atoms for Peace, Food for Peace, and the People-to-People exchange programs, which brought private citizens into contact with foreigners. In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy invited famed CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow to head the USIA.

Controversial Outcomes

Foreign propaganda work sometimes provoked controversy, as when Radio Liberty exhorted the people of Eastern Europe to overthrow their governments. When Hungarians revolted in 1956, many counted on help from the United States and complained bitterly that Radio Liberty had raised their expectations. The station's broadcasts grew more cautious after Soviet tanks crushed the revolt.

In the 1980s, with the sharpening of the Cold War, the USIA received a billion-dollar budget to support new programs such as Worldnet television broadcasts. From 1983 to 1986, the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean was directed by Otto J. Reich, who reported to the National Security Council. Reich used white, gray, and black propaganda techniques to try to reverse the negative media coverage of the Reagan administration's policies in Central America, where Washington supported regimes with poor human rights records in El Salvador and Guatemala and underwrote the counterrevolutionary Contra forces seeking to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. His staff of psychological warfare specialists from the CIA and the Pentagon claimed credit for placing ghost-written op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post and intervening with editorial offices at CBS and NBC News and National Public Radio to alter their coverage of Central America. Reich's office spread the rumor that reporters who wrote articles critical of the Contras had been bribed by Sandinista agents with sexual favors, and his staff orchestrated a smear campaign linking the Sandinistas to anti-Semitism. The nonpartisan General Accounting Office later found that Reich's office "engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities."

Since 1985, radio and later television broadcasts have been beamed to Cuba by a government station named after nineteenth-century Cuban independence hero José Martí. Radio Martí and TV Martí largely adhered to VOA standards of objectivity until 1998, when pressure from Cuban exile political organizations led VOA to move the station from Washington to Miami, where it came under the influence of hard-line exile activists. The subsequent change in tone of the broadcasts led Senate critics to call the program an embarrassment to the United States, and listenership inside Cuba fell to an estimated level of eight percent.

The Gulf War

The end of the Cold War reduced the emphasis on propaganda broadcasts to Eastern Europe, but the military continued to apply psychological warfare during armed conflicts. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the U.S. military dropped some 29 million leaflets over Iraqi lines, and used radio and loudspeaker teams to urge enemy soldiers to surrender. Army officers tightly restricted access to the battlefield, guiding "pools" of journalists to approved sites for supervised reporting. The Pentagon provided compelling video footage to news organizations, famously demonstrating the capabilities of "smart bombs" that accurately hit their targets without causing collateral damage. Only after the war was it revealed that "smart" weapons made up a small fraction of the bombs dropped on Iraq. Covert CIA broadcasts to Iraq urged the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south to rise up against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but drew criticism when the revolts took place and were swiftly crushed without U.S. interference.

Bibliography

Green, Fitzhugh. American Propaganda Abroad. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1988.

Hixson, Walter L. Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.

Jackall, Robert, ed. Propaganda. New York: New York University, 1995.

Schlesinger, Stephen, and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982.

Shulman, Holly Cowan. The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941–1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Wagnleitner, Reinhold. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War. Translated by Diana M. Wolf. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1994.

The United States has utilized propaganda techniques repeatedly through its history, particularly during periods of war and international crisis. As early as the revolutionary period, Americans evinced a shrewd grasp of the utility of propaganda as an instrument of foreign policy. The total wars of the early twentieth century led the U.S. government to employ propaganda on a massive scale as an accessory to military operations, but the Cold War institutionalized propaganda as a central component of American foreign policy. The governmental use of propaganda continued to expand in the twenty-first century, largely due to the harnessing of the revolution in communications. But for most Americans, propaganda has a negative connotation as a treacherous, deceitful, and manipulative practice. Americans have generally thought of propaganda as something "other" people and nations do, while they themselves merely persuade, inform, or educate. Americans have employed numerous euphemisms for their propaganda in order to distinguish it from its totalitarian applications and wicked connotations. The most common of these has been "information," a designation that has adorned all of the official propaganda agencies of the government—from the Committee on Public Information (1917–1919) and the Office of War Information (1942–1945) to the U.S. Information Agency (1953–1999) and its successor, the Office of International Information Programs in the Department of State.

For a brief period during the 1940s and early 1950s, the terms "psychological warfare" and "political warfare" were openly espoused by propaganda specialists and politicians alike. Increasingly, they turned to euphemisms like "international communication" and "public communication" to make the idea of propaganda more palatable to domestic audiences. During the Cold War, common phrases also included "the war of ideas," "battle for hearts and minds," "struggle for the minds and wills of men," "thought war," "ideological warfare," "nerve warfare," "campaign of truth," "war of words," and others. Even the term "Cold War" was used to refer to propaganda techniques and strategy (as in "Cold War tactics"). Later, the terms "communication," "public diplomacy," "psychological operations" (or "psyops"), "special operations," and "information warfare" became fashionable. Political propaganda and measures to influence media coverage were likewise labeled "spin," and political propagandists were "spin doctors" or, more imaginatively, "media consultants" and "image advisers."

The term "propaganda" has spawned as many definitions as it has euphemisms. Harold Lass well, a pioneer of propaganda studies in the United States, defined it as "the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols." Like other social scientists in the 1930s, he emphasized its psychological elements: propaganda was a subconscious manipulation of psychological symbols to accomplish secret objectives. Subsequent analysts stressed that propaganda was a planned and deliberate act of opinion management. A 1958 study prepared for the U.S. Army, for example, defined propaganda as "the planned dissemination of news, information, special arguments, and appeals designed to influence the beliefs, thoughts, and actions of a specific group." In the 1990s the historian Oliver Thomson defined propaganda broadly to include both deliberate and unintentional means of behavior modification, describing it as "the use of communication skills of all kinds to achieve attitudinal or behavioural changes among one group by another." Numerous communication specialists have stressed that propaganda is a neutral activity concerned only with persuasion, in order to free propagandists (and their profession) from pejorative associations. Some social scientists have abandoned the term altogether because it cannot be defined with any degree of precision; and others, like the influential French philosopher Jacques Ellul, have used the term but refused to define it because any definition would inevitably leave something out.

As these examples indicate, propaganda is notoriously difficult to define. Does one identify propaganda by the intentions of the sponsor, by the effect on the recipients, or by the techniques used? Is something propaganda because it is deliberate and planned? How does propaganda differ from advertising, public relations, education, information, or, for that matter, politics? At its core, propaganda refers to any technique or action that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, or behavior of a group, in order to benefit the sponsor. Propaganda is usually, but not exclusively, concerned with public opinion and mass attitudes. The purpose of propaganda is to persuade—either to change or reinforce existing attitudes and opinions. Yet propaganda is also a manipulative activity. It often disguises the secret intentions and goals of the sponsor; it seeks to inculcate ideas rather than to explain them; and it aspires to modify or control opinions and actions primarily to benefit the sponsor rather than the recipient.

Although manipulative, propaganda is not necessarily untruthful, as is commonly believed. In fact, many specialists believe that the most effective propaganda operates with different layers of truth—from half-truths and the truth torn out of context to the just plain truth. Propagandists have on many occasions employed lies, misrepresentations, or deceptions, but propaganda that is based on fact and that rings true to the intended audience is bound to be more persuasive than bald-faced lies.

Another common misconception identifies propaganda narrowly by its most obvious manifestations—radio broadcasts, posters, leaflets, and so on. But propaganda experts employ a range of symbols, ideas, and activities to influence the thoughts, attitudes, opinions, and actions of various audiences—including such disparate modes of communication and human interaction as educational and cultural exchanges, books and scholarly publications, the adoption of slogans and buzzwords, monuments and museums, spectacles and media events, press releases, speeches, policy initiatives, and person-to-person contacts. Diplomacy, too, has been connected to the practice of propaganda. Communication techniques have been employed by government agents to cultivate public opinion so as to put pressure on governments to pursue certain policies, while traditional diplomatic activities—negotiations, treaties—have been planned, implemented, and presented in whole or in part for the effects they would have on public opinion, both international and domestic.

Types of Propaganda

Modern practitioners of propaganda utilize various schema to classify different types of propaganda activities. One such categorization classifies propaganda as white, gray, or black according to the degree to which the sponsor conceals or acknowledges its involvement. White propaganda is correctly attributed to the sponsor and the source is truthfully identified. (The U.S. government's international broadcast service Voice of America, for example, broadcasts white propaganda.) Gray propaganda, on the other hand, is unattributed to the sponsor and conceals the real source of the propaganda. The objective of gray propaganda is to advance viewpoints that are in the interest of the originator but that would be more acceptable to target audiences than official statements. The reasoning is that avowedly propagandistic materials from a foreign government or identified propaganda agency might convince few, but the same ideas presented by seemingly neutral outlets would be more persuasive. Unattributed publications, such as articles in newspapers written by a disguised source, are staples of gray propaganda. Other tactics involve wide dissemination of ideas put forth by others—by foreign governments, by national and international media outlets, or by private groups, individuals, and institutions. Gray propaganda also includes material assistance provided to groups that put forth views deemed useful to the propagandist.

Like its gray cousin, black propaganda also camouflages the sponsor's participation. But while gray propaganda is unattributed, black propaganda is falsely attributed. Black propaganda is subversive and provocative; it is usually designed to appear to have originated from a hostile source, in order to cause that source embarrassment, to damage its prestige, to undermine its credibility, or to get it to take actions that it might not otherwise. Black propaganda is usually prepared by secret agents or an intelligence service because it would be damaging to the originating government if it were discovered. It routinely employs underground newspapers, forged documents, planted gossip or rumors, jokes, slogans, and visual symbols.

Another categorization distinguishes between "fast" and "slow" propaganda operations, based on the type of media employed and the immediacy of the effect desired. Fast media are designed to exert a short-term impact on public opinion, while the use of slow media cultivates public opinion over the long haul. Fast media typically include radio, newspapers, speeches, television, moving pictures, and, since the 1990s, e-mail and the Internet. These forms of communication are able to exert an almost instantaneous effect on select audiences. Books, cultural exhibitions, and educational exchanges and activities, on the other hand, are slow media that seek to inculcate ideas and attitudes over time.

An additional category of propaganda might be termed "propaganda of the deed," or actions taken for the psychological effects they would have on various publics. The famous Doolittle Raid of April 1942 is a classic example. After months of negative news from the Pacific during World War II, Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle of the U.S. Army Air Corps led a force of sixteen planes on a bombing raid of Japan. The mission was pointless from a military point of view, but psychologically it was significant. For Americans, it provided a morale boost and evidence that the United States was "doing something" to strike at the enemy directly; for the Japanese, it was a warning that the United States possessed the capability to reach their homeland with strategic bombers and a reminder that the attack at Pearl Harbor had not completely destroyed the U.S. fleet. "Propaganda of the deed" can also include such disparate actions as educational or cultural exchanges, economic aid, disaster relief, disarmament initiatives, international agreements, the appointment of investigating commissions, legislation, and other policy initiatives when employed primarily for the effects they would have on public opinion.

Revolution, War, and Propaganda to 1917

By whatever name we call it, propaganda has a long history. War propaganda is as ancient as war itself. Anthropologists have unearthed evidence that primitive peoples used pictures and symbols to impress others with their hunting and fighting capabilities. The Assyrian, Greek, and Roman empires employed storytelling, poems, religious symbols, monuments, speeches, documents, and other means of communication to mobilize their armed forces or demoralize those of their enemies. As early as the fifth century B.C., the Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu advocated various techniques to maintain fighting morale and to destroy the enemy's will to fight. The nineteenth-century German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz identified psychological forces as decisive elements of modern war.

Thus, propaganda is not, as it is sometimes believed, a twentieth-century phenomenon born of the electronic communications revolution. Throughout history the governors have attempted to influence the ways the governed see the world, just as critics and revolutionaries have aspired to change that view. The word itself originated during the Reformation, when the Roman Catholic Church created a commission of cardinals to "propagate" the faith in non-Catholic lands. The principle differences between modern and ancient propaganda are the use of new techniques and technologies, greater awareness of the utility of propaganda, and perhaps also the sheer pervasiveness and volume of modern propaganda.

Although the concept is often associated with dictatorship, propaganda has figured prominently in American life and history. Political propaganda has been an essential ingredient of the democratic process, as politicians and political parties have employed a range of communication techniques to win public support for their ideas and policies. Similarly, countless private groups—from early antislavery societies to modern political action committees—have turned to propaganda techniques to push their agendas. Advertising and public relations, fields that came into fruition during the early twentieth century, have made commercial propaganda a permanent feature of the cultural landscape. War propaganda has been utilized by both government agencies and private groups to win the support of neutrals, demoralize enemies, and energize domestic populations. The pluralistic nature of American life and the existence of a free press has prevented the emergence of a monolithic propaganda apparatus, but it could be argued that these factors have in fact made American democracy better equipped than totalitarian societies for effective propaganda, if only because the free marketplace of ideas has required would-be propagandists to develop ever more sophisticated means of persuasion.

As far back as the colonial period, influential Americans exhibited a remarkable grasp of propaganda techniques. Propaganda and agitation were essential components of the American Revolution. Prior to the outbreak of hostilities, propaganda played a pivotal role in creating the intellectual and psychological climate of the Revolution itself.

Philip Davidson, in his history of the propaganda of the American Revolution, documented a remarkably sophisticated grasp of propaganda techniques among the leading organizers of the Revolution. Although the Founders are rarely recognized as propagandists—probably because of propaganda's pejorative associations—the evidence of a conscious, systematic effort by colonial leaders to gain public support for their ideas is unmistakable. Benjamin Franklin admitted to exposing "in as striking a light as I could, to the nation, the absurdity of the [British] measures towards America"; Thomas Jefferson spoke of "arousing our people from…lethargy"; and George Washington advocated the release of information "in a manner calculated to attract the attention and impress the minds of the people." Thomas Paine was the Revolution's most famous (and radical) propagandist. He wrote numerous pamphlets articulating with rhetorical flourish the ideological justification for the Revolution, including the influential Common Sense and the poetic Crisis, which began with the memorable words, "These are the times that try men's souls."

These men were keenly sensitive to the importance of public opinion, and they employed a wide variety of techniques to arouse public sentiment against the British. Through town meetings, assemblies, churches, legal documents, resolutions, demonstrations, songs, plays, oratory, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and letters they agitated relentlessly against the policies of the British government. Newspapers such as the Providence Gazette and the Boston Gazette were crucial in organizing opposition to the Stamp Act and in exploiting such incidents as the Boston Massacre. Powerful slogans such as "No Taxation Without Representation" and "Liberty or Death" were utilized to mobilize colonists for revolution, as were such rituals as effigy burning and the planting of "liberty trees."

Several revolutionaries employed the tactics that would later be known as gray propaganda. They wrote articles, letters, and pamphlets under pseudonyms to disguise their identities and to create the impression that opposition to British policies was much greater than it was. Samuel Adams, for example, wrote under twenty-five different pseudonyms in numerous publications. Benjamin Franklin articulated a shrewd understanding of the techniques of propaganda, including the use of gray and black materials. He remarked: "The facility with which the same truths may be repeatedly enforced by placing them daily in different lights in newspapers…gives a great chance of establishing them. And we now find that it is not only right to strike while the iron is hot but that it may be very practicable to heat it by continually striking." The tactics Franklin was referring to—incessant repetition of propaganda themes and the transmitting of ideas through local media outlets in the form of news—described core techniques of modern propaganda and are an indication of the sophistication of revolutionary war propaganda.

The Revolution also saw the utilization of these and other propaganda techniques as instruments of diplomacy. Franklin worked assiduously to mold European views of the conflict and he especially cultivated French opinion to secure France's assistance in the war. To isolate the British diplomatically and to encourage domestic opposition to the war in Britain, Franklin widely publicized British war atrocities, even resorting to black propaganda to exaggerate and fabricate crimes. In 1777 he distributed a phony letter, purportedly written by a German commander of Hessian mercenaries, indicating that the British government advised him to let wounded soldiers die. The letter caused a sensation in France and also induced numerous desertions by the Hessian mercenaries. Franklin also forged an entire issue of the Boston Independent, which contained a fabricated account of British scalp hunting. The story touched off a public uproar in Britain and was used by opposition politicians to attack the conduct of the war. The historian Oliver Thomson described these efforts as "one of the most thorough campaigns of diplomatic isolation by propaganda ever mounted."

The revolutionary war itself promoted themes common to most war propaganda: the righteousness of the cause, the savageness of the enemy, and the necessity and certainty of victory. Although no theme received greater treatment than the depravity of the enemy, it was the Revolution's appeal to high moral purpose that had the most lasting impact on American life. The Declaration of Independence was a brilliant document on the rights of man, but, at the same time, it was a brilliant document that employed emotive rhetoric to justify the Revolution and to rally public opinion to the cause. The war itself was portrayed as a struggle for liberty against tyranny, freedom against slavery. In this, the Revolution provided the model for the themes and ideas that would animate many subsequent propaganda campaigns (and much of the political rhetoric) of the United States. From the planting of liberty trees during the Revolution, to the cultivation of liberty gardens during World War II, symbolic appeals to freedom and liberty were staples of wartime mobilization efforts.

During the American Civil War both the Union and Confederate governments utilized propaganda abroad to influence foreign sentiment. The Union sent propaganda commissions to Europe to influence the governments and people of England and France. President Abraham Lincoln personally appealed to British opinion by writing directly to labor unions and textile industrialists to press the Union case. Lincoln, who had a strong appreciation of public relations techniques, was perhaps the Union's best propagandist. His "house divided" metaphor was one of the most powerful images of the 1860s, and his public addresses—most notably the Gettysburg Address—were calculated to unite Northerners behind the cause. The Emancipation Proclamation was deliberately timed to encourage defections from the Confederacy by border states and was skillfully exploited by Union representatives abroad to win European sentiment.

The Confederate government sponsored a meagerly funded, but relatively sophisticated, propaganda operation in Britain under the direction of Henry Hotze. Hotze successfully placed numerous articles in British newspapers by giving them gratis to journalists, who in turn sold them to newspapers in their own names for personal profit. In this manner he both courted the goodwill of a select company of journalists and concealed his own sponsorship of the articles—a classic tactic of gray propaganda. He also developed a scheme whereby he paid several journalists to work for a weekly paper he produced, The Index. While earning their salaries as Hotze's editors, they also continued writing for influential London dailies. The Index thus provided Hotze with a mechanism for articulating pro-Confederate viewpoints and for subtle bribery of the press.

The Confederacy also sent a representative to France, Edwin De Leon, who openly bribed French newspapers to print favorable editorials on the Confederate cause. De Leon also penned a fervid defense of slavery that probably did more harm than good; few hated the "peculiar institution" as much as the French, and his arguments merely reinforced French hostility to Southern slavery. Despite some successful operations, Confederate propagandists in Europe failed in their ultimate objective of securing recognition by foreign governments. Above all else, this was due to the existence of slavery in the South, which isolated the Confederacy from British and French public opinion.

Propaganda accompanied other pre–twentieth century conflicts in which the United States participated, but it was conducted primarily by private groups and news organizations. Propaganda during the War of 1812 reiterated many of the themes of the revolutionary period by portraying the British as tyrannical opponents of American liberty. American westward expansion in the nineteenth century was justified by appealing to the "manifest destiny" of the United States to colonize North America, while the Indian wars and the Mexican-American War were bolstered by racist and bigoted portrayals of Native Americans and Mexicans. At the end of the nineteenth century, the infamous "yellow press" incited U.S. participation in the Spanish-American War by portraying the Spaniards as monsters, by sensationally reporting and fabricating Spanish atrocities, and by emphasizing the noble and enlightened intentions of the United States. Similarly, during the American-Filipino Wars, U.S. advocates of imperialism portrayed the Filipinos as uncivilized monkeys and as children in need of American tutelage. Much of this propaganda was private, but it reflected popular sentiment and official attitudes, if not direct policy.

Total War, 1917–1945

Notwithstanding this early experience with propaganda, it was primarily the age of total war that inducted the U.S. government into the business of propaganda. During World War I, national governments employed propaganda on an unprecedented scale. The arrival of the modern mass media together with the requirements of total war made propaganda an indispensable element of wartime mobilization. All of the major belligerents turned to propaganda to woo neutrals, demoralize enemies, boost the morale of their troops, and mobilize the support of civilians.

One of the most vital of all World War I propaganda battles was the struggle between Germany and Britain for the sympathy of the American people. The German government organized a program of propaganda in the United States that was so heavy-handed it did more to alienate American public opinion than to win it. The British government, on the other hand, conducted most of its propaganda in the United States covertly, through a secret propaganda bureau directed by the Foreign Office. The British adopted a low-key approach that selectively released news and information to win American sympathies. The publication of the Zimmerman telegram in 1917 (in which Germany sought to enlist Mexico in a war with the United States) was undoubtedly the most important propaganda achievement of the British, and it helped to bring the Americans into the war on the Allied side.

A week after declaring war, President Woodrow Wilson established the first official propaganda agency of the U.S. government to manage public opinion at home and abroad—the Committee on Public Information. Headed by the muckraking journalist George Creel, the committee was responsible for censorship, propaganda, and general information about the war effort. The Creel committee focused on mobilizing support on the home front, but it also conducted an extensive campaign of propaganda abroad, overseeing operations in more than thirty overseas countries.

The committee bombarded foreign media outlets with news, official statements, and features on the war effort and on American life, using leaflets, motion pictures, photographs, cartoons, posters, and signboards to promote its messages. The committee established reading rooms abroad, brought foreign journalists to the United States, crafted special appeals for teachers and labor groups, and sponsored lectures and seminars. In its international propaganda, the committee advertised American strength and commitment to victory in order to curb defeatism among Allied troops and to demoralize enemy soldiers. Stressing the unselfish, anti-imperialistic war aims of the United States, it put forth an idealistic message that reflected the idealism of the Progressive Era, the tone of the Wilson presidency, and long-standing traditions in American ideology. Creel himself spoke excitedly about using the committee to spread the "gospel of democracy" around the world, and staff members pursued that objective with religious fervor. Taking its cue from the president (and British propaganda), the Creel committee stressed that the war was fought for freedom, self-determination, and democracy.

Despite the many successes Creel attributed to the Committee on Public Information, Congress swiftly abolished it in June 1919—a decision that reflected both the natural American distrust of propaganda and Congress's fear that the president would utilize the committee for domestic political purposes. The Creel committee had a short life but a lasting impact. It established the principle that government-sponsored propaganda was a necessity in times of war or national emergency. It also demonstrated the utility of propaganda as a tool of national policy and became the basic model for subsequent U.S. propaganda agencies.

The years that followed nurtured a popular fascination with, and revulsion toward, the practice of propaganda. A series of investigations in the 1920s exposed the nature and scope of Britain's propaganda campaign in the United States, including revelations that the British had fabricated numerous stories about German atrocities. Many Americans came to blame British propaganda for bringing the United States into a wasteful and ruinous war, and the practice of propaganda became associated with deceit and trickery. It was thus in the aftermath of World War I that propaganda acquired its negative connotations—a development that stemmed from the employment of propaganda by a democracy, not, as is generally supposed, from that of a dictatorship. Although British propaganda was probably more effective than Germany's because of military and political blunders by the Germans—such as unrestricted submarine warfare—many observers took from the war a legendary belief in the power of propaganda.

These propaganda campaigns affected the United States in other ways as well. The belief that Americans had been tricked into participating in the first world war delayed U.S. intervention in the second. Moreover, news of Nazi atrocities connected to the Holocaust were greeted incredulously by the American public in part because of the exaggerated and fabricated atrocity propaganda released by the British two decades earlier.

At the same time, the social science revolution and Freudian psychology brought about a public fascination with ideas about subconscious psychological manipulation and mind control. The science of persuasion, in the form of advertising and public relations, came into vogue in the 1920s, and advertising became a large-scale national industry. These developments created a skilled group of professionals with expertise in the employment of symbols, images, and techniques to interpret and to manipulate perceptions.

The development of radio revolutionized the practice of propaganda by making it possible to reach audiences of unprecedented size instantaneously. A short-wave propaganda battle began in the mid-1920s as the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan, and Britain developed international broadcasting capabilities. American suspicion of foreign propaganda was sufficiently aroused that in 1938 Congress passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which required foreign propagandists to register with the U.S. government. The same year, Nazi propaganda in Central and South America led the Roosevelt administration to create the first peacetime propaganda agency of the U.S. government, the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), headed by Nelson Rockefeller.

Initially, the CIAA focused on cultural and educational activities designed to improve relations between the United States and Latin America. The CIAA inaugurated a new tradition in U.S. foreign policy: government sponsorship of educational and cultural exchanges. It sponsored tours by ballet, theater, and music groups, archaeological expeditions, art exhibits, comic books, and academic conferences. Publicly, the CIAA's cultural programs were defended for their reciprocal benefits in promoting "international understanding." Behind closed doors, however, the agency frankly emphasized propaganda motives. It attached far greater importance to interpreting the United States to Latin America than vice versa. The principle theme promoted by the coordinator's office was "Pan-Americanism," stressing that the key to defense of the region lay in hemispheric solidarity. After the United States entered World War II, Rockefeller's CIAA became a full-blown propaganda agency, utilizing film, publications, and radio to "combat the Nazi lie." By 1943, the CIAA had become a large federal agency with a generous budget and nearly 1,500 employees.

In the early part of 1941, as war appeared imminent, Roosevelt created several additional agencies to disseminate propaganda at home and abroad. In 1942 these various information programs were combined into the Office of War Information (OWI) under the direction of the well-known journalist and broadcaster Elmer Davis. Roosevelt also established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, and authorized it to engage in black and gray propaganda abroad, mostly in connection with military operations.

The OWI was a sprawling organization that conducted domestic and international propaganda on a truly massive scale. In addition to millions of leaflets, it produced entire newspapers, which were dropped by airplane to France, Norway, Spain, Ireland, and Germany. One newspaper distributed by the OWI in France achieved a circulation of 7 million per week, compared to a grand total of 3 million leaflets distributed in Europe through all of World War I. The OWI established posts attached to U.S. diplomatic missions overseas, known as the U.S. Information Service, and it operated reading rooms and libraries in more than twenty countries. Radio was the most crucial medium in the overseas propaganda war, and in 1942 the Voice of America was established under OWI jurisdiction. By the end of the war, the Voice of America was broadcasting around the world in forty different languages.

Combat propaganda, or what began to be called "psychological warfare," was utilized by all the belligerents, including the United States. These operations focused on breaking enemy morale, encouraging enemy troops to surrender, publicizing U.S. military victories, positively projecting U.S. war aims, providing aid and encouragement to partisans in occupied territories, and stiffening the resolve of American and Allied troops. Initially, these operations were conducted by OWI personnel, but the idealistic outlook of many of the agency's propagandists clashed with the more conservative mindset of many U.S. military officers who believed it was more interested in advertising Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal than in promoting military objectives. In December 1942, General Dwight D. Eisenhower created a separate psychological warfare branch of the army to participate in the Allied invasion of North Africa. In 1944 he created an even larger organization, the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, to prepare propaganda for the DDay invasion. Psychological warfare was especially important in the Pacific theater, where U.S. propaganda sought to convince Japanese soldiers—who had been taught by their army that to surrender meant relinquishing their place as members of Japanese society—to cease resistance.

Cold War

Despite the importance of propaganda and psychological warfare to the war effort, the United States moved quickly to dismantle the propaganda apparatus it had constructed during World War II. Within weeks of Japan's surrender, President Harry Truman liquidated the Office of War Information, transferring only the bare bones of an information service to the Department of State. Although the OWI was abolished and the budget of its successor was slashed, Truman insisted that the United States maintain at least a modest information program to support U.S. foreign policy. This was a remarkable step, since prior to the 1940s no one seriously considered an organized, government-sponsored effort to influence foreign peoples except during a national emergency.

While Truman acknowledged the importance of propaganda as a peacetime instrument of foreign policy, it was primarily the Cold War that institutionalized propaganda as a permanent instrument of U.S. foreign policy. A widespread belief developed that the United States was losing the "war of ideas" to the Soviet Union's supposedly superior propaganda apparatus. As Cold War tensions intensified, the United States gradually expanded its propaganda capabilities.

In 1948, the information program received permanent legislative sanction with the passage of the Smith-Mundt Act—the first legislative charter for a peacetime propaganda program. The act gave the State Department jurisdiction over both international information operations and cultural and educational exchange programs. Additional propaganda activities were conducted by the newly created Central Intelligence Agency, the economic assistance agencies (forerunners to the Agency for International Development), and the armed forces, especially the army.

In 1950, Truman called for an intensified program of propaganda known as the Campaign of Truth. In a speech delivered to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Truman articulated the perennial domestic justification for official U.S. propaganda: in order to combat enemy lies, the U.S. needed to promote the truth. Under the Campaign of Truth, the State Department's budget for information activities jumped from around $20 million in 1948 to $115 million in 1952—a development aided by the outbreak of the Korean War a few weeks after Truman's speech. The Campaign of Truth also brought a change in the style and content of U.S. propaganda output, which shifted from objective-sounding news and information to hard-hitting propaganda in its most obvious form—cartoons depicting bloodthirsty communists, vituperative anticommunist polemics, and sensational commentary.

In April 1951, Truman created the Psychological Strategy Board to coordinate the American psychological warfare effort. The board acted as a coordinating body for all nonmilitary Cold War activities, including covert operations. It supervised programs for aggressive clandestine warfare and propaganda measures against the Soviet bloc and it developed "psychological strategy" plans for dozens of countries in western Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. By the time Truman left office, the U.S. government had established a far-reaching apparatus for influencing public opinion in both friendly and hostile countries.

During these years, the practice of propaganda became inextricably tied to the practices of psychological warfare and covert action. During World War II, psychological warfare was largely seen as an accessory to military operations, but with the onset of the Cold War, psychological warfare specialists defined the concept broadly to include any nonmilitary actions taken to influence public opinion or to advance foreign policy interests. Psychological warfare was transformed into a catchall formula that went beyond mere propaganda to embrace covert operations, trade and economic aid, diplomacy, the threat of force, cultural and educational exchange programs, and a wide range of clandestine activities. Psychological warfare became, in essence, a synonym for Cold War. It reflected the belief of many politicians and foreign policy analysts that the Cold War was an ideological, psychological, and cultural contest for hearts and minds that would be won or lost on the plain of public opinion rather than by blood shed on the battlefield.

Psychological warfare in the Cold War context was also associated with the policy of "rollback," or the employment of nonmilitary means to force the retraction of Soviet power and the "liberation" of Eastern Europe. Rollback was openly espoused by the Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, which campaigned in 1952 against the "immoral" and "futile" policy of containment. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, the policies of liberation and rollback did not originate with the Eisenhower administration. Scholarship in the late 1990s by Gregory Mitrovich, Scott Lucas, and others reveals that Truman's Democratic administration inaugurated a muscular form of rollback years earlier. To these scholars, U.S. efforts to liberate areas under Moscow's control indicate that American foreign policy in the early Cold War was not as defensive and fundamentally nonaggressive as the term "containment" implies or as earlier historiography suggested.

Indeed, the "father of containment," George F. Kennan, was also the driving force behind an aggressive program of psychological warfare and covert action against the Soviet bloc. In early 1948, Kennan, who was then serving as head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, developed a plan for "organized political warfare" against communism. The plan was set forth in National Security Council Document 10/2. The document, approved by President Truman in June 1948, authorized a comprehensive program of clandestine warfare, including black propaganda, psychological warfare, subversion, assistance to underground resistance movements, paramilitary operations, and economic warfare. NSC 10/2, although not generally recognized as a landmark policy paper like the future NSC 68, was especially significant in that it established psychological warfare and covert action as vital instruments of U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War.

Under the authorization provided by NSC 10/2, the Central Intelligence Agency made a botched attempt to detach Albania from the Kremlin's grip, launched leaflet-dropping operations via enormous unmanned hot-air balloons, encouraged defections from behind the Iron Curtain, and sponsored provocative (and generally unsuccessful) paramilitary operations involving U.S.-trained émigrés from Russia and Eastern Europe. The agency's most famous form of anti-Soviet propaganda came in the form of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which broadcast to Eastern Europe and Russia, respectively. The radios were staffed by émigrés and exiled political leaders from the Soviet bloc, but the CIA maintained a fairly loose control over their broadcasts through the National Committee for a Free Europe (also known as the Free Europe Committee), an ostensibly private organization created to camouflage U.S. government involvement.

The CIA also conducted clandestine propaganda operations in allied and neutral areas. The agency subsidized noncommunist labor unions, journalists, political parties, politicians, and student groups. In western Europe the CIA conducted a secret program of cultural and ideological propaganda through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a purportedly private, but CIA-funded, organization that supported the work of anticommunist liberals. Through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the agency published more than twenty prestigious magazines, held art exhibitions, operated a news and feature service, organized high-profile international conferences, published numerous books, and sponsored public performances by musicians and artists.

For much of the Cold War, the CIA also organized both successful and unsuccessful "political action" programs to influence democratic elections, sponsor revolutions or counterrevolutions, and, on a few occasions, topple governments. It conducted numerous operations to influence political developments around the world, most notably in Italy, the Philippines, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Vietnam, Thailand, Chile, Iraq, and Angola. Although details surrounding these operations are murky, the available evidence indicates that propaganda and psychological warfare were the principle instruments of the agency's political action programs. These activities became a means for the United States to influence and manipulate developments in foreign countries so that they served the perceived interests of American national security policies. The extensive employment of covert action signaled an unacknowledged revolution in the way the government conducted its foreign policy: it was now actively intervening in the internal affairs of sovereign nations to encourage the development of ideas, actions, and policies to benefit the United States.

During the Korean War, sensationalized charges that the United States had been waging bacteriological warfare, accounts of Soviet brainwashing techniques, and communist-inspired "peace" campaigns, focused American attention on psychological warfare as a mysterious Cold War weapon. During the 1952 presidential campaign, Eisenhower repeatedly called for an expansive and coordinated psychological warfare effort on a national scale. In San Francisco he delivered a major speech on the subject, arguing that every significant act of government should reflect psychological warfare calculations. He emphasized that the Cold War was a struggle of ideas and argued that the United States must develop every psychological weapon available to win the hearts and minds of the world's peoples. Defining psychological warfare in truly expansive terms, Eisenhower included among the means of psychological warfare diplomacy, mutual economic assistance, trade, friendly contacts, and even sporting events.

These campaign speeches were not mere rhetoric; they reflected Eisenhower's unparalleled faith in psychological warfare. This faith grew in part from his experience with it during World War II and in part from his strong conviction that the Cold War was a long-haul struggle that would be won by nonmilitary means. Whereas Truman was relatively uninvolved in the information activities of his administration, Eisenhower was personally involved in several major propaganda campaigns and played an active role in establishing propaganda themes and tactics.

One of his very first acts as president was to appoint a personal adviser to serve as special assistant for psychological warfare planning, a position filled first by Time-Life executive C. D. Jackson and later by Nelson Rockefeller. He also established a high-level committee, chaired by William H. Jackson, to make recommendations on how to strengthen the U.S. psychological warfare effort. The Jackson committee investigation was arguably the most influential study of U.S. information policy ever conducted. The investigation led to numerous innovations including the establishment of a high-level coordinating body attached to the National Security Council devoted to psychological warfare and strategy. Euphemistically designated the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), it replaced the Psychological Strategy Board in the fall of 1953.

Under Eisenhower, the United States abandoned the aggressive anti-Soviet psychological warfare tactics initiated by his predecessor. The Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty continued to broadcast propaganda to the Soviet bloc, but gradually they abandoned the strident, polemical tone that characterized the Campaign of Truth. This trend was accelerated by controversy surrounding the involvement of Radio Free Europe in provoking the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The brutal suppression of the revolt by Soviet armed forces demonstrated that Moscow would fight to maintain its influence over Eastern Europe and revealed that the policy of liberation carried with it unacceptable psychological, political, and human costs. By the end of 1956, as the historian Walter Hixson has shown, "liberation" had been replaced by an evolutionary strategy that stressed cultural infiltration and straight news and information over aggressive psychological warfare.

Eisenhower also oversaw the creation of an independent propaganda agency, the United States Information Agency (USIA). (Information posts abroad were called the U.S. Information Service, or USIS, because "information agency" had an intelligence connotation in many languages, but both names referred to the same organization.) The agency was modeled after the Office of War Information and Creel's Committee on Public Information, but, unlike its predecessors, the USIA was authorized to conduct only foreign propaganda; domestic operations were explicitly forbidden. The USIA assembled under one roof all the various information programs scattered throughout the government, except those administered by the CIA and the military. It operated a press and publication service and a motion picture and television service. The USIA also assumed responsibility for the Voice of America and for U.S. libraries and information centers abroad.

Despite the many attempts by the United States to "pierce the Iron Curtain" with American propaganda, most of the USIA's resources were directed on the other side of that curtain, in the so-called free world. The agency was primarily concerned with winning the support of neutrals and strengthening the resolve of allies. As a USIA policy document stated: "We are in competition with Soviet Communism primarily for the opinion of the free world. We are (especially) concerned with the uncommitted, the wavering, the confused, the apathetic, or the doubtful within the free world." The agency oversaw more than 208 USIS posts in ninety-one countries, all of them in allied or neutral countries. For much of the Cold War, the USIA's largest programs were in Germany, Austria, Japan, India, Indochina (Vietnam), Thailand, France, and Italy. The USIS also maintained sizable operations in Spain, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Greece, Iran, Mexico, Brazil, and Pakistan. Beginning in the mid-1950s, an increasing amount of attention was spent "targeting" countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America with U.S. propaganda—a development that reflected the growing importance of the developing world to the Cold War competition.

When the USIA was created in 1953, Congress insisted that the Department of State retain jurisdiction over cultural programs in order to distinguish cultural relations from propaganda. In practice, the distinction proved mostly symbolic, since public affairs officers abroad, under orders from the USIA, managed both cultural and information policy and pursued both with an eye to improving the "climate of opinion." Increasingly, foreign policy experts recognized that such activities could be more effective in promoting pro-American attitudes than conventional types of propaganda. During the Cold War, such activities as the Fulbright exchange program, the People-to-People program, and the Peace Corps were utilized to promote goodwill between the United States and other countries through person-to-person contacts. Although many Americans who participated in these programs did not see themselves as propagandists, government administrators saw them as positive, long-range programs to create a favorable atmosphere abroad for U.S. political, economic, and military policies.

In broad form, the USIA's principal propaganda themes remained fairly constant throughout the Cold War. The obvious theme was anticommunism, and the agency exploited the ideological contradictions, forced labor camps, restrictions on freedom, and absence of consumer goods in communist countries. The agency devoted a greater percentage of its programming, however, to positive themes about the United States. The USIA publicized U.S. economic and technical assistance programs, scientific and technological advances, and other policies, programs, and developments that reflected positively on the United States. It promoted free trade unionism, explained the workings of American democracy, and extolled the benefits of consumer capitalism. The agency also developed cultural propaganda depicting the lives of ordinary Americans in a favorable light and celebrating American achievements in the arts. Many USIA films, radio broadcasts, publications, and other programs were devoted to educational purposes, covering topics ranging from agriculture to English-language instruction. Most of these activities were slow media operations that aspired to cultivate favorable attitudes over the long haul. They also reflected the belief that, in addition to military defense and economic prosperity, U.S. security required the active promulgation of American ideas, values, and beliefs.

One of the most important activities of the USIA was simply to present U.S. policies favorably to international audiences on a daily basis. The USIA explained and promoted policy decisions through all its media, transmitted complete texts of important speeches to news organizations around the world, and distributed, authored, and secretly subsidized books and publications that defended controversial aspects of U.S. policies.

The USIA professed to adhere to a "strategy of truth" in its operations, in the belief that to be effective its propaganda had to be credible, and to be credible, it had to be truthful. The agency thus repudiated the sensationally propagandistic tone that had characterized the Campaign of Truth, instead adopting as its model the neutral tone and style of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). That does not mean, however, that the USIA merely dished out objective information; there was undoubtedly an element of protesting too much in the agency's claim to truth. While the agency generally avoided deliberate distortions, wild exaggerations, and broad generalizations, it remained in the business of shaping, influencing, and manipulating popular opinion. As the first director of the USIA, Theodore C. Streibert, noted: "We are no less engaged in propaganda because we are to minimize the propagandistic."

The USIA operated on the assumption that it could best influence international opinion in the free world by influencing opinion makers. Its most important target was the world press. The bulk of USIA operations fell under the category of "media control projects" designed to influence the news and information that reached the public through indigenous media outlets. Rather than address audiences directly—through radio and overtly propagandistic materials—the USIA preferred to plant news, place programs on local television, and utilize personal contacts to influence the views of foreign journalists and other influential persons.

U.S. propagandists also worked to enhance the potential persuasiveness of American propaganda by obscuring the source. A large percentage of USIA propaganda was of the unattributed gray variety, even though the agency was not explicitly authorized to engage in covert propaganda. USIA operatives maintained a network of contacts with journalists and media outlets in countries around the world, many of whom knowingly cooperated with the agency in placing unattributed materials prepared by the U.S. government. Another strategy involved the participation of private groups and nongovernmental organizations, or what the USIA termed "private cooperation." The agency maintained an Office of Private Cooperation, which worked to involve nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and ordinary Americans in campaigns to promote a positive image of the United States abroad.

When John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, he attached a high priority to the USIA. Kennedy was acutely sensitive to the importance of images and ideas to international relations, and he made the apparent decline in American prestige abroad a major theme of his campaign. Upon his election, Kennedy appointed the respected journalist Edward R. Murrow as the agency's new director. Murrow's appointment raised the stature and visibility of the agency both at home and abroad. Murrow's prominence also helped the USIA in Congress: agency funding increased dramatically from around $100 million in 1960 to more than $160 million in 1963. Despite Murrow's journalistic background, the USIA under his tenure became more, rather than less, focused on hard-hitting propaganda. It also became increasingly focused on propaganda in the developing world. In just under three years, it opened more than two dozen new posts in newly independent countries in Africa.

Kennedy also assigned the USIA a new advisory function. The agency was now explicitly charged with contributing to the formulation of U.S. foreign policies by advising the president on issues pertaining to international opinion. Nevertheless, it was primarily an operational agency rather than a policymaking one. (In fact, on several notable occasions, such as the Bay of Pigs invasion, the agency was not informed of what the U.S. government was doing.) Its most important advisory function began in the 1950s, when it administered international public opinion surveys to collect "psychological" intelligence. This information was used in part to gauge and improve the effectiveness of USIA propaganda, but it was also sent to the president and the National Security Council for consideration in the policymaking process. Successive U.S. presidents, especially Eisenhower and Kennedy, monitored these public opinion surveys very closely, an indication of the seriousness with which they took international public opinion.

As the United States became involved in Vietnam, the information program, like the rest of the country, became focused on the war. Both overt and covert propaganda programs had been going on in Southeast Asia since the 1940s and continued through the Vietnam War. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Carl T. Rowan as director of the USIA—at the time the highest post held by any African American in the U.S. government. Rowan oversaw the creation of the Joint United States Public Affairs Office, which managed all the U.S. psychological warfare programs in Vietnam and accounted for some 10 percent of the agency's overseas manpower. In May 1965, Johnson assigned the USIA responsibility for all U.S. propaganda in Vietnam, the largest role ever undertaken by the agency.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing U.S. propagandists during this period lay outside the combat zone, where the USIA tried to sell an unpopular war to international public opinion. The agency presented the war as a noble defense of a free country under attack by communist insurgents. It stressed American peaceful intentions and argued that the United States had turned to military force only as a last resort. The Johnson and Nixon administrations attached a high priority to propaganda in support of the war effort, but their information policies ultimately devastated the credibility of the USIA as it became widely known that the United States was painting an excessively rosy, and at times patently false, picture of the events in Vietnam.

These distortions were less the fault of the agency's propaganda than of the policies and public relations strategies employed by the White House. For example, in April 1965 the USIA widely publicized a speech by Johnson indicating U.S. willingness to enter into "unconditional" negotiations with the government of North Vietnam. When it was later revealed that the Johnson administration maneuvered and delayed to avoid such negotiations, the United States was criticized abroad (and at home) for manipulating the peace issue for propaganda purposes. International public opinion was further alienated by the USIA's portrayal of the government of South Vietnam as a functioning democracy and by its unceasing publicity of U.S. military progress when evidence presented by the independent news media contradicted such claims. Cases of deliberate deception, such as President Richard Nixon's secret bombing campaign, worsened the "credibility gap" that plagued all official U.S. pronouncements.

All in all, the Vietnam War served as a reminder of a principle U.S. propagandists knew but neglected: obvious falsehoods, when exposed, could exact irreparable harm on the credibility, and hence the believability, of the propaganda and of the sponsor. The war also demonstrated how a crusading and skeptical press could counterbalance the effects of propaganda. No amount of clever spin-doctoring could counteract the powerful images that appeared on television screens around the world.

During the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the USIA adopted a remarkable change of mission. Carter argued that the agency should not simply communicate to the world about America; it should also communicate to America about the world. He renamed the agency the United States International Communication Agency (ICA), curtailed its anticommunist programming, and ordered it to cease its covert propaganda programs. Carter also assigned the ICA a "second mandate" to educate Americans about foreign countries. It was an idealistic task that the agency, which had spent twenty-five years selling the United States to foreigners, was ill-equipped to perform.

When Ronald Reagan took control of the White House, he promptly shelved Carter's "second mandate" and restored the USIA's name. During Reagan's tenure the agency adopted the crusading zeal of the cold warrior in the White House. The president who presided over the massive arms buildup of the 1980s also presided over psychological rearmament through the USIA. In a speech in 1982 he called for a new war of ideas and values against communism. He repackaged the Campaign of Truth as Project Truth to rally the country behind an expanded psychological offensive to spread democracy and combat Soviet propaganda. Under Reagan, the USIA was funded more lavishly than ever before. The new director, Charles Z. Wick, embarked on a number of reforms to modernize the agency, including the creation of the Worldnet satellite television broadcasting system and Radio Marti, which broadcast U.S. propaganda to Cuba. Reagan himself, the "great communicator," set the tone for the new ideological offensive by branding the Soviet Union the "evil empire."

With the end of the Cold War, the USIA turned its attention from the communist threat to promoting economic expansion. National security and anticommunist justifications for propaganda and exchange activities gave way to economic justifications: these programs were now evaluated in terms of their contributions to American commerce. In October 1999, largely as the result of Senator Jesse Helms, the USIA was abolished and its functions transferred to the Office of International Information Programs in the Department of State.

Propaganda, Diplomacy, and International Public Opinion

The Cold War inaugurated a paradigm shift in the U.S. practice of diplomacy that reflected changes in the nature of diplomatic activity worldwide. Through propaganda, policy initiatives, and covert action, agents of the U.S. government acted directly to influence the ideas, values, beliefs, opinions, actions, politics, and culture of other countries. Foreign affairs personnel not only observed and reported, they also participated in events or tried to influence the way that they happened. The old maxim that one government does not interfere in the internal affairs of another had been swept aside.

The pattern of international relations was further transformed by the electronic communications revolution and the emergence of popular opinion as a significant force in foreign affairs. Foreign policy could no longer be pursued as it had during the nineteenth century, when diplomacy was the exclusive province of professional diplomats who used (often secret) negotiations to reach accords based on power and interest. Developments in mass communication and the increased attentiveness to domestic audiences abroad to foreign affairs meant that the target of diplomacy had now widened to include popular opinion as much, if not more so, than traditional diplomatic activities.

A report published by the House Foreign Relations Committee in 1964, entitled "Winning the Cold War: The U.S. Ideological Offensive," captured this sentiment well:

For many years military and economic power, used separately, or in conjunction, have served as the pillars of diplomacy. They still serve that function but the recent increase in influence of the masses of the people over government, together with greater awareness on the part of the leaders of the aspirations of people…has created a new dimension of foreign policy operations. Certain foreign policy objectives can be pursued by dealing directly with the people of foreign countries, rather than with their governments. Through the use of modern instruments and techniques of communications it is possible today to reach large or influential segments of national populations—to inform them, to influence their attitudes, and at times perhaps even to motivate them to a particular course of action. These groups, in turn, are capable of exerting noticeable, even decisive, pressures on their government.

In other words, by appealing over the heads of governments directly to public opinion, effective propaganda and other measures would encourage popular opinion to support U.S. policies, which would in turn exert pressure on government policymakers.

Throughout the Cold War, propaganda and diplomacy operated on multiple levels. At the most obvious level, propaganda as it is conventionally understood (the utilization of communication techniques to influence beliefs and actions) was employed as a distinct instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Through the United States Information Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, and other mechanisms, the United States waged a war of words and of ideas that attacked communism, promoted capitalism and democracy, defended U.S. foreign policies, and advertised the American way of life in order to win the Cold War.

On another level, the awareness that international public opinion had become a major factor in the conduct of diplomacy meant that propaganda considerations intruded on the policymaking process itself. American policymakers were increasingly aware that international public opinion had to be an ingredient in policy formulation at all levels: in the planning and policy formulation stage, in the coordination and timing of operations, and finally in the last phase of explanation and interpretation by government officials and information programs.

This attitude played itself out most visibly in the United Nations, which became one of the most important arenas for Cold War propaganda. It also was reflected in the marked increase in the foreign travel of U.S. presidents and vice presidents, an important device for generating news coverage and for reaching international audiences directly. On a more routine basis, consideration of international public opinion simply involved the careful selection of words and phrases to describe the objectives of American foreign policy—including the process of creating what came to be known as a "sound bite."

Even within the State Department—an institution wedded to traditional diplomacy and wary of popular opinion—the Policy Planning Staff began to argue in the mid-1950s that convincing foreign officials was often less important than carrying issues over their heads to public opinion, reasoning that popular opinion would exert more of an impact on government officials than vice versa. The extensive and instantaneous media coverage that accompanied diplomatic conferences meant that negotiations needed to be conducted on two levels: on the diplomatic level between governments, and on the popular level to win international public support for policies. Diplomatic conferences were no longer merely opportunities for resolving international disputes; they were sounding boards for public opinion and forums for propaganda. Arms control proposals in particular were not infrequently tabled predominantly to satisfy the demands of public opinion for progress in disarmament. President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace and Open Skies initiatives, for example, were sophisticated propaganda exercises designed to put the Soviet Union on the defensive and establish the U.S. commitment to peace and disarmament without making costly concessions or entering into protracted negotiations.

The psychological dimension of postwar American diplomacy also included a preoccupation with American prestige and credibility—concepts that connoted the reliability of American commitments and served as code words for America's image and reputation. As Robert McMahon has argued, throughout the postwar period American leaders invoked the principle of credibility to explain and justify a wide range of diplomatic and military decisions. American actions in such disparate crises as Korea (1950–1953), Taiwan Strait (Quemoy-Matsu) (1954–1955), Lebanon (1958), and Vietnam (1954–1973) were driven by a perceived need to demonstrate the resolve, will, and, determination—in a word, credibility—of the United States. In these and other cases, American actions were driven as much if not more by calculations of how the U.S. would be perceived abroad than by narrowly focused calculations of national interest.

Concerns about the maintenance of American prestige and credibility were undoubtedly magnified by the presence of nuclear weapons. The high stakes of all-out war in an age of nuclear devastation meant that the United States and Soviet Union channeled the competition into symbolic modes of combat. Nothing better illustrates this than the space race, which became the preeminent propaganda contest of the Cold War. Spectacular feats in outer-space exploration were at once symbolic of the scientific, technological, economic, educational, and military achievements of the superpowers. The space race also allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to demonstrate their military prowess—and thus reinforce the credibility of their deterrent capabilities—without appearing warlike. The successful Soviet launch of Sputnik I in 1957 and the American moon landing in 1969 were two of the most significant events of the Cold War, largely because of what they symbolized to people around the world.

The infusion of psychological considerations and propaganda tactics into the practice of diplomacy is one of the Cold War's most important legacies, but given the revolution in communication technologies of the late twentieth century it was perhaps inevitable that the ancient art of diplomacy would become affected by the techniques of propaganda and public persuasion. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War's propaganda battles, foreign policy continued to be swayed by images transmitted instantly around the globe.

The days of brazenly propagandistic posters and radio broadcasts may have faded into history, but the science of propaganda has simply evolved into less overt forms of image making and media manipulation. Paralleling a broader development in international politics, where symbols and images loom large as critical components of political power, the phenomenon of posturing for public opinion has become increasingly sophisticated, involving such techniques as staged media events, generated news, orchestrated public appearances, and carefully scripted sound bites. The communication techniques that camouflage modern propaganda have obscured the basic fact that the end of the Cold War has brought about more propaganda, not less.

Bibliography

Daugherty, William E., and Morris Janowitz, eds. A Psychological Warfare Casebook. Baltimore, 1958. Compiled for U.S. Army psychological warfare experts, the work covers a wide range of subjects from both theoretical and historical perspectives.

Davidson, Philip. Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763–1783. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1941.

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. Translated by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner. New York, 1973. Influential philosophic treatise on modern propaganda.

Haefele, Mark. "John F. Kennedy, USIA, and World Public Opinion." Diplomatic History 25, no. 1 (winter 2001): 63–84. Useful on the importance of international public opinion to U.S. foreign policy, especially during the Kennedy administration.

Henderson, John W. The United States Information Agency. New York, 1969.

Hixson, Walter L. Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961. New York, 1998.

Jackall, Robert, ed. Propaganda. New York, 1995. Focuses on the twentieth century.

Krugler, David F. The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945–1953. Columbia, Mo., and London, 2000. Explores the domestic political controversies surrounding the Voice of America.

Lasswell, Harold Dwight. Propaganda Technique in the World War. New York, 1927. Classic work that influenced a generation of propaganda specialists.

Laurie, Clayton D. The Propaganda Warriors: America's Crusade Against Nazi Germany. Lawrence, Kans., 1996. Focuses on combat propaganda.

Lucas, Scott. Freedom's War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union. New York, 1999. Focuses on state-private collaboration in Cold War propaganda campaigns.

McMahon, Robert J. "Credibility and World Power: Exploring the Psychological Dimension in Postwar American Diplomacy." Diplomatic History 15, no. 4 (fall 1991): 455–471.

Mitrovich, Gregory. Undermining the Kremlin: America's Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956. Ithaca, N.Y., 2000. Explores the relationships among psychological warfare, covert action, and national security strategy in the early Cold War.

Ninkovich, Frank A. The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950. Cambridge, 1981.

——. U.S. Information Policy and Cultural Diplomacy. New York, 1996. A brief but thorough and insightful overview of postwar information and cultural policies.

Osgood, Kenneth A. "Form Before Substance: Eisenhower's Commitment to Psychological Warfare and Negotiations with the Enemy." Diplomatic History 24, no. 3 (summer 2000): 405–433. On the relationship between propaganda and diplomacy during the Eisenhower administration.

——. "Total Cold War: U.S. Propaganda in the 'Free World,' 1953–1960." Ph.D. dissertation. University of California, Santa Barbara, Calif., 2001. Many of this essay's conclusions are drawn from the original research in the dissertation.

Page, Caroline. U.S. Official Propaganda During the Vietnam War, 1965–1973: The Limits of Persuasion. London and New York, 1996.

Puddington, Arch. Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Lexington, Ky., 2000. Celebrates the purported successes of Cold War propaganda.

Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York, 1999.

Snow, Nancy. Propaganda Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World. New York, 1998.

Sorensen, Thomas C. The Word War: The Story of American Propaganda. New York, 1968.

Taylor, Philip M. Munitions of the Mind: War Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Nuclear Age. Glasgow, 1990. A good overview of the wartime use of propaganda in world history.

Thomson, Oliver. Easily Led: A History of Propaganda. Gloucester shire, Eng., 1999. Comprehensive investigation of propaganda in world history.

Winkler, Allan M. The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942–1945. New Haven, Conn., 1978. Focuses on domestic politics.

— Kenneth A. Osgood

(DOD) Any form of communication in support of national objectives designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly. See also black propaganda; grey propaganda; white propaganda.

Official government communications to the public that are designed to influence opinion. The information may be true or false, but it is always carefully selected for its political effect.

Quotes:

"Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way." - Jean Anouilh

"Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases." - James B. Conant

"Propaganda is that branch of the art of lying which consists in nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies." - Francis Cornford

"Propaganda has a bad name, but its root meaning is simply to disseminate through a medium, and all writing therefore is propaganda for something. It's a seeding of the self in the consciousness of others." - Elizabeth Drew

"All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly not constructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that." - Terry Eagleton

"We have made the Reich by propaganda." - Paul Joseph Goebbels

See more famous quotes about Propaganda

For other uses, see Propaganda (disambiguation).

French Propaganda Postcard from World War I era showing a caricature of Kaiser Wilhelm II biting the world

Poster for Thirteenth Naval District, United States Navy, showing a rat representing Japan, approaching a mousetrap labeled "Army, Navy, Civilian," on a background map of the Alaska Territory.

Propaganda is communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, often presents information primarily in order to influence its audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or gives loaded messages in order to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda.

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Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.

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The English term is an 18th century coinage, from the Latin feminine gerund of propagare "to propagate", originally in Congregatio de Propaganda Fide "congregation for propagating the faith," a committee of cardinals established 1622 by Gregory XV. The term is not pejorative in origin, the political sense dates to World War I.

Contents 1 Types 2 Techniques 3 Models 3.1 Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model 3.2 Ross' epistemic merit model 4 History 4.1 Ancient propaganda 4.2 19th and 20th centuries 4.3 Russian revolution 4.4 Nazi Germany 4.5 America in World War II 4.6 Britain in World War II 4.7 Soviet Union in World War II 4.8 Cold War propaganda 4.9 Revolution in Central and Eastern Europe 4.10 Yugoslav wars 4.11 Afghan War 4.12 Iraq War 5 Children 5.1 Anti-Semitic propaganda for children 6 See also 7 References 7.1 Bibliography 7.2 Further reading 7.3 Notes 8 External links 8.1 Current propaganda 8.2 Historical propaganda

Types

Propaganda is generally an appeal to emotion, not intellect. It shares techniques with advertising and public relations, each of which can be thought of as propaganda that promotes a commercial product or shapes the perception of an organization, person or brand, though in post-World War II usage the word "propaganda" more typically refers to political or nationalist uses of these techniques or to the promotion of a set of ideas, since the term had gained a pejorative meaning, which commercial and government entities couldn’t accept. The refusal phenomenon was eventually to be seen in politics itself by the substitution of ‘political marketing’ and other designations for ‘political propaganda’.

Poster of the 19th century Scandinavist movement

Propaganda was often used to influence opinions and beliefs on religious issues, particularly during the split between the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant churches. Propaganda has become more common in political contexts, in particular to refer to certain efforts sponsored by governments, political groups, but also often covert interests. In the early 20th century, propaganda was exemplified in the form of party slogans. Also in the early 20th century the term propaganda was used by the founders of the nascent public relations industry to describe their activities. This usage died out around the time of World War II, as the industry started to avoid the word, given the pejorative connotation it had acquired.

The execution of British nurse Edith Cavell by the German Army in 1915 was a major theme of World War I anti-German propaganda

Literally translated from the Latin gerundive as "things which must be disseminated", in some cultures the term is neutral or even positive, while in others the term has acquired a strong negative connotation. The connotations of the term "propaganda" can also vary over time. For example, in Portuguese and some Spanish language speaking countries, particularly in the Southern Cone, the word "propaganda" usually refers to the most common manipulative media — "advertising".

In English, "propaganda" was originally a neutral term used to describe the dissemination of information in favor of any given cause. During the 20th century, however, the term acquired a thoroughly negative meaning in western countries, representing the intentional dissemination of often false, but certainly "compelling" claims to support or justify political actions or ideologies. This redefinition arose because both the Soviet Union and Germany's government under Hitler admitted explicitly to using propaganda favoring, respectively, communism and Nazism, in all forms of public expression. As these ideologies were repugnant to liberal western societies, the negative feelings toward them came to be projected into the word "propaganda" itself.

"Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels. A propaganda organization employs propagandists who engage in propagandism—the applied creation and distribution of such forms of persuasion." —Richard Alan Nelson, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States, 1996

A 1947 comic book published by the Catechetical Guild Educational Society warning of "the dangers of a Communist takeover".

Roderick Hindery argues^[1] that propaganda exists on the political left, and right, and in mainstream centrist parties. Hindery further argues that debates about most social issues can be productively revisited in the context of asking "what is or is not propaganda?" Not to be overlooked is the link between propaganda, indoctrination, and terrorism/counterterrorism. He argues that threats to destroy are often as socially disruptive as physical devastation itself.

Propaganda also has much in common with public information campaigns by governments, which are intended to encourage or discourage certain forms of behavior (such as wearing seat belts, not smoking, not littering and so forth). Again, the emphasis is more political in propaganda. Propaganda can take the form of leaflets, posters, TV and radio broadcasts and can also extend to any other medium. In the case of the United States, there is also an important legal (imposed by law) distinction between advertising (a type of overt propaganda) and what the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an arm of the United States Congress, refers to as "covert propaganda."

Journalistic theory generally holds that news items should be objective, giving the reader an accurate background and analysis of the subject at hand. On the other hand, advertisements evolved from the traditional commercial advertisements to include also a new type in the form of paid articles or broadcasts disguised as news. These generally present an issue in a very subjective and often misleading light, primarily meant to persuade rather than inform. Normally they use only subtle propaganda techniques and not the more obvious ones used in traditional commercial advertisements. If the reader believes that a paid advertisement is in fact a news item, the message the advertiser is trying to communicate will be more easily "believed" or "internalized."

Such advertisements are considered obvious examples of "covert" propaganda because they take on the appearance of objective information rather than the appearance of propaganda, which is misleading. Federal law specifically mandates that any advertisement appearing in the format of a news item must state that the item is in fact a paid advertisement.

US Office for War Information poster implying that working less helped the Axis powers.

The propagandist seeks to change the way people understand an issue or situation for the purpose of changing their actions and expectations in ways that are desirable to the interest group. Propaganda, in this sense, serves as a corollary to censorship in which the same purpose is achieved, not by filling people's minds with approved information, but by preventing people from being confronted with opposing points of view. What sets propaganda apart from other forms of advocacy is the willingness of the propagandist to change people's understanding through deception and confusion rather than persuasion and understanding. The leaders of an organization know the information to be one sided or untrue, but this may not be true for the rank and file members who help to disseminate the propaganda.

More in line with the religious roots of the term, it is also used widely in the debates about new religious movements (NRMs), both by people who defend them and by people who oppose them. The latter pejoratively call these NRMs cults. Anti-cult activists and countercult activists accuse the leaders of what they consider cults of using propaganda extensively to recruit followers and keep them. Some social scientists, such as the late Jeffrey Hadden, and CESNUR affiliated scholars accuse ex-members of "cults" who became vocal critics and the anti-cult movement of making these unusual religious movements look bad without sufficient reasons.^[2][3]

The much-imitated 1914 "Lord Kitchener Wants You!" poster

Propaganda is a powerful weapon in war; it is used to dehumanize and create hatred toward a supposed enemy, either internal or external, by creating a false image in the mind. This can be done by using derogatory or racist terms, avoiding some words or by making allegations of enemy atrocities. Most propaganda wars require the home population to feel the enemy has inflicted an injustice, which may be fictitious or may be based on facts. The home population must also decide that the cause of their nation is just.

Propaganda is also one of the methods used in psychological warfare, which may also involve false flag operations. The term propaganda may also refer to false information meant to reinforce the mindsets of people who already believe as the propagandist wishes. The assumption is that, if people believe something false, they will constantly be assailed by doubts. Since these doubts are unpleasant (see cognitive dissonance), people will be eager to have them extinguished, and are therefore receptive to the reassurances of those in power. For this reason propaganda is often addressed to people who are already sympathetic to the agenda. This process of reinforcement uses an individual's predisposition to self-select "agreeable" information sources as a mechanism for maintaining control.

Britannia arm-in-arm with Uncle Sam symbolizes the British-American alliance in World War I.

Propaganda can be classified according to the source and nature of the message. White propaganda generally comes from an openly identified source, and is characterized by gentler methods of persuasion, such as standard public relations techniques and one-sided presentation of an argument. Black propaganda is identified as being from one source, but is in fact from another. This is most commonly to disguise the true origins of the propaganda, be it from an enemy country or from an organization with a negative public image. Grey propaganda is propaganda without any identifiable source or author. A major application of grey propaganda is making enemies believe falsehoods using straw arguments: As phase one, to make someone believe "A", one releases as grey propaganda "B", the opposite of "A". In phase two, "B" is discredited using some strawman. The enemy will then assume "A" to be true.

In scale, these different types of propaganda can also be defined by the potential of true and correct information to compete with the propaganda. For example, opposition to white propaganda is often readily found and may slightly discredit the propaganda source. Opposition to grey propaganda, when revealed (often by an inside source), may create some level of public outcry. Opposition to black propaganda is often unavailable and may be dangerous to reveal, because public cognizance of black propaganda tactics and sources would undermine or backfire the very campaign the black propagandist supported.

Propaganda may be administered in insidious ways. For instance, disparaging disinformation about the history of certain groups or foreign countries may be encouraged or tolerated in the educational system. Since few people actually double-check what they learn at school, such disinformation will be repeated by journalists as well as parents, thus reinforcing the idea that the disinformation item is really a "well-known fact", even though no one repeating the myth is able to point to an authoritative source. The disinformation is then recycled in the media and in the educational system, without the need for direct governmental intervention on the media. Such permeating propaganda may be used for political goals: by giving citizens a false impression of the quality or policies of their country, they may be incited to reject certain proposals or certain remarks or ignore the experience of others. See also: black propaganda, marketing, advertising.

Techniques

Anti-Capitalism propaganda

See also: doublespeak, cult of personality, spin (politics), demonization, and factoid

Common media for transmitting propaganda messages include news reports, government reports, historical revision, junk science, books, leaflets, movies, radio, television, and posters. Less common nowadays are letterpost envelopes examples of which of survive from the time of the American Civil War.(Connecticut Historical Society;Civil War Collections;Covers(envelopes). (In principle any thing that appears on a poster can be produced on a reduced scale on a pocket-style envelope with corresponding proportions to the poster). The case of radio and television, propaganda can exist on news, current-affairs or talk-show segments, as advertising or public-service announce "spots" or as long-running advertorials. Propaganda campaigns often follow a strategic transmission pattern to indoctrinate the target group. This may begin with a simple transmission such as a leaflet dropped from a plane or an advertisement. Generally these messages will contain directions on how to obtain more information, via a web site, hot line, radio program, et cetera (as it is seen also for selling purposes among other goals). The strategy intends to initiate the individual from information recipient to information seeker through reinforcement, and then from information seeker to opinion leader through indoctrination.

A number of techniques based in social psychological research are used to generate propaganda. Many of these same techniques can be found under logical fallacies, since propagandists use arguments that, while sometimes convincing, are not necessarily valid.

Some time has been spent analyzing the means by which propaganda messages are transmitted. That work is important but it is clear that information dissemination strategies become propaganda only strategies when coupled with propagandistic messages. Identifying these messages is a necessary prerequisite to study the methods by which those messages are spread. Below are a number of techniques for generating propaganda:

Propaganda to urge immigrants to move to California, 1876.

• Ad hominem

A Latin phrase which has come to mean attacking your opponent, as opposed to attacking their arguments.

• Ad nauseam

This argument approach uses tireless repetition of an idea. An idea, especially a simple slogan, that is repeated enough times, may begin to be taken as the truth. This approach works best when media sources are limited and controlled by the propagator.

• Appeal to authority

Appeals to authority cite prominent figures to support a position, idea, argument, or course of action.

• Appeal to fear

Appeals to fear seek to build support by instilling anxieties and panic in the general population, for example, Joseph Goebbels exploited Theodore Kaufman's Germany Must Perish! to claim that the Allies sought the extermination of the German people.

• Appeal to prejudice

Using loaded or emotive terms to attach value or moral goodness to believing the proposition.

• Bandwagon

Bandwagon and "inevitable-victory" appeals attempt to persuade the target audience to join in and take the course of action that "everyone else is taking."

• Inevitable victory: invites those not already on the bandwagon to join those already on the road to certain victory. Those already or at least partially on the bandwagon are reassured that staying aboard is their best course of action.
• Join the crowd: This technique reinforces people's natural desire to be on the winning side. This technique is used to convince the audience that a program is an expression of an irresistible mass movement and that it is in their best interest to join.

Getting What He Deserves. Heroes of the Fiery Cross 1928

• Black-and-White fallacy

Presenting only two choices, with the product or idea being propagated as the better choice. (e.g., "You are either with us, or you are with the enemy")

• Beautiful people

The type of propaganda that deals with famous people or depicts attractive, happy people. This makes other people think that if they buy a product or follow a certain ideology, they too will be happy or successful.

• Big Lie

The repeated articulation of a complex of events that justify subsequent action. The descriptions of these events have elements of truth, and the "big lie" generalizations merge and eventually supplant the public's accurate perception of the underlying events. After World War I the German Stab in the back explanation of the cause of their defeat became a justification for Nazi re-militarization and revanchist aggression.

• Common man

The "'plain folks'" or "common man" approach attempts to convince the audience that the propagandist's positions reflect the common sense of the people. It is designed to win the confidence of the audience by communicating in the common manner and style of the target audience. Propagandists use ordinary language and mannerisms (and clothe their message in face-to-face and audiovisual communications) in attempting to identify their point of view with that of the average person. For example, a propaganda leaflet may make an argument on a macroeconomic issue, such as unemployment insurance benefits, using everyday terms: "given that the country has little money during this recession, we should stop paying unemployment benefits to those who do not work, because that is like maxing out all your credit cards during a tight period, when you should be tightening your belt."

• Demonizing the enemy

Making individuals from the opposing nation, from a different ethnic group, or those who support the opposing viewpoint appear to be subhuman (e.g., the Vietnam War-era term "gooks" for National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam aka Vietcong, (or 'VC') soldiers), worthless, or immoral, through suggestion or false accusations.

World War I poster by Winsor McCay, urging Americans to buy Liberty Bonds

• Direct order

This technique hopes to simplify the decision making process by using images and words to tell the audience exactly what actions to take, eliminating any other possible choices. Authority figures can be used to give the order, overlapping it with the Appeal to authority technique, but not necessarily. The Uncle Sam "I want you" image is an example of this technique.

• Disinformation

The creation or deletion of information from public records, in the purpose of making a false record of an event or the actions of a person or organization, including outright forgery of photographs, motion pictures, broadcasts, and sound recordings as well as printed documents.

• Euphoria

The use of an event that generates euphoria or happiness, or using an appealing event to boost morale. Euphoria can be created by declaring a holiday, making luxury items available, or mounting a military parade with marching bands and patriotic messages.

• Flag-waving

An attempt to justify an action on the grounds that doing so will make one more patriotic, or in some way benefit a group, country, or idea. The feeling of patriotism which this technique attempts to inspire may not necessarily diminish or entirely omit one's capability for rational examination of the matter in question.

The Finnish Maiden - personification of Finnish nationalism

• Glittering generalities

Glittering generalities are emotionally appealing words applied to a product or idea, but which present no concrete argument or analysis. A famous example is the campaign slogan "Ford has a better idea!"

• Half-truth

A half-truth is a deceptive statement which may come in several forms and includes some element of truth. The statement might be partly true, the statement may be totally true but only part of the whole truth, or it may utilize some deceptive element, such as improper punctuation, or double meaning, especially if the intent is to deceive, evade blame or misrepresent the truth.

• Intentional vagueness

Generalities are deliberately vague so that the audience may supply its own interpretations. The intention is to move the audience by use of undefined phrases, without analyzing their validity or attempting to determine their reasonableness or application. The intent is to cause people to draw their own interpretations rather than simply being presented with an explicit idea. In trying to "figure out" the propaganda, the audience forgoes judgment of the ideas presented. Their validity, reasonableness and application may still be considered.

• Labeling

A Euphemism is used when the propagandist attempts to increase the perceived quality, credibility, or creedence of a particular ideal. A Dysphemism is used when the intent of the propagandist is to discredit, diminish the perceived quality, or hurt the perceived righteousness of the Mark. By creating a 'label' or 'category' or 'faction' of a population, it is much easier to make an example of these larger bodies, because they can uplift or defame the Mark without actually incuring legal-defamation. Example: "Liberal" is a dysphamsim intended to diminish the perceived credibility of a particular Mark. By taking a displeasing argument presented by a Mark, the propagandist can quote that person, and then attack 'liberals' in an attempt to both (1) create a political battle-ax of unaccountable aggression and (2) diminish the quality of the Mark. If the propagandist uses the label on too-many perceivably credible individuals, muddying up the word can be done by broadcasting bad-examples of 'liberals' into the media. Labeling can be thought of as a sub-set of Guilt by association, another logical fallacy.

• Name-calling

Propagandists use the name-calling technique to incite fears and arouse prejudices in their hearers in the intent that the bad names will cause hearers to construct a negative opinion about a group or set of beliefs or ideas that the propagandist would wish hearers to denounce. The method is intended to provoke conclusions about a matter apart from impartial examinations of facts. Name-calling is thus a substitute for rational, fact-based arguments against the an idea or belief on its own merits.^[4]

• Obtain disapproval or Reductio ad Hitlerum

This technique is used to persuade a target audience to disapprove of an action or idea by suggesting that the idea is popular with groups hated, feared, or held in contempt by the target audience. Thus if a group which supports a certain policy is led to believe that undesirable, subversive, or contemptible people support the same policy, then the members of the group may decide to change their original position. This is a form of bad logic, where a is said to equal X, and b is said to equal X, therefore, a = b.

• Oversimplification

Favorable generalities are used to provide simple answers to complex social, political, economic, or military problems.

Illustration by Rev. Branford Clarke from Heroes of the Fiery Cross by Bishop Alma White published by the Pillar of Fire Church 1928 in Zarephath, NJ

• Quotes out of Context

Selective editing of quotes which can change meanings. Political documentaries designed to discredit an opponent or an opposing political viewpoint often make use of this technique.

• Rationalization

Individuals or groups may use favorable generalities to rationalize questionable acts or beliefs. Vague and pleasant phrases are often used to justify such actions or beliefs.

• Red herring

Presenting data or issues that, while compelling, are irrelevant to the argument at hand, and then claiming that it validates the argument.

• Repetition

This type of propaganda deals with a jingle or word that is repeated over and over again, thus getting it stuck in someones head, so they can buy the product. The "Repetition" method has been described previously.

• Scapegoating

Assigning blame to an individual or group, thus alleviating feelings of guilt from responsible parties and/or distracting attention from the need to fix the problem for which blame is being assigned.

• Slogans

A slogan is a brief, striking phrase that may include labeling and stereotyping. Although slogans may be enlisted to support reasoned ideas, in practice they tend to act only as emotional appeals. Opponents of the US's invasion and occupation of Iraq use the slogan "blood for oil" to suggest that the invasion and its human losses was done to access Iraq's oil riches. On the other hand, "hawks" who argue that the US should continue to fight in Iraq use the slogan "cut and run" to suggest that it would be cowardly or weak to withdraw from Iraq. Similarly, the names of the military campaigns, such as "enduring freedom" or "just cause", may also be regarded to be slogans, devised to influence people.

• Stereotyping

This technique attempts to arouse prejudices in an audience by labeling the object of the propaganda campaign as something the target audience fears, hates, loathes, or finds undesirable. For instance, reporting on a foreign country or social group may focus on the stereotypical traits that the reader expects, even though they are far from being representative of the whole country or group; such reporting often focuses on the anecdotal. In graphic propaganda, including war posters, this might include portraying enemies with stereotyped racial features.

• Testimonial

Testimonials are quotations, in or out of context, especially cited to support or reject a given policy, action, program, or personality. The reputation or the role (expert, respected public figure, etc.) of the individual giving the statement is exploited. The testimonial places the official sanction of a respected person or authority on a propaganda message. This is done in an effort to cause the target audience to identify itself with the authority or to accept the authority's opinions and beliefs as its own. See also, damaging quotation

• Transfer

Also known as association, this is a technique that involves projecting the positive or negative qualities of one person, entity, object, or value onto another to make the second more acceptable or to discredit it. It evokes an emotional response, which stimulates the target to identify with recognized authorities. Often highly visual, this technique often utilizes symbols superimposed over other visual images. These symbols may be used in place of words; for example, placing swastikas on or around a picture of an opponent in order to associate the opponent with Naziism.

• Unstated assumption

This technique is used when the propaganda concept that the propagandist intends to transmit would seem less credible if explicitly stated. The concept is instead repeatedly assumed or implied.

• Virtue words

These are words in the value system of the target audience which tend to produce a positive image when attached to a person or issue. Peace, happiness, security, wise leadership, freedom, "The Truth", etc. are virtue words. In countries such as the U.S. religiosity is seen as a virtue, making associations to this quality affectively beneficial. See ""Transfer"".

Models

Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model

First Red Scare depiction of a "European Anarchist" attempting to destroy the Statue of Liberty.

The propaganda model is a theory advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky that alleges systemic biases in the mass media and seeks to explain them in terms of structural economic causes.

The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

—^[5][6]

First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media, the propaganda model views the private media as businesses selling a product — readers and audiences (rather than news) — to other businesses (advertisers) and relying primarily on government and corporate information and propaganda. The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media: Ownership of the medium, the medium's Funding, Sourcing of the news, Flak, and Anti-communist ideology.

The first three (ownership, funding, and sourcing) are generally regarded by the authors as being the most important. Although the model was based mainly on the characterization of United States media, Chomsky and Herman believe the theory is equally applicable to any country that shares the basic economic structure and organizing principles which the model postulates as the cause of media biases. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Chomsky stated that the new filter replacing communism would be terrorism and Islam.

Ross' epistemic merit model

The epistemic merit model is a method for understanding propaganda conceived by Sheryl Tuttle Ross and detailed in her 2002 article for the Journal of Aesthetic Education entitled "Understanding Propaganda: The Epistemic Merit Model and Its Application to Art".^[7] Ross developed the Epistemic merit model due to concern about narrow, misleading definitions of propaganda. She contrasted her model with the ideas of Pope Gregory XV, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Alfred Lee, F.C. Bartlett, and Hans Speier. Insisting that each of their respective discussions of propaganda are too narrow, Ross proposed her own definition.

American World War I poster: "Remember Your First Thrill of American Liberty"

To appropriately discuss propaganda, Ross argues that one must consider a threefold communication model: that of Sender-Message-Receiver. "That is... propaganda involve[s]... the one who is persuading (Sender) [who is] doing so intentionally, [the] target for such persuasion (Receiver) and [the] means of reaching that target (Message)." There are four conditions for a message to be considered propaganda. Propaganda involves the intention to persuade. As well, propaganda is sent on behalf of a sociopolitical institution, organization, or cause. Next, the recipient of propaganda is a socially significant group of people. Finally, propaganda is an epistemic struggle to challenge other thoughts.

Ross claims that it is misleading to say that propaganda is simply false, or that it is conditional to a lie, since often the propagandist believes in what he/she is propagandizing. In other words, it is not necessarily a lie if the person who creates the propaganda is trying to persuade you of a view that they actually hold. "The aim of the propagandist is to create the semblance of credibility." This means that they appeal to an epistemology that is weak or defective.

False statements, bad arguments, immoral commands as well as inapt metaphors (and other literary tropes) are the sorts of things that are epistemically defective... Not only does epistemic defectiveness more accurately describe how propaganda endeavors to function... since many messages are in forms such as commands that do not admit to truth-values, [but it] also accounts for the role context plays in the workings of propaganda.

Throughout history those who have wished to persuade have used art to get their message out. This can be accomplished by hiring artists for the express aim of propagandizing or by investing new meanings to a previously non-political work. Therefore, Ross states, it is important to consider "the conditions of its making [and] the conditions of its use."

History

Ancient propaganda

English Civil War cartoon entitled "The Cruel Practices of Prince Rupert" (1643)

Propaganda has been a human activity as far back as reliable recorded evidence exists. The Behistun Inscription (c. 515 BC) detailing the rise of Darius I to the Persian throne, can be seen as an early example of propaganda. The Arthashastra written by Chanakya (c. 350 - 283 BC), a professor of political science at Takshashila University and a prime minister of the Maurya Empire in ancient India, discusses propaganda in detail, such as how to spread propaganda and how to apply it in warfare. His student Chandragupta Maurya (c. 340 - 293 BC), founder of the Maurya Empire, employed these methods during his rise to power.^[8] The writings of Romans such as Livy (c. 59 BC - 17 AD) are considered masterpieces of pro-Roman propaganda. Another example of early propaganda would be the 12th century work The War of the Irish with the Foreigners, written by the Dál gCais to portray themselves as legitimate rulers of Ireland.

U.S. Propaganda from World War II, depicting Hitler as foolish.

19th and 20th centuries

With the beginnings of the mass media in the 19th century, war rape was sometimes used as propaganda by European colonialists in order to justify the colonization of places they had conquered. The most notable example was perhaps during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, known as "India's First War of Independence" to the Indians and as the "Sepoy Mutiny" to the British, where Indian sepoys rebelled against the British East India Company's rule in India. While incidents of rape committed by Indian rebels against English women or girls were generally uncommon during the rebellion, this was exaggerated to great effect by the British media in order to justify continued British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent.^[9] At the time, British newspapers had printed various accounts about English women and girls being raped by the Indian rebels, but with little physical evidence to support these stories. It was later found that some of these accounts were false stories created in order to paint the native people of India as savages who need to be civilized by British colonialists, a mission sometimes known as "The White Man's Burden". One such account published by The Times, regarding an incident where 48 English girls as young as 10-14 were supposedly raped by the Indian rebels in Delhi, was criticized as a false propaganda story by Karl Marx, who pointed out that the story was reported by a clergyman in Bangalore, far from the events of the rebellion.^[10]

Gabriel Tarde's Laws of Imitation (1890) and Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1897) were two of the first codifications of propaganda techniques, which influenced many writers afterward, including Sigmund Freud. Hitler's Mein Kampf is heavily influenced by Le Bon's theories. Journalist Walter Lippmann, in Public Opinion (1922) also worked on the subject, as well as the American advertising pioneer Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud, early in the 20th century.^[11]

During World War I, Lippmann and Bernays were hired by then United States President, Woodrow Wilson, to participate in the Creel Commission, the mission of which was to sway popular opinion in favor of entering the war, on the side of the United Kingdom. The Creel Commission provided themes for speeches by "four-minute men" at public functions, and also encouraged censorship of the American press. The Commission was so unpopular that after the war, Congress closed it down without providing funding to organize and archive its papers.

The war propaganda campaign of Lippmann and Bernays produced within six months such an intense anti-German hysteria as to permanently impress American business (and Adolf Hitler, among others) with the potential of large-scale propaganda to control public opinion. Bernays coined the terms "group mind" and "engineering consent", important concepts in practical propaganda work.

The current public relations industry is a direct outgrowth of Lippmann's and Bernays' work and is still used extensively by the United States government. For the first half of the 20th century Bernays and Lippmann themselves ran a very successful public relations firm. World War II saw continued use of propaganda as a weapon of war, both by Hitler's propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the British Political Warfare Executive, as well as the United States Office of War Information.

In the early 2000s, the United States government developed and freely distributed a video game known as America's Army. The stated intention of the game is to encourage players to become interested in joining the U.S. Army.

Russian revolution

Russian revolutionaries of the 19th and 20th centuries distinguished two different aspects covered by the English term propaganda. Their terminology included two terms: Russian: агитация (agitatsiya), or agitation, and Russian: пропаганда, or propaganda, see agitprop (agitprop is not, however, limited to the Soviet Union, as it was considered, before the October Revolution, to be one of the fundamental activities of any Marxist activist; this importance of agit-prop in Marxist theory may also be observed today in Trotskyist circles, who insist on the importance of leaflet distribution).

Soviet propaganda meant dissemination of revolutionary ideas, teachings of Marxism, and theoretical and practical knowledge of Marxist economics, while agitation meant forming favorable public opinion and stirring up political unrest. These activities did not carry negative connotations (as they usually do in English) and were encouraged. Expanding dimensions of state propaganda, the Bolsheviks actively used transportation such as trains, aircraft and other means.

Joseph Stalin's regime built the largest fixed-wing aircraft of the 1930s, Tupolev ANT-20, exclusively for this purpose. Named after the famous Soviet writer Maxim Gorky who had recently returned from fascist Italy, it was equipped with a powerful radio set called "Voice from the sky", printing and leaflet-dropping machinery, radio stations, photographic laboratory, film projector with sound for showing movies in flight, library, etc. The aircraft could be disassembled and transported by railroad if needed. The giant aircraft set a number of world records.

The GPU thunderbolt strikes the counter-revolutionary saboteur.

"Long Live World October (revolution)!"

Bolshevik propaganda train, 1923.

ANT-20 "Maxim Gorky" propaganda aircraft in the Moscow sky.

Nazi Germany

Main article: Nazi propaganda

Most propaganda in Germany was produced by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Joseph Goebbels was placed in charge of this ministry shortly after Hitler took power in 1933. All journalists, writers, and artists were required to register with one of the Ministry's subordinate chambers for the press, fine arts, music, theatre, film, literature, or radio.

The Nazis believed in propaganda as a vital tool in achieving their goals. Adolf Hitler, Germany's Führer, was impressed by the power of Allied propaganda during World War I and believed that it had been a primary cause of the collapse of morale and revolts in the German home front and Navy in 1918 (see also: Dolchstoßlegende). Hitler would meet nearly every day with Goebbels to discuss the news and Goebbels would obtain Hitler's thoughts on the subject; Goebbels would then meet with senior Ministry officials and pass down the official Party line on world events. Broadcasters and journalists required prior approval before their works were disseminated. Along with posters, the Nazis produced a number of films and books to spread their beliefs.

Nazi Poster depicting American "liberators" as monster.	"Mother and Child" poster for charity subscription.	"The Eternal Jew" poster for a movie.	"Mothers Fight for your Children."
Invites Dutchmen to join the SS.	Poster promoting eugenics and euthanasia of disabled people.	Nazi poster portraying Adolf Hitler. Text: "Long Live Germany!"	Recruitment poster for pro-Nazi Italian Social Republic naval auxiliaries

America in World War II

Main article: American propaganda during World War II

Britain in World War II

Main article: British propaganda during World War II

Soviet Union in World War II

Main article: Soviet propaganda during World War II

Cold War propaganda

German Democratic Republic poster showing the increase of timber production from 7 million cubic metres in 1970 to 11 million in 1990 (see also Economy of the German Democratic Republic)

Poster showing the increase of agricultural production in the German Democratic Republic from 1981 to 1983 and 1986

Soldier loads a "leaflet bomb" during the Korean war.

The United States and the Soviet Union both used propaganda extensively during the Cold War. Both sides used film, television, and radio programming to influence their own citizens, each other, and Third World nations and USA. The United States Information Agency operated the Voice of America as an official government station. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which were in part supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, provided grey propaganda in news and entertainment programs to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union respectively. The Soviet Union's official government station, Radio Moscow, broadcast white propaganda, while Radio Peace and Freedom broadcast grey propaganda. Both sides also broadcast black propaganda programs in periods of special crises.

In 1948, the United Kingdom's Foreign Office created the IRD (Information Research Department) which took over from wartime and slightly post-war departments such as the Ministry of Information and dispensed propaganda via various media such as the BBC and publishing.^[12][13]

The ideological and border dispute between the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China resulted in a number of cross-border operations. One technique developed during this period was the "backwards transmission", in which the radio program was recorded and played backwards over the air. (This was done so that messages meant to be received by the other government could be heard, while the average listener could not understand the content of the program.)

When describing life in capitalist countries, in the US in particular, propaganda focused on social issues such as poverty and anti-union action by the government. Workers in capitalist countries were portrayed as "ideologically close". Propaganda claimed rich people from the US derived their income from weapons manufacturing, and claimed that there was substantial racism or neo-fascism in the US.

When describing life in Communist countries, western propaganda sought to depict an image of a citizenry held captive by governments that brainwash them. The West also created a fear of the East, by depicting an aggressive Soviet Union. In the Americas, Cuba served as a major source and a target of propaganda from both black and white stations operated by the CIA and Cuban exile groups. Radio Habana Cuba, in turn, broadcast original programming, relayed Radio Moscow, and broadcast The Voice of Vietnam as well as alleged confessions from the crew of the USS Pueblo.

George Orwell's novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are virtual textbooks on the use of propaganda. Though not set in the Soviet Union, these books are about totalitarian regimes in which language is constantly corrupted for political purposes. These novels were, ironically, used for explicit propaganda. The CIA, for example, secretly commissioned an animated film adaptation of Animal Farm in the 1950s with small changes to the original story to suit its own needs.^[14]

Revolution in Central and Eastern Europe

During the democratic revolutions of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe the propaganda poster was an important weapon in the hand of the opposition. Printed and hand-made political posters appeared on the Berlin Wall, on the statue of St. Wenceslas in Prague and around the unmarked grave of Imre Nagy in Budapest and the role of them was important for the democratic change.

Yugoslav wars

During the Yugoslav wars, propaganda was used to create fear and hatred and particularly incite the Serb population against the other ethnicities (Bosniaks, Croats, Albanians and other non-Serbs). Serb media made a great effort in justifying, revising or denying mass war crimes committed by Serb forces during the Yugoslav wars on Bosniaks and other non-Serbs.^[15] According to the ICTY verdicts against Serb political and military leaders, during the Bosnian war, the propaganda was a part of the Strategic Plan by Serb leadership, aimed at linking Serb-populated areas in Bosnia and Herzegovina together, gaining control over these areas and creating a separate Serb state, from which most non-Serbs would be permanently removed. The Serb leadership was aware that the Strategic Plan could only be implemented by the use of force and fear, thus by the commission of war crimes.^[16][17]

Croats also used propaganda against Bosniaks during the 1992-1994 Croat-Bosniak war, which was part of the larger Bosnian War. During Lašva Valley ethnic cleansing Croat forces seized the television broadcasting stations (for example at Skradno) and created its own local radio and television to carry propaganda, seized the public institutions, raised the Croatian flag over public institution buildings, and imposed the Croatian Dinar as the unit of currency. During this time, Busovača's Bosniaks were forced to sign an act of allegiance to the Croat authorities, fell victim to numerous attacks on shops and businesses and, gradually, left the area out of fear that they would be the victims of mass crimes.^[18] According to ICTY Trial Chambers in Blaškić case Croat authorities created a radio station in Kiseljak which broadcast nationalist propaganda. ^[19] A similar pattern was applied in Mostar and Gornji Vakuf (where Croats created a radio station called Radio Uskoplje). ^[20] Local propaganda efforts in parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina controlled by the Croats, were supported by Croatian daily newspapers such as Večernji list and Croatian Radiotelevision, especially by controversial reporters Dijana Čuljak and Smiljko Šagolj who are still blamed by the families of Bosniak victims in Vranica case for inciting massacre of Bosnian POWs in Mostar, when broadcasting a report about alleged terrorists arrested by Croats who victimized Croat civilians. The bodies of Bosnian POWs were later found in Goranci mass grave. Croatian Radiotelevision presented Croat attack on Mostar, as a Bosnian Muslim attack on Croats in alliance with the Serbs. According to ICTY, in the early hours of May 9, 1993, the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) attacked Mostar using artillery, mortars, heavy weapons and small arms. The HVO controlled all roads leading into Mostar and international organisations were denied access. Radio Mostar announced that all Bosniaks should hang out a white flag from their windows. The HVO attack had been well prepared and planned.^[21]

During the ICTY trials against Croat war leaders, many Croatian journalists participated as the defence witnesses trying to relativise war crimes committed by Croatian troops. During the trial against general Tihomir Blaškić (later convicted of war crimes), Ivica Mlivončić, Croatian columnist in Slobodna Dalmacija, tried to defend general Blaškić presenting number of claims in his book Zločin s pečatom about alleged genocide against Croats (most of it unproven or false), which was considered by the Trial Chambers as irrelevant for the case. After the conviction, he continued to write in Slobodna Dalmacija against the ICTY presenting it as the court against Croats, with chauvinistic claims that the ICTY cannot be unbiassed because it is financed by Saudi Arabia (Muslims). ^[22][23]

Afghan War

In the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, psychological operations tactics were employed to demoralize the Taliban and to win the sympathies of the Afghan population. At least six EC-130E Commando Solo aircraft were used to jam local radio transmissions and transmit replacement propaganda messages. Leaflets were also dropped throughout Afghanistan, offering rewards for Osama bin Laden and other individuals, portraying Americans as friends of Afghanistan and emphasizing various negative aspects of the Taliban. Another shows a picture of Mohammed Omar in a set of crosshairs with the words "We are watching." This technique has been shown to be rather ineffective in terms of long term opinions change given current political and social conditions in Afghanistan.^{[citation needed]}

US PSYOP pamphlet disseminated in Iraq. Text: "This is your future al-Zarqawi" and shows al-Qaeda fighter al-Zarqawi caught in a rat trap.

The US Air Force can use cluster bombs to deliver leaflets. The LBU-30 clusterbomb is designed to allow an aircraft to deliver leaflets to a target area while minimizing wind drift.

Iraq War

The United States and Iraq both contributed to the use of propaganda and like strategy during the Iraq War. With the growing discomfort in the hearts of the American and Iraqi people, there needed to be a way to gain the support of the on-going war. The United States established campaigns towards the American people on the justifications of the war while using similar tactics to bring down Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.^[24] By looking at the ways America and Iraq used propaganda to benefit their individual views it is clear that both sides had similar ideas on how to gain the support needed to win the war.

• Iraqi Propaganda

The Iraqi insurgency had a plan, and that was to gain as much support as possible by using violence as their propaganda tool.^[25] By using the inspiration of the Vietcong^[26], the insurgents were using rapid movement to keep the coalition off-balance.^[27] By using low-technology strategies to convey their messages, they were able to gain support.^[28] Graffiti slogans were used on walls and houses praising the virtues of many group leaders while condemning the Iraqi government. Others used flyers, leaflets, articles and self published newspapers and magazines to get the point across.^[29]

Low-tech methods were most common in Iraqi propaganda however, they were also proficient in high-tech methods. The insurgents would produce CDs and DVDs and distribute them in communities that the Iraq and the U.S. Government were trying to influence.^[30] The insurgents designed advertisements that cost a fraction of what the U.S. was spending on their ads aimed at the same people in Iraq with much more success.^[31] In Addition, the Iraqis also created and established an Arabic language television station in order to transmit information to the people of Iraq about the rumors and lies that the Americans were spreading about the war.^[32]

• American Propaganda in Iraq

For the U.S. to create their aim of a moderate, pro-western Iraq, the U.S. authorities have been careful to avoid conflict with Islamic culture in order to avoid any passionate reaction from the Iraqis. As a result differentiating between "good" and "bad" Islams has proven to be challenging for the U.S.^[33]

The U.S. implemented something called “Black Propaganda” by creating false radio personalities that would disseminate pro-American information but supposedly run by the supporters of Saddam Hussein. One radio station used was Radio Tikrit.^[34] Another example of America’s attempt with Black Propaganda is that the U.S. paid Iraqis to publish articles written by American troops in their newspapers under the idea that they are unbiased and real accounts; this was brought forth by the New York Times in 2005.^[35] The article stated that it was the Lincoln Group who had been hired by the U.S. government to create the propaganda, however their names were later cleared from any wrong doing.^[36]

The U.S. was more successful with the “Voice of America”campaign, which is an old Cold War tactic that exploited people’s desire for information.^[37] While the information they gave out to the Iraqis was truthful, they were in a high degree of competition with the opposing forces after the censorship of the Iraqi media was lifted with the removal of Saddam from power.^[38] If the U.S. had wished to be more successful with their news media they could have followed Hussein’s lead and prohibited Satellite TV and popular access to the internet directly after the Fall of Hussein. ^[39]

In addition to the employment of Black Propaganda and other types of mass communication attempts in Iraq, the U.S. also used many different leaflets that were pro-western in nature. Some of which read that the no-fly zones were for the safety of Iraqis and others attempt to persuade Iraqis to become civil servants for the post-Saddam era in Iraq.^[40]

In November 2005, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, alleged that the United States military had manipulated news reported in Iraqi media in an effort to cast a favorable light on its actions while demoralizing the insurgency. Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman in Iraq, said the program is "an important part of countering misinformation in the news by insurgents", while a spokesman for former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the allegations of manipulation were troubling if true. The Department of Defense has confirmed the existence of the program.^[41] The New York Times published an article about how the Pentagon has started to use contractors with little experience in journalism or public relations to plant articles in the Iraqi press.

These articles are usually written by US soldiers without attribution or are attributed to a non-existent organization called the "International Information Center." Planting propaganda stories in newspapers was done by both the Allies and Central Powers in the First World War and the Axis and Allies in the Second; this is the latest version of this technique.^[42][43][44]

• Propaganda aimed at Americans

Media such as daily news coverage, advertisements, videos, pictures, polls, and various others are indirectly controlled by the news media. The country has strayed from its popular form of mass advertising media and focused more on its biased coverage found in the news.^[24] This is seen as a credible source, allowing information on the current situation to be known to the general public. As noted in the book Selling Intervention & War by Jon Western, the president is “selling the war” to the public.^[45]

People had their initial reactions to the War on Terror, but with more biased and persuading information, Iraq as a whole has been negatively targeted..^[46] America’s goal was to remove Saddam Hussein’s power in Iraq with allegations of possible weapons of mass destruction related to Osama Bin Laden.^[47] Video and picture coverage in the news has shown shocking and disturbing images of torture and other evils being done under the Iraqi Government.^[47] This is one way United States media is fabricating the enemy. By providing purely negative and exaggerated alleged evidence on the situation, Americans are provided with the generally accepted opinion of hatred towards the evil in Iraq. While torture and mass murder of the civilian population was common in Iraq, there were positive positions. The Iraqi government's strong military position was able to keep terrorists under control, a position that changed quickly after that fall of the regime.

Cover page of Album de la Revolucion Cubana, a series of comic trading card and music compilation that targets children

Children

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2009)

Of all the potential targets for propaganda, children are the most vulnerable because they are the most unprepared for the critical reasoning and contextual comprehension required to determine whether a message is propaganda or not.^{[citation needed]} Children's vulnerability to propaganda is rooted in developmental psychology. The attention children give their environment during development, due to the process of developing their understanding of the world, will cause them to absorb propaganda indiscriminately. Also, children are highly imitative: studies by Albert Bandura, Dorothea Ross and Sheila A. Ross in the 1960s indicated that children are susceptible to filmed representations of behaviour. Therefore television is of particular interest in regard to children's vulnerability to propaganda.^{[citation needed]}

Another vulnerability of children is the theoretical influence that their peers have over their behaviour. According to Judith Rich Harris's group-socialization theory, children learn the majority of what they do not receive paternally, through genes, from their peer groups. The implication then is that if peer-groups can be indoctrinated through propaganda at a young age to hold certain beliefs, the group will self-regulate the indoctrination, since new members to the group will adapt their beliefs to fit the group's.^{[citation needed]}

Poster promoting the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. The text reads, "Sandinista children: Toño, Delia and Rodolfo are in the Association of Sandinista Children. Sandinista children use a handkerchief. They participate in the revolution and are very studious."

To a degree, socialization, formal education, and standardized television programming can be seen as using propaganda for the purpose of indoctrination. Schools that utilize dogmatic, frozen world-views, often resort to propagandist curricula that indoctrinate children. The use of propaganda in schools was highly prevalent during the 1930s and 1940s in Germany, as well as in Stalinist Russia.^{[citation needed]}

Anti-Semitic propaganda for children

In Nazi Germany, the education system was thoroughly co-opted to indoctrinate the German youth with anti-Semitic ideology. This was accomplished through the National Socialist Teachers League, of which 97% of all German teachers were members in 1937. It encouraged the teaching of “racial theory.” Picture books for children such as Don’t Trust A Fox in A Green Meadow Or the Word of A Jew, The Poisonous Mushroom, and The Poodle-Pug-Dachshund-Pincher were widely circulated (over 100,000 copies of Don’t Trust A Fox... were circulated during the late 1930s) and contained depictions of Jews as devils, child molesters, and other morally charged figures. Slogans such as “Judas the Jew betrayed Jesus the German to the Jews” were recited in class.^[48] The following is an example of a propagandistic math problem recommended by the National Socialist Essence of Education:

The Jews are aliens in Germany—in 1933 there were 66,606,000 inhabitants in the German Reich, of whom 499,682 (.75%) were Jews.^[49]

Tomorrow's Pioneers(Arabic: رواد الغد‎; also The Pioneers of Tomorrow) is a children's program, broadcast since April 13, 2007 on the official Palestinian Hamas television station, Al-Aqsa TV (Arabic: مرئية الأقصى قناة الأقصى‎). The program deals with many life aspects Palestinan children face. Assoud (Arabic: اسود‎; also rendered as Assud), a Bugs Bunny-like rabbit character whose name means lion was introduced after his brother, the previous co-host, Nahoul died of illness.^[50] In explaining why he is called Assoud (lion), when Arnoub (rabbit) would be more appropriate, Assoud explains that "A rabbit is a term for a bad person and coward. And I, Assoud, will finish off the Jews and eat them."^[50][51] Before Nahoul's death, Assoud lived in Lebanon; he returned "in order to return to the homeland and liberate it."^[51] Assoud has hinted in episode 113 that he will be replaced by a tiger when he is martyred.

See also

• Astroturfing
• Disinformation
• Index of public relations-related articles
• Media bias
• Misinformation

References

Bibliography

• Fred Cohen. ``Frauds, Spies, and Lies — and How to Defeat Them. ISBN 1-878109-36-7 (2006). ASP Press.
• Fred Cohen. ``World War 3 ... Information Warfare Basics. ISBN 1-878109-40-5 (2006). ASP Press.
• Appendix I: PSYOP Techniques (August 31, 1979). Psychological Operations Field Manual No.33-1. Washington, D.C.: Headquarters; Department of the Army. (partial contents here)
• Bytwerk, Randall L. Bending Spines: The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-87013-710-7
• Edwards, John Carver. Berlin Calling: American Broadcasters in Service to the Third Reich. New York, Prager Publishers, 1991. ISBN 0275939057
• Howe, Ellic. The Black Game: British Subversive Operations Against the German During the Second World War. London: Futura, 1982.
• Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World Revisited, New York: Harper, 1958
• Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. New York: Knopf, 1965. New York: Random House/ Vintage 1973
• Hindery, Roderick, "The Anatomy of Propaganda within Religious Terrorism", Humanist, March-April 2003, 16-19.
• Le Bon, Gustave, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1897 (1895 original version)
• Linebarger, Paul M. A. (aka Cordwainer Smith). Psychological Warfare. Washington, D.C., Infantry Journal Press, 1948.
• Nelson, Richard Alan. A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1996. ISBN 0-313-29261-2.
• Young, Emma (October 10, 2001) Psychological warfare waged in Afghanistan. New Scientist.
• Shirer, William L. Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941. New York: Albert A. Knopf, 1942.
• Stauber, John, and Rampton, Sheldon Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995.

Further reading

"Here may lie the most important effect of mass communication, its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us. In short, the mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about." —Shaw & McCombs, The Emergence of American Political Issues, 1977

• Edward Bernays. "Propaganda". (1928)
• Altheide, David L. & Johnson, John M. Bureaucratic Propaganda. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc. (1980)
• J. A. C. Brown Techniques of Persuasion: From Propaganda to Brainwashing Harmondsworth: Pelican (1963)
• John H. Brown. "Two Ways of Looking at Propaganda" (2006)
• Robert Cole. Propaganda in Twentieth Century War and Politics (1996)
• Robert Cole, ed. Encyclopedia of Propaganda (3 vol 1998)
• Combs, James E. & Nimmo, Dan. The New Propaganda: The Dictatorship of Palaver in Contemporary Politics. White Plains, N.Y. Longman. (1993)
• Nicholas John Cull, David Culbert, and David Welch, eds. Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present (2003)
• Cunningham, Stanley, B. The Idea of Propaganda: A Reconstruction. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. (2002)
• Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. (1988)
• Jowett, Garth S. and O'Donnell, Victoria. Propaganda and Persuasion 4th edition. * * Kevin R. Kosar. "Is Propaganda Legal?" Chicago Sun-Times, January 29, 2006.
• Kevin R. Kosar. Public Relations and Propaganda: Restrictions on Executive Branch Activities, CRS Report RL32750, February 2005.
• Kevin R. Kosar. "The Law: The Executive Branch and Propaganda: The Limits of Legal Restrictions" Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 35 Iss. 4 Page 784-797, December 2005.
• Harold D. Lasswell. Propaganda Technique in World War I. Cambridge, Mass: The M.I.T. Press. (1971)
• Le Bon, Gustave, The Crowd: a study of the Popular Mind (1895)
• John R. MacArthur. Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War. New York: Hill and Wang. (1992)
• Randal Marlin. Propaganda & The Ethics of Persuasion. Orchard Park, New York: Broadview Press. (2002)
• McCombs M. E. & Shaw, D. L. (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36, 176-87.
• Paul M. Linebarger. Psychological Warfare. International Propaganda and Communications. ISBN 0-405-04755-X (1948)
• Pratkanis, Anthony & Aronson, Elliot. Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company. (1992)
• Rutherford, Paul. Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. (2000)
• Rutherford, Paul. Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Marketing the War Against Iraq. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. (2004)
• Nancy Snow. "American Persuasion, Influence and Propaganda"
• Sproule, J. Michael. Channels of Propaganda. Bloomington, IN: EDINFO Press. (1994)
• David R.Willcox,Propaganda, the Press and Conflict (2005)

Notes

1. ^ Hindery, Roderick R., Indoctrination and Self-deception or Free and Critical Thought? (2001)
2. ^ "The Religious Movements Page: Conceptualizing "Cult" and "Sect"". http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/cultsect/concult.htm. Retrieved on December 4 2005. 
3. ^ "Polish Anti-Cult Movement (Koscianska) - CESNUR". http://www.cesnur.org/conferences/riga2000/koscianska.htm. Retrieved on December 4 2005. 
4. ^ Propaganda Techniques
5. ^ "Letter from Noam Chomsky" to Covert Action Quarterly, quoting Alex Carey, Australian social scientist.
6. ^ review of Carey, Alex (1995) Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Propaganda in the US and Australia, University of NSW Press.
7. ^ Ross, Sheryl Tuttle. "Understanding Propaganda: The Epistemic Merit Model and Its Application to Art." Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 36, No.1. pp. 16-30
8. ^ Boesche, Roger. "Kautilya’s Arthasastra on War and Diplomacy in Ancient India", The Journal of Military History 67 (p. 9–38), January 2003.
9. ^ Beckman, Karen Redrobe (2003), Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism, Duke University Press, pp. 31-3, ISBN 0822330741 
10. ^ Beckman, Karen Redrobe (2003), Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism, Duke University Press, pp. 33-4, ISBN 0822330741 
11. ^ About Edward Berneys book chapter
12. ^ "Records". http://www.catalogue.nationalarchives.gov.uk/displaycataloguedetails.asp?CATID=7100&CATLN=3&Highlight=&FullDetails=True. Retrieved on December 4 2005. 
13. ^ "Reports". http://www.catalogue.nationalarchives.gov.uk/displaycataloguedetails.asp?CATID=6965&CATLN=3&Highlight=&FullDetails=True. Retrieved on December 4 2005. 
14. ^ Guardian — The cartoon that came in from the cold -
15. ^ ""Serbian Propaganda: A Closer Look"". April 12, 1999. http://www.bu.edu/globalbeat/pubs/Pesic041299.html. "NOAH ADAMS: The European Center for War, Peace and the News Media, based in London, has received word from Belgrade that no pictures of mass Albanian refugees have been shown at all, and that the Kosovo humanitarian catastrophe is only referred to as the one made up or overemphasized by Western propaganda.
    Also, and we quote from the report, "information programs are designed to present the illegitimacy of a NATO aggression on Yugoslavia, the unanimity of the Serbian people in resisting the enemy and Serbian invincibility. All three aims are wrapped in a nationalistic code, `most powerful Western nations, killers, death disseminators, fascists, dictators, criminals, villains, bandits, vandals, barbarians, gangsters, vampires, cowards, perverts, lunatics, scum and trash who want to destroy the small but honorable, dignified, freedom-loving Serbian nation." 
16. ^ "ICTY: Radoslav Brđanin verdict - 1. Joint Criminal Enterprise". http://www.un.org/icty/brdjanin/trialc/judgement/brd-tj040901e1.htm#VIIA1. 
17. ^ "ICTY: Radoslav Brđanin verdict — C. The implementation of the Strategic Plan in the Bosnian Krajina". http://www.un.org/icty/brdjanin/trialc/judgement/brd-tj040901e1.htm#IVC. 
18. ^ "ICTY: Blaškić verdict — A. The Lasva Valley: May 1992 – January 1993 - b) The municipality of Busovača". http://www.un.org/icty/blaskic/trialc1/judgement/bla-tj000303e-3.htm#IIIA1b. 
19. ^ "ICTY: Blaškić verdict — A. The Lasva Valley: May 1992 – January 1993 - c) The municipality of Kiseljak". http://www.un.org/icty/blaskic/trialc1/judgement/bla-tj000303e-3.htm#IIIA1c. 
20. ^ "ICTY: Kordić and Čerkez verdict — IV. Attacks on towns and villages: killings - 2. The Conflict in Gornji Vakuf". http://www.un.org/icty/kordic/trialc/judgement/kor-tj010226e-5.htm#IVA2. 
21. ^ "ICTY: Naletilić and Martinović verdict — Mostar attack". http://www.un.org/icty/naletilic/trialc/judgement/nal-tj030331-1.htm#IIB2. 
22. ^ Slobodna Dalmacija — NAJVEĆI DONATOR HAAŠKOG SUDA JE — SAUDIJSKA ARABIJA [1]
23. ^ Igor Lasić — Izlog izdavačkog smeća
24. ^ ^{a b} Altheide, David L. "War and Mass Mediated Evidence." Cultural Studies — Critical Methodologies 9 (2009): 14-22.
25. ^ Garfield, Andrew. "The U.S. Counter-propaganda Failure in Iraq." Middle East Quarterly 14 (2007): 23-32.
26. ^ Schleifer, Ron. "Reconstructing Iraq: Winning the Propaganda War in Iraq." Middle East Quarterly (2005): 15-24.
27. ^ Garfield, Andrew. "The U.S. Counter-propaganda Failure in Iraq." Middle East Quarterly 14 (2007): 23-32.
28. ^ Garfield, Andrew. "The U.S. Counter-propaganda Failure in Iraq." Middle East Quarterly 14 (2007): 24
29. ^ Garfield, Andrew. "The U.S. Counter-propaganda Failure in Iraq." Middle East Quarterly 14 (2007): 24
30. ^ Garfield, Andrew. "The U.S. Counter-propaganda Failure in Iraq." Middle East Quarterly 14 (2007): 26
31. ^ Garfield, Andrew. "The U.S. Counter-propaganda Failure in Iraq." Middle East Quarterly 14 (2007): 26
32. ^ Schleifer, Ron. "Reconstructing Iraq: Winning the Propaganda War in Iraq." Middle East Quarterly (2005): 15-24.
33. ^ Schleifer, Ron. "Reconstructing Iraq: Winning the Propaganda War in Iraq." Middle East Quarterly (2005): 15-24.
34. ^ Schleifer, Ron. "Reconstructing Iraq: Winning the Propaganda War in Iraq." Middle East Quarterly (2005): 15-24.
35. ^ Shah, Anup. Iraq War Media Reporting, Journalism and Propaganda. Aug 1, 2007. May 12, 2009. <http://www.globalissues.org/article/461/media-reporting-journalism-and-propaganda.>
36. ^ Shah, Anup. Iraq War Media Reporting, Journalism and Propaganda. Aug 1, 2007. May 12, 2009. <http://www.globalissues.org/article/461/media-reporting-journalism-and-propaganda.>
37. ^ Schleifer, Ron. "Reconstructing Iraq: Winning the Propaganda War in Iraq." Middle East Quarterly (2005): 15-24.
38. ^ Goldstein, Sol. "A Strategic Failure: American Information Control Policy in Occupied Iraq." Military Review 88.2 (Mar. 2008): 58-65.
39. ^ Goldstein, Sol. "A Strategic Failure: American Information Control Policy in Occupied Iraq." Military Review 88.2 (Mar. 2008): 58-65.
40. ^ Psywar.org. N.D.A. May 13, 2009. http://www.psywar.org/apdsearchform.php?Search=Search&war=Iraqi%20Freedom.
41. ^ http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/U.S._military_covertly_pays_to_run_stories_in_Iraqi_press#Sources
42. ^ Baldor, Lolita C. (November 30, 2005). "U.S. Military Unclear on 'Planted' Stories". Associated Press. http://web.archive.org/web/20060630204816/http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/11/30/national/w140545S58.DTL. 
43. ^ "U.S. military plants stories in the Iraqi media -". http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=10010. Retrieved on December 4 2005. ^{[dead link]}
44. ^ Baldor, Lolita C. (December 2, 2005). "Pentagon describes Iraq propaganda plan". Associated Press. http://web.archive.org/web/20051205031408/http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/13305355.htm. 
45. ^ Thrall, A. Trevor. "A Review of: "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Marketing the War Against Iraq, by Paul Rutherford Selling Intervention & War: The Presidency, the..." Political Communication 24.2 (Apr. 2007): 202-207.
46. ^ John, Sue Lockett, et al. "Going Public, Crisis after Crisis: The Bush Administration and the Press from September 11 to Saddam." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10.2 (Summer2007 2007): 195-219.
47. ^ ^{a b} O'Shaughnessy, Nicholas. "Weapons of Mass Seduction: Propaganda, Media and the Iraq War." Journal of Political Marketing 3.4 (2004): 79-104. America: History & Life.
48. ^ Mills, Mary. "Propaganda and Children During the Hitler Years". Jewish Virtual Library. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/propchil.html
49. ^ Hirsch, Herbert.|Genocide and the Politics of Memory. Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. pg. 119
50. ^ ^{a b} "Assoud Arrives". Tomorrow's Pioneers. 2008-02-01. No. 11, season 1. 
51. ^ ^{a b} Nissan Ratzlav-Katz, "PA TV Bunny Rabbit Threatens to 'Eat the Jews'", Arutz Sheva, February 12, 2008 (6 Adar 5768).

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: propaganda

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Propaganda

Current propaganda

• PR Watch
• Is Government Propaganda Legal? Well...
• Spinwatch
• Propaganda Critic: A website devoted to propaganda analysis.
• Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

Historical propaganda

• Documentation on Early Cold War U.S. Propaganda Activities in the Middle East by the National Security Archive. Collection of 148 documents and overview essay.
• Sacred Congregation of Propaganda from the Catholic Encyclopedia
• World War II propaganda leaflets: A website about airdropped, shelled or rocket fired propaganda leaflets. Some posters also.
• Second World War Posters: A website containing images/links/information on Second World War posters, mostly British.
• War, Propaganda and the Media: from GlobalIssues.org
• Canadian Wartime Propaganda - Canadian War Museum
• Vietnamese propaganda posters
• "North Korea's art of propaganda", BBC, July 29, 2007: images of North Korean propaganda posters
• CBC Radio's "Nazi Eyes On Canada" (1942), series with Hollywood stars promoting Canadian War Bonds
• America at War, a digital collection of World War II-era American propaganda pamphlets and additional material
• Over 400 posters from World Wars II & II (searchable facsimile at the University of Georgia Libraries; DjVu & layered PDF format)
• Psywar.org's large collection of propaganda leaflets from various conflicts
• Pyongyang Chronicles
• US Central Command (CENTCOM) archive of propaganda leaflets dropped in Iraq
• Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages
• Bytwerk, Randall, "Nazi and East German Propaganda Guide Page". Calvin College.
• US Navy recruiting posters archive
• Tim Frank Collection of WWII Propaganda Leaflets, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library

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Common misspelling(s) of propaganda

• propoganda

Dansk (Danish)
n. - propaganda

Nederlands (Dutch)
propaganda, Rooms Katholiek rechtsorgaan

Français (French)
n. - propagande

Deutsch (German)
n. - Propaganda

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - προπαγάνδα

Italiano (Italian)
propaganda

Português (Portuguese)
n. - propaganda (f)

Русский (Russian)
пропаганда

Español (Spanish)
n. - propaganda

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - propaganda

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
宣传, 宣传机关, 宣传活动

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 宣傳, 宣傳機關, 宣傳活動

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 선전, 선전활동

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 宣伝, プロパガンダ, 布教聖省, 布教神学校

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) دعايه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮תעמולה, תעמולה מטעה‬

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