PROPAGANDA AND JOURNALISM
The press has been the target of propagandists from its
infancy in America. The first English-language newspaper in the New World lasted only a single issue when
Boston’s Publick Occurrences, appearing on September
29, 1690, criticized the governing council of Massachusetts. Benjamin Harris had published “without authority”
and his refusal to serve as propagandist for local authorities meant the colonies would have to wait another fourteen
years before another newspaper saw the light of day. John
Campbell’s Boston News-Letter, begun on April 24, 1704,
for fifteen years faithfully served as propagandist for civil
authority. The colony’s governor or his secretary exercised
expressed authority to review each issue of Campbell’s
paper before distribution. This eventually alienated the
paper from its public when Campbell continued to support
the unpopular administration of Governor Joseph Dudley
despite widespread colonial opposition because of his history of maladministration.
Colonial America’s most famous printer, Benjamin
Franklin, spoke in behalf of printers who were criticized
for the opinions appearing in their pages. His “Apologie
for Printers,” appearing in the June 10, 1731, issue of his
Pennsylvania Gazette, claimed that printers should not be
blamed for the arguments appearing in their papers. “The
business of printing has chiefly to do with men’s opinions,”
Franklin wrote, and that meant publishing points of view
with which they disagreed. For Franklin, that meant widely
circulating “both truth and error,” and trusting readers to
know the difference.
In the years leading up to the American Revolution,
printers were put in the position of propagandist for Loyalist or Patriot forces who saw the press as an instrument
of mobilization. Revolutionary leader John Adams divided
the country into thirds—one-third favored separation from
Britain, one third opposed, and a middle third were undecided. The press became a place where each side tried to
persuade the undecided of the rightness of their cause.
Adams cousin, Samuel Adams, helped organize the Sons of
Liberty, whose Committees of Correspondence spread propaganda throughout the colonies arguing for independence.
The so-called “Boston Massacre” of 1770 and the “Boston
Tea Party” of 1773 were exercises in political propaganda.
Five colonists were killed in a snowball throwing melee
with British troops, but the rendering of the episode that
most colonists saw was Paul Revere’s depiction of soldiers
standing as a firing squad and executing defenseless civilians. The tea party was a piece of political theater in which
boxes of tea were hurled into Boston harbor to protest the
English tax on tea. Newspapers that resisted being mouthpieces for revolutionary forces, such as the Boston Evening Post, operated by Thomas and John Fleet, were silenced. A
similar fate awaited publishers of the Boston Chronicle and
the Pennsylvania Chronicle. Patriot printers John Dunlap,
James Humphreys, and Benjamin Edes faced the same fate
when they resisted publishing the propaganda of Loyalist
forces. Other newspapers simply tried to stay in business
by printing the propaganda of whichever side seemed winning to be during the six long years of fighting during the
American Revolution. Despite a series of setbacks on the
battlefield, General George Washington continued to get a
good press to prop up the fragile wartime morale.
Propaganda ruled in the party press during the early
Republican period. Newspapers could not afford to be neutral. They were financed through competing political parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, and
were expected to reflect the views of the political interests
that supported them. Federalists attacked their political
opponents as “anarchists” and Democratic-Republican
press charged their political opposition favored “monarchy.”
The Federalists, led by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, financed a nationwide network of newspapers as a vehicle for expressing their political point of view.
Thomas Jefferson, who would become the third president,
was the leader of the agrarian forces that heartily opposed
in the press the creation of too much power in Washington, D.C. Each side was intemperate in their unbridled use
of personal invective in pushing their case. Federalist editors charged Jefferson was a “mulatto,” a calumny in the
early nineteenth century. Readers were told if Jefferson
was elected he would “burn Bibles.” Jefferson’s allies in the
press were no less measured in their political propaganda.
They argued that if Jefferson lost the presidential election of
1800 to John Adams, the American experiment in democracy was over. Jefferson narrowly won the election.
The press remained a site of political propaganda well
into the administration of Andrew Jackson. By the 1830s
the Federalists had faded into history, and the press became
the place where competing candidates within the Democratic Party could make their case before the public. When
a Pennsylvania publisher who was on Jackson’s payroll
criticized “Old Hickory” for naming John C. Calhoun as
his vice presidential running mate, Jackson suspended
payments to the editor who wound up bankrupted. Until
newspapers could wean themselves away from economic
dependence on political benefactors, they were forced to
serve as conduits of political propaganda. Beginning in
1833, the press could increasingly portray itself as resisting propaganda from “private interests” to serve the “public
interest.” This became a successful marketing strategy in
the intense competition to win readers for advertisers, who
helped subsidize the astonishing growth of penny papers
over much of urban America.
By the late Gilded Age nearly half of all operating costs
for the nation’s newspapers was paid through advertising.
Advertising was a factor in the rise of yellow journalism, initially appearing in the pages of William Randolph
Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York
World, a narrative style that relied on sensation and celebrity to stimulate circulation. Hearst, as well as his mentor
and eventual competitor, Pulitzer, sold sensationalism and
the profits made it irresistible. Hearst, for instance, ran a
series of articles blaming Spain for sinking the American
warship U.S. Maine in February, 1898. Although the stories were of dubious accuracy, some historians have argued
that Hearst—and Pulitzer—played an important role in
inciting the Spanish-American War with this brand of
“propaganda.”
The cooperation between journalists and the government entered a new phase during World War I (1914–1918).
In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed controversial journalist George Creel the U.S. Committee on
Public Information (CPI), the first large-scale American
government propaganda agency. The Committee’s goal was
to unite American public opinion behind the war, and Wilson and Creel acted on the idea that few people knew how
to do that better at the time than journalists. The Committee
inundated Americans with information extolling American
ideals, vilifying German militarism, and telling citizens
what they could do to help win the war. At the same time,
the Committee enlisted journalists and others to deliver
America’s message abroad in more than thirty countries.
Creel, who was a former muckraker and a true believer in
American exceptionalism, called his book detailing his
propaganda war in the war How We Advertised America:
The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on
Public Information that Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe (1920).
If the word “propaganda” carried negative connotations
before the war, its meaning took on even more worrying
implications after the war as mass communications became
more sophisticated. Webster’s dictionary defined propaganda as “the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for
the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or
a person; and ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately
to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause; also,
a public action having such an effect.” The propaganda
work of journalists, advertisers, and others such as the public relations specialist Edward L. Bernays in 1917–1918, led
many observers to believe that the government had oversold
the war to a public that was too susceptible to emotional
appeals. After the war, columnist Walter Lippmann, who
had worked in military propaganda in Europe, wrote a powerful critique of modern democracy called Public Opinion
(1922) and argued that the combination of propaganda and
censorship helped to prevent citizens from understanding
the real world.
Scholars began to study propaganda systematically after
they had seen the results of government media manipulation in World War I. In 1927, Harold Lasswell published
one of the first scholarly analyses of modern media manipulation entitled Propaganda Technique in the World War.
Lasswell said that all war propaganda had certain characteristics: 1) blaming the enemy for starting the war and,
if possible, personalizing the enemy (e.g., in World War
I, it was the Kaiser); 2) accusing the enemy of unspeakable atrocities, what Lasswell called “Satanism”; 3) giving an illusion of victory and attempting to demoralize
the enemy with information whether true or otherwise; 4)
explaining to the home front how citizens could contribute to winning the war; and 5) trying to win over neutral
countries. In 1935, Yale University psychology professor
Leonard Doob explained the difference between education
and propaganda in his book Propaganda: Its Psychology
and Technique. “The educator tries to tell people how to
think; the propagandist, what to think,” Dobb explained.
“The educator strives to develop individual responsibility;
the propagandist, mass effects. The educator fails unless
he [or she] achieves an open mind; the propagandist unless
he achieves a closed mind.”
Propagandists were not limited to wartime. During the
Great Depression of the 1930s, one of the most popular figures was Father Charles Coughlin, who edited a magazine
called Social Justice, which boasted circulation at half a
million. Every week Coughlin would supplement that circulation with a radio broadcast of his views to 3.5 million
Americans in the late 1930s and beyond. Among other
things, Coughlin broadcasts attacked President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt as a warmonger. St. Louis journalist
Marquis Childs, skeptical of Coughlin’s verbal attacks and
character assassination, took a special interest in the priest’s
work. Through research, Childs discovered and reported
that an article in Social Justice bearing Coughlin’s byline
was a word-for-word translation of a radio speech delivered
by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Goebbels, Adolph Hitler, and the Nazis, of course,
became masters of using mass media to manipulate vast
numbers of people. They used radio, public address systems, film, and public spectacles to create propaganda
that was far more disturbing than what had been produced
during the Great War. In studying the effects of such propaganda, a powerful effects model of media influence
grew out of the Marxist Frankfurt School of intellectuals who tried to explain Germany’s willingness to accept
Nazism.
American propaganda during World War II was also
more effective and complex. After Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt
set up the Foreign Information Service (FIS) at the urging of playwright Robert Sherwood. It was based on the
idea that the FIS could use mass communication to “tell
the world about the aims and objectives of the American
government and the American people.” Journalists, writers, broadcasters, and others, most of whom were prewar
interventionists who believed that words and ideas could
be used to fight fascism, joined the new organization. In
June, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt combined several government information agencies to create the Office
of War Information (OWI) and made broadcast journalist
Elmer Davis its director. In 1942, the United States also
entered the world of international propaganda with the
Voice of America (VOA).
By all accounts, the FIS, the OWI, and VOA were far
more sophisticated in their use of psychology and media
effects research than had been the case with the CPI in
World War I. Many of the people who worked in propaganda for the American government during World War
II went on to be come leading journalists and scholars in
communication research in the postwar world. During the
Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union,
enormous resources were devoted to studying propaganda
and how to turn world opinion against international Communism. Scholarly research into the power of propaganda
proceeded on a massive scale. Research challenged the
powerful effects model, contending it overestimated connections between the power of the media and independent
thought. In 1955, Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, and later
Joseph Klapper in 1960, refuted the idea that the media
could tell people what to think. Their research led to what
became known as the limited effects theory of mass communication. In 1963, political scientist Bernard C. Cohen
wrote The Press and Foreign Policy in which he argued
that even if the media could not tell people what to think, it
could perhaps at least tell them what to think about.
By the early 1970s, communication researchers lost
faith in the limited effects model. In 1972, a landmark
Chapel Hill Study provided the agenda-setting hypothesis
about mass communication, which breathed new life into
the powerful effects model. The hypothesis held that news
outlets have special interests they want to serve, which
determine the perspective they report, and the stories they
report.
In 1976, George Gerbner first described his cultivation theory of mass communication. It held that television
had become the main source of storytelling in society and
as such its misuse had created a homogeneous and fearful populace. TV was closing the intellectual commons by
reducing the diversity of viewpoints held by the citizenry.
Television, he argued, fed people from all strata of society
the same thoughts and ideas, thereby allowing an idea with
broad appeal to take hold on a mass scale without questioning or thought or vetting. In this way, he argued, television
shaped societal values.
Later media effects research in the 1980s and 1990s
emphasized how the media “construct” reality, and also
how audiences build their own view of social reality as
well as their place in it when information is framed certain
ways by television, newspapers, and radio. That notion may
be extended to the study of online news as well. Key studies in the construction of reality by news outlets included
analyses of the U.S. student movement against the Vietnam
War in the late 1960s, and opinion formation concerning
nuclear power in 1989. During the early 1990s, communication researchers described the agenda-melding function
in media effects research, which suggested that the mass
media expanded knowledge by exposing people to things
that they might not otherwise think about. In so doing, mass
communication could help citizens find other people with
whom we have common interest.
Most researchers agreed that the spread of digital and
web-based technologies in the twenty-first century was
creating a new opportunity for propagandists to use media
to arouse and mobilize public opinion for a new range of
purposes.
Further Reading
Lasswell, Harold D. Propaganda Technique in World War I.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1927, 1971.
Rogers, Everett M. A History of Communication Study: A Biographical Approach. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
Shulman, Holly Cowan. The Voice of America: Propaganda and
Democracy, 1941–1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1990.
Simpson, Christopher. Science of Coercion: Communication
Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960. New
York : Oxford University Press, 1994.
Vaughn, Stephen. Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy,
Nationalism and the Committee on Public Information.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.
Winkler, Allan M. Politics of Propaganda: The Offi ce of War
Information, 1942–1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1978.
Debra A. Schwartz