On Propaganda

"Want It? Join up" Poster by Vladimir Mayakovsky. The text reads, "1. Want to overcome cold? 2. Want to overcome hunger? 3. Want to eat? 4. Want to drink? Then hurry up and join the shock brigades of exemplary labor!" Via Wikipedia.

Got into a big debate—not hostile, I think, but more properly exploratory—in which I was trying to explain some ideas about the press, and how it works, that I think are really kind of important in our post-truth environment. That you can understand how bad the proper prestige press is, in the first place, without concluding that nothing is knowable and everything you read or hear might be a lie. The very real problems of the news media are systemic, like racism. They are not the result of an elaborate conspiracy, as if Dean Baquet was taking marching orders from Charles Koch in some undisclosed location; they are a feature, as our old friend Thornton (who will show up in the thread, under the name "Henry Porter"), would say, not of an ideology but of a business plan. It starts out at what seems like a modest point (the specific question was whether the Senate deal on US Postal Service reform was going to protect Louis DeJoy from getting fired, and whether an old Politico article got the question right):

It's not so hard to get a feel for it and read it critically. They're not interested in telling lies, they're interested in dealing exciting gossip, and they might occasionally thank sources by making them look good in return.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 9, 2022

I actually don't think that's the case. We have organs that do that, like the @newscorp pigs, and we don't have organs that back Democrats, which I wish we did, like my friend @HenryPorters--the other guys, from @Pollitico to @NYtimes, are selling entertainment.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 9, 2022

You're much more generous than I. Between who owns these news conglomerates and who grooms journalists I'd surmise it's a fairly closed loop. https://t.co/0qnITzXSms

— Luddite🌻 push the overton window toward humanity. (@soleuscramps) March 9, 2022

Nope. There’s no reason to believe that the kind of media which powered the Progressive Movement and New Deal is bad and the kind that oversaw the Reagan Revolution is good… no reason except 7 decades of marketing in mass media by and for mass media.

— Henry Porter (@HenryPorters) March 9, 2022

You can push an agenda with solid honest reporting and editing. The Guardian does it all the time. Mother Jones and Talking Points Memo never tell a lie--not that they're beyond criticism, nobody is, but there's no contradiction between good journalism and having a viewpoint.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 9, 2022

Well there's sensational focused media and then there's media created to try to push an agenda, propaganda posing as news. Both are harmful and overlap.

— Luddite🌻 push the overton window toward humanity. (@soleuscramps) March 9, 2022

Indeed, the enablers give legitimacy to false claims or political strategy under the guise of impartiality. This is the track where the political spectrum gets pushed.

— Luddite🌻 push the overton window toward humanity. (@soleuscramps) March 9, 2022

What I'm saying is that even if they're completely sincere believers in impartiality, as I think many are, that has a pernicious effect in its own right. The journalists' ideology of being above politics is itself distorting.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 9, 2022

Interesting to hear a novel reflecting what life was like could be considered propaganda. Confederate statues are, however, and were designed to create a distorted view of history. Currently propaganda in media is created to sell an idea, frequently using fabricated information.

— Luddite🌻 push the overton window toward humanity. (@soleuscramps) March 9, 2022

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The statues had little to do with history; they don't have a narrative. They were really about the Jim Crow present (1890s through 1920s or so), a celebration of the end of Reconstruction and assertion that white power had risen again, meant to frighten or awe Black people.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 9, 2022

And, importantly, it was first published not as a book but in a newspaper in serialized form.

— Henry Porter (@HenryPorters) March 9, 2022

I mentioned in another tweet that I was referring to a different type of propaganda.

— Luddite🌻 push the overton window toward humanity. (@soleuscramps) March 9, 2022

Well, there's the rub, right? What you want is a way of distinguishing bad propaganda, which is dishonest, from good propaganda, which isn't—like Uncle Tom's Cabin: Life Among the Lowly, which openly acknowledges that it is fiction, though the subtitle suggests a journalistic intent. I'm serious about that: the authentic narratives of enslavement, of which Frederick Douglass's autobiography is the best known, are more important as documents, but the novel, bypassing the question of whether the story really happened (it clearly could have happened, most of the incidents and characters are drawn from real life), draws you straight into its emotional world, and that makes a contribution of its own.

The word "propaganda" is, as everybody knows, the feminine singular gerundive of Latin propagare, to propagate, hence "that (feminine) thing that has to be propagated", from the 1622 Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Holy Congregation for the Faith, Which Needs to Be Spread (my translation—the official name is not so attentive to the grammar of the Latin) or committee of cardinals supervising foreign missions, which the Counter-Reformation clerics obviously believed was a good thing (it still exists, since 1967 under the name "Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples"). You might think it got its negative connotations in the first place from Protestants back in the 17th century, but it didn't really become a popular word until the 20th century, in the leadup to World War I, and reached its climax in the leadup to World War II—

And the negative use of the term may have originated in the United States, in abreaction against the machinations of sneaky foreigners, according to Erwin W. Fellows, in a paper published in American Speech, 1959 (Jstor link):

(The dictionary was W.T. Brande's Dictionary of Science, Literature, and Art, New York, 1843.)

But the World War I connection must begin with a neutral, bureaucratic use of the word in Britain, where Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George set up a Bureau of War Propaganda in the first weeks of the war, eventually incorporated into the Ministry of Information headed by Lord Beaverbrook, the owner of the Daily Express (until 1917 the secret owner, which is pretty weird when you think about it), with Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, in charge of propaganda intended for enemy nations. Meanwhile the revolutionary Communist Party of Russia had a Section of Agitation and Propaganda (Otdel Agitatsii i Propagandy, Agitprop for short) in its Central Committee, which would become a permanent feature of all the parties of the Soviet Union form the revolution and subsequent civil war onwards, even as the wacky, joyous imagery of early Agitprop turned sour, ugly, and fundamentally conservative under Stalin.

The propaganda of all the combatants in World War I was dishonest and vicious enough to give the word a permanent bad smell. Joseph Goebbels, who had willingly told international journalists in 1931 that he would use American advertising techniques should the Nazi Party come to power in Germany, worried two years later when Chancellor Hitler invited him to set up a Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Imperial Ministry for the Enlightenment of the People and for Propaganda); it didn't sound right, and he asked Hitler to allow him to give it a different name, but Hitler insisted. I think that is an extremely interesting detail: I wonder if Hitler was an early understander of the Putinian principle that there's no need for the Leader to pretend he's not lying—the point isn't to convince them what you're saying is true but to frighten them into abandoning the concept of truth altogether, in favor of obedience.

I'm kind of encouraged, in that context, to note the emergence of the word "advocacy" on that chart at the beginning of the 21st century, representing as it does a kind of journalism that can aim to take a side without dishonesty—a side in favor of democracy, or of liberty and equality and fraternity, which is better, literally more truthful, than the View From Nowhere espoused in J-school. 

Propaganda in the narrow sense, the "different kind of propaganda" Luddite wants to reserve his complaints for, is more suitable, like voter fraud, sexual hypocrisy, and tax evasion, to conservatives.