ZGram - 11/16/2002 - "The Selling of America" -Part II

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

=1FZGRAM - Where Truth is Destiny

November 16, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

This is the conclusion of a two-part ZGram titled "Propaganda War: 
One Year Later" or, alternately, "The Selling of America", based on 
an interview by "Guerrilla News Network" (GNN) with author Dr. Nancy 
Snow.

Shortly after 9-11, GNN asked Dr. Nancy Snow, author of Propaganda, 
Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World, to explain how the U.S. 
propaganda machine really works. Dr. Snow, a former cultural officer 
with the United States Information Agency, should know. She worked in 
the belly of the beast.

[START]

(Continuing Dr. Nancy Snow's response to GNN's question:

"=1FGNN: What are some of the new propaganda methods that the Bush 
Administration has employed?

DR. NANCY SNOW:  Charlotte Beers at one time headed J. Walter 
Thompson, one of the top ten PR firms in the world.  One of George 
Creel's enlisted men in the propaganda effort of WWI was James Webb 
Young of J. Walter Thompson, who led information efforts to 
demoralize the German people.  Victoria de Grazia describes how U.S. 
propaganda efforts function in comparison to other forms: "Publicity, 
with private sector support, was the handmaiden of a government that 
presented itself as opposed to heavy-handed involvement abroad and 
sought to circumvent autocratic leaders to get the humane, rational 
message of the American people directly to peoples with similar 
aspirations.  Other regimes may propagate hard-nosed ideology, but 
American democracy had lofty ideals."  Her point that publicity 
institutions working with the private sector were the handmaidens of 
American propaganda is exactly what Propaganda, Inc. describes about 
the function of the U.S. Information Agency both during and after the 
Cold War.

She also makes a significant point about the United States.  There is 
no other country in the world that matches ours for developing such 
close links between commerce (salesmanship) and the business of 
government (statesmanship).  None.  Since World War I, advertising 
has mixed with selling war, foreign aid, and even cultural exchanges.

This creates a real dilemma for the United States government in 
2002.  How can the numero uno propaganda nation avoid overplaying its 
hand by mixing the Big Sell with a government effort to inform and 
educate people elsewhere about American society?  It cannot.  We will 
continue to read occasional reports from the Council on Foreign 
Relations or the U.S. Public Diplomacy Advisory Commission gnashing 
their teeth over our hyper-advertising approach to reshaping 
America's image in the world.  This is what the U.S. is to the 
world-the ultimate salesman.  And just like a tiger doesn't change 
its stripes, so doesn't the U.S. become something it's not.  We 
appear to the world like the world's Barnum & Bailey, and remember 
what P.T. Barnum said, "A sucker is born every minute."  We shouldn't 
be surprised that anti-Americanism is on the rise one year after we 
had global sympathy in the days following 9/11.  The President's 
go-it-alone rhetoric just fans the flames of this growing enmity.    

The Bush Administration's propaganda efforts on Iraq underscore a 
sense that this administration needs the world more as an audience or 
convenient backdrop to doing exactly what it's going to do anyway.  
Until and unless the world sees a picture of American society full of 
debate and dissent about the direction our country is going in, I 
don't hold out great hope for any short-term gains in improving our 
global image, whether or not we cool it on the advertising.  What I'm 
trying to do in my own work is to reach out with friends here and 
abroad to mount some kind of open dissent and protest against a U.S. 
administration that is neither acting in the American public interest 
nor in the interests of a global civil society.                       

Now I'm not so na=EFve to believe that the New York Times, the 
so-called "newspaper of record," is printing all the news that's fit 
to print about what the Bush Administration is doing outside public 
eye.  There's plenty in this new media/mental mind management era 
that is out of public reach and public comment, hidden in so-called 
black budgets that merge intelligence, covert action, with 
information and psyops programs.  There's also plenty that we as 
citizens allow the U.S. press to get away with by not pressing Bush 
and other people in power about what they mean by Axis of Evil and 
the defense of freedom.  Whose freedom?  My freedom or your freedom?  
=46reedom for McDonnell Douglas or Exxon Mobil?  Haven't we graduated 
from the Dick and Jane reading series to a place where we can 
aggressively debate foreign policies that put innocent people in 
harm's way?  I remember last fall hearing Representative Henry Hyde 
ask something like, "How is it that the country that invented 
Hollywood and Madison Avenue engendered so much hatred?" That 
question seemed to sail around the Internet as an example of a nation 
of leaders out of step with how others see us.  He's the chair of the 
House International Relations Committee and is now promoting the 
=46reedom Promotion Act of 2002.  Naturally.  In his statement to the 
press about this new legislation, he said, "If any nation has been a 
greater force for good in the long and tormented history of this 
world, I am unaware of it.  We have guarded whole continents from 
conquest, showered aid on distant lands, sent thousands of youthful 
idealists to remote and often inhospitable areas to help the world's 
forgotten.  Why, then, when we read or listen to descriptions of 
America in the foreign press do we so often seem to be entering a 
fantasyland of hatred?"  

I find statements like these counterproductive to improving American 
relations with the world.  I'm less concerned about our image than I 
am about our true relationships.  I want to be able to connect with 
my international counterparts and meet citizen-to-citizen.  Some of 
our elected officials seem focused on underscoring how good or great 
we are because we say so.  Do you think Rep. Hyde has actually sat 
down with some members of that foreign press who criticize to get an 
accurate measure of the source of that criticism?  It shouldn't 
surprise our government that we are held in mixed review.  No 
government, including our own, is immune to engaging in actions that 
harm, especially since governments are often driven by their own 
narrow self-interests.  But the propaganda message is that no really, 
we're the greatest nation on earth, perhaps in P.T. Barnum's view, 
the greatest show on earth.  I think the world's people and its press 
are becoming weary of this refrain.

GNN: How has propaganda changed over time?  We bemoan it infiltrating 
the media today, but during World War II, the newsreels produced by 
the "press" were pretty much indistinguishable from the military's 
objective. 
 
DR. NANCY SNOW:  Recall the now legendary Eisenhower outgoing speech 
of 1961 in which he said that our country must "guard against the 
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by 
the military industrial complex."  He's famous for providing the 
military industrial complex (MID) to our lexicon, but I think he 
might have wanted to add another M.  Today's landscape, or at least 
the landscape of the last 50 years or more, is a military-media 
industrial complex (MMID).  The military and media absorb the bulk of 
our research sources in technology.  Anything that's invested in 
information technology in the U.S. is first applied in the media and 
military sectors and then filters down eventually to the mass 
consumer society.  Consumers are the last to get access to new 
technology that will make our lives freer and easier to challenge the 
power establishments.
 
Having said that, wartime propaganda in the 20th century and beyond 
has always been impacted by the American motion picture industry and 
American press.  Can you imagine the propaganda potential of film 
with a captive audience of hundreds of millions in the early part of 
the last century alone?!  In Phil Taylor's book, Munitions of the 
Mind, he describes the massive film operation set up by the Office of 
War Information just months after the Pearl Harbor attack.  What we 
used to call the U.S. War Department (now the Department of Defense) 
spent annually over $50 million on film production during World War 
II to propagate the message of the war both here and overseas.  The 
famous Hollywood film director Frank Capra (Mr. Smith Goes to 
Washington, It's a Wonderful Life), became Major Frank Capra during 
the war and was asked by General George C. Marshall to make the Why 
We Fight documentary war series.  The free press is comprised of 
people like you and me who are just as subject to a swell of 
patriotism and ultra nationalism as is anyone else.  I think we like 
to idealize that the press will truly separate its personal feelings 
about a story and report objectively, but World War II was the "Good 
War" and was thought then to end all wars.  The American press worked 
in tandem with the military objectives of the U.S. Government as part 
of their sense of duty to country in wartime.  
 
Today propaganda infiltration of the media system is more intense 
than ever.  You certainly cannot turn to the Internet as a source of 
"the absolute truth" since the Internet functions as an open media 
system and is subject to the same rumormongering and gossip as a 
National Enquirer.  The Internet, as media and democracy scholar 
Robert McChesney notes, is also being colonized by the corporate 
landscape.  That's not to say that there aren't some good critical 
sites and I do use the Internet regularly to conduct research, but 
always with an eye toward the source of the information.

[END]

( SOURCE:  =1Fhttp://www.guerrillanews.com/media/cointel/doc744.html )