“We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy’s side of the front is always propaganda, and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.”
―Walter Lippmann
“The first casualty when war comes is Truth”
―U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson, 1917
“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
―Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister during World War II
“Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
―Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, 1916, Ch.9
” [Professor] Galtung laid out 12 points of concern where journalism often goes wrong when dealing with violence. Each implicitly suggests more explicit remedies.
Decontextualizing violence: focusing on the irrational without looking at the reasons for unresolved conflicts and polarization.
Dualism: reducing the number of parties in a conflict to two, when often more are involved. Stories that just focus on internal developments often ignore such outside or external forces as foreign governments and transnational companies.
Manicheanism: portraying one side as good and demonizing the other as evil.
Armageddon: presenting violence as inevitable, omitting alternatives.
Focusing on individual acts of violence while avoiding structural causes, like poverty, government neglect, and military or police repression.
Confusion: focusing only on the conflict arena (i.e., the battlefield or location of violent incidents) but not on the forces and factors that influence the violence.
Excluding and omitting the bereaved, thus never explaining why there are acts of revenge and spirals of violence. Failure to explore the causes of escalation and the impact of media coverage itself. Failure to explore the goals of outside interventionists, especially big powers. Failure to explore peace proposals and offer images of peaceful outcomes. Confusing cease-fires and negotiations with actual peace.
Omitting reconciliation: conflicts tend to reemerge if attention is not paid to efforts to heal fractured societies. When news about attempts to resolve conflicts are absent, fatalism is reinforced. That can help engender even more violence, when people have no images or information about possible peaceful outcomes and the promise of healing.”
―Danny Schechter, Covering Violence: How Should Media Handle Conflict?, July 18, 2001
” No matter how it is spread, propaganda comes in four basic varieties, said Arthur Siegel, social science professor at York University in Toronto, whose 1996 book Radio Canada International examines World War II and Cold War propaganda.
The first level is the Big Lie, adapted by Hitler and Stalin. The state-controlled Egyptian press has been spreading a Big Lie, saying the World Trade Center was attacked by Israel to embarrass Arabs, said Siegel.
The second layer says, It doesn’t have to be the truth, so long as it’s plausible.
The third strategy is to tell the truth but withhold the other side’s point of view.
The fourth and most productive is to tell the truth, the good and the bad, the losses and the gains.
Governments in Western society take the last three steps. They avoid the Big Lie, which nobody here will swallow, Siegel said.”
―Beth Gillin, U.S. intensifies the war of words, The Philadelphia Inequirer, October 21, 2001
” Ottosen identifies several key stages of a military campaign to soften up public opinion through the media in preparation for an armed intervention. These are:
The Preliminary Stage—during which the country concerned comes to the news, portrayed as a cause for mounting concern because of poverty/dictatorship/anarchy;
The Justification Stage—during which big news is produced to lend urgency to the case for armed intervention to bring about a rapid restitution of normality;
The Implementation Stage—when pooling and censorship provide control of coverage;
The Aftermath—during which normality is portrayed as returning to the region before it once again drops down the news agenda.
O’Kane notes there is always a dead baby story and it comes at the key point of the Justification Stage—in the form of a story whose apparent urgency brooks no delay—specifically, no time for cool deliberation or negotiating on peace proposals. Human interest stories … are ideal for engendering this atmosphere.”
―The Peace Journalist Option, Poiesis.org, August 1997
“One difficulty is that the media have little or no memory. War correspondents have short working lives and there is no tradition or means for passing on their knowledge and experience. The military, on the other hand, is an institution and goes on forever. The military learned a lot from Vietnam and these days plans its media strategy with as much attention as its military strategy.”
― Phillip Knightley
“For reporters covering this war [on terrorism], the challenge is not just in getting unfettered and uncensored access to U.S. troops and the battlefield—a long and mostly losing struggle in the past—but in discerning between information and disinformation. That is made all the more difficult by a 24-hour news cycle, advanced technology, and the military’s growing fondness for a discipline it calls Information Operations. IO, as it is known, groups together information functions ranging from public affairs (PA, the military spokespersons corps) to military deception and psychological operations, or PSYOP. What this means is that people whose job traditionally has been to talk to the media and divulge truthfully what they are able to tell now work hand-in-glove with those whose job it is to support battlefield operations with information, not all of which may be truthful.”
―Maud S. Beelma
“Shortly after the end of the American Civil War, journalist F. Colburn Adams wrote, The future historian of the late war will have [a] very difficult task to perform … sifting the truth from falsehood as it appears in official records.
Similar to the oft-repeated axiom that truth is the first casualty of war, Adams’ observation succinctly summarizes the nub of the conflict between the military and the news media. The military’s mission is to fight, and to win, whatever conflict may present itself-preferably on the battlefield but certainly in public opinion and the history books. The journalist, on the other hand, is a skeptic if not a cynic and aims to seek, find and report the truth — a mission both parties often view as incompatible with successful warfare, which depends on secrecy and deception as much as superior strategy, tactics, weaponry and manpower.”
― Jane Kirtley
“We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know about and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”
―Katharine Graham CIA
In [many cases], the U.S. and other western news media depend on the military for information…. And when the information that military officers provide to the public is part of a process that generates propaganda and places a high value on deceit, deception and denial, then truth is indeed likely to be high on the casualty list.
―William M. Arkin
The history of warfare suggests this is not a false antithesis. Governments, understandably, put a priority on nurturing the morale of the armed forces and the people, intimidating an enemy with the force of the national will They have few scruples about whether they are being fair and just as their propaganda demonizes an alien leader or even a whole population. The enemy is doing the same to them. That is the emotion wars generate, inviting a competitive ecstasy of hate. There is a duel in vicious stereotypes in propaganda posters, illustrations and headlines; populations would be astounded if they could see how they and their leaders are portrayed by the other side. Authority resents it when a newspaper or broadcast shades the black and white.
… Atrocity stories have been debased currency in the war of words. The other side’s are propaganda and should be ignored or discredited by patriotic correspondents; ours are an integral part of the cause, and should be propagated with conviction, uniting people in vengefulness for a cause higher than pedantry. Only after the conflict, the zealots’ argument runs, is there time enough to sift the ashes for truth. History knows now that the Germans did not, as charged in World War I, toss Belgian babies in the air and catch them on bayonets, nor boil down German corpses for glycerin for munitions—a story invented by a British correspondent being pressed by his office for news of atrocities. The French did not, as the German press reported, routinely gouge out the eyes of captured German soldiers, or chop off their fingers for the rings on them. Iraqi soldiers invading Kuwait did not toss premature babies out of incubators, as The Sunday Telegraph in London, and then the Los Angeles Times, reported, quoting Reuters. The story was an invention of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait lobby in Washington and the teen-age witness who testified to Congress was coached by the lobby’s public relations company. It was only two years later that the whole thing was exposed for the fraud it was. But the myth galvanized public opinion at a critical moment on the need to go to war, as it was intended to.
… History is a mausoleum of errant emotions: Who is the more patriotic—the government that conceals the blunders its soldiers endure, the cruelties they may inflict, or the correspondent who exposes them so that they might be rectified?
… [In the dilemmas journalists often have between reporting and intervening], Alan Dower, who reported the Korean War for the Melbourne Herald … reporter Rene Cutforth and cameraman Cyril Page saw a column of women in Seoul being marched off to jail; many were carrying babies. The journalists were told the families were all to be shot because someone in the street had identified them as communists. Dower, who was a commando before he was a reporter, was carrying a carbine. He used it to bully his way into the jail, where the trio of journalists found that the women had been made to kneel with their babies in front of an open pit, two machine guns at their backs. Dower threatened to shoot the guard unless he took the trio to the prison governor’s office. There Dower aimed his carbine at the governor and threatened: If those machine guns fire, I’ll shoot you between the eyes. Dower, making another threat, that of publicity, secured a promise from the United Nations command in Seoul that it would stamp out such practices.
Did Dower break the normal limits of journalism? Yes, and he was right to do so. One’s first duty is to humanity, and there are exceptional occasions when that duty overrides the canons of any profession.
―Harold Evans
The sad truth is that in the new millennium, government propaganda prepares its citizens for war so skillfully that it is quite likely that they do not want the truthful, objective and balanced reporting that good war correspondents once did their best to provide.
―Phillip Knightley
A principle familiar to propagandists is that the doctrine to be instilled in the target audience should not be articulated: that would only expose them to reflection, inquiry, and, very likely, ridicule. The proper procedure is to drill them home by constantly presupposing them, so that they become the very condition for discourse.
―Noam Chomsky
It is easier to dominate someone if they are unaware of being dominated. Colonised and colonisers both know that domination is not just based on physical supremacy. Control of hearts and minds follows military conquest. Which is why any empire that wants to last must capture the souls of its subjects.
―Ignacio Ramonet
“When there is little or no elite dissent from a government policy, there may still be some slippage in the mass media, and the facts can tend to undermine the government line. … We have long argued that the naturalness of [the] processes [of indirectly pressing the media to keep even more tenaciously to the propaganda assumptions of state policy], with inconvenient facts allowed sparingly and within the proper framework of assumptions, and fundamental dissent virtually excluded from the mass media (but permitted in a marginalized press), makes for a propaganda system that is far more credible and effective in putting over a patriotic agenda than one with official censorship.
…
It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attach and expose corporate and government malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality of the command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance. (Emphasis Added)”
―Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
“Since war is particularly unpleasant, military discourse is full of euphemisms. In the 1940’s, America changed the name of the War Department to the Department of Defense. Under the Reagan Administration, the MX-Missile was renamed The Peacekeeper. During war-time, civilian casualties are referred to as collateral damage, and the word liquidation is used as a synonym for murder.”
―Dr. Aaron Delwiche, Propaganda Analysis
” Focusing on leaders’ thoughts is often a kind of propaganda. It involves repeating the government line without comment, thereby allowing journalists to claim neutrality as simple conduits supplying information. But it is not neutral to repeat the government line while ignoring critics of that line, as often happens. It is also not neutral to include milder criticism simply because it is voiced by a different section of the establishment, while ignoring more radical, but perhaps equally rational, critiques from beyond the state-corporate pale. A big lesson of history is that it is wrong to assume that power, or respectability, confers rationality. Media analyst Sharon Beder describes the reality of much mainstream reporting:
Balance means ensuring that statements by those challenging the establishment are balanced with statements by those whom they are criticising, though not necessarily the other way round.
Talk of leaders’ hopes teaches us to empathise with their wishes by personalising issues: Blair desperately hopes to build bridges in the Middle East. This is also a kind of propaganda based on false assumptions. It assumes that the reality of politicians’ hopes — their intentions, motivations and goals — is identical to the appearance. Machiavelli was kind enough to explain what every politician knows, and what almost all corporate media journalists feign not to know:
It is not essential, then, that a Prince should have all the good qualities which I have enumerated above [mercy, good faith, integrity, humanity, and religion] but it is most essential that he should seem to have them; I will even venture to affirm that if he has and invariably practises them all, they are hurtful”
―David Edwards
“One of the secrets of media manipulation is to report the horror and strife of the world as though Western power, interests and machinations did not exist. Vast poverty, injustice and chaos in the Third World are depicted as unconnected to the cool oases of civilisation in Europe and the United States, which look on benignly but helplessly, or pitch in heroically to right wrongs as far as they are able. The idea, for example, that the vast economic and military might of North America might in some way be linked to the vast poverty and suffering of neighbouring Central and South America is unthinkable.
An important feature of the reporting that maintains this audacious deception—not consciously but through an internalised sense of what is just not done — is to relay our enemies’ claims of benign motives as claims, while reporting our governments’ claims without comment, or as obviously true — the message, tirelessly repeated, gets through to the public and an important propaganda function is thereby fulfilled. This is called honest, factual reporting.”
―David Edwards
“In 1921, the famous American journalist Walter Lippmann said that the art of democracy requires what he called the manufacture of consent. This phrase is an Orwellian euphemism for thought control. The idea is that in a state such as the U.S. where the government can’t control the people by force, it had better control what they think. The Soviet Union is at the opposite end of the spectrum from us in its domestic freedoms. It’s essentially a country run by the bludgeon. It’s very easy to determine what propaganda is in the USSR: what the state produces is propaganda.
… Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism.
… For those who stubbornly seek freedom around the world, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the propaganda system to which we are subjected and in which all too often we serve as unwilling or unwitting instruments.”
―Noam Chomsky, Propaganda, American-style
“All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those towards whom it is directed will understand it…. Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise”
―Adolf Hitler
“The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than to a small lie. For they themselves often tell little lies, but would be ashamed to tell big lies.”
―Adolf Hitler
“[Given all the revelations discrediting Bush’s reasons for war with Iraq,] You may wonder why it is that a majority of Americans still link Saddam to 9/11,
says Snow. The reason for such a belief is because the American people were repeatedly told by the President and his inner circle that Saddam’s evil alone was enough to be linked to 9/11 and that given time, he would have used his weapons against us. With propaganda, you don’t need facts per se, just the best facts put forward. If these facts make sense to people, then they don’t need proof like one might need in a courtroom.
According to Snow, the U.S. government succeeded in driving the agenda
and milking the story
(maximising media coverage of a particular issue by the careful use of [media management].)
That’s also very commonly practice,
she says. When a country goes off to war, so goes its media with it. The news media were caught up in the rally round the flag syndrome. They were forced to choose a side, and given the choices, whose side did they logically choose but the U.S.?
”
―Mirren Guiterrez
“While the U.S. government campaign [for war on Iraq] had an impact on the U.S. public, the perception management was a failure at influencing foreign audiences.
According to [Professor Randall Bytwerk, a specialist in propaganda] it is far easier to make propaganda at home than abroad. One has more credibility at home, and much more in common with the audience. Although Nazi propaganda was not completely believed by Germans, they believed what their government said far more than the British believed German propaganda, for example. All things being equal, most people want to believe they live in a good country.”
―Mirren Guiterrez
” Naturally the common people don’t want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. … Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
―Herman Goering, Nuremburg Diary
” It seems to me that David Horowitz and some far rightwing friends of his have hit upon a new way of discrediting a political opponent, which is the GoogleSmear. It is an easy maneuver for someone like Horowitz, who has extremely wealthy backers, to set up a web magazine that has a high profile and is indexed in google news. Then he just commissions persons to write up lies about people like me (leavened with innuendo and out-of-context quotes). Anyone googling me will likely come upon the smear profiles, and they can be passed around to journalists and politicians as though they were actual information”
―Juan Cole
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
―Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, Odonian Press, 1998
“Since the voice of the people is allowed to speak out [in democratic societies], those in power better control what that voice says — in other words, control what people think. One of the ways to do this is to create political debate that appears to embrace many opinions, but actually stays within very narrow margins. You have to make sure that both sides in the debate accept certain assumptions — and that those assumptions are the basis of the propaganda system. As long as everyone accepts the propaganda system, the debate is permissible.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. propaganda system did its job partially but not entirely. Among educated people it worked very well. Studies show that among the more educated parts of the population, the government’s propaganda about the war is now accepted unquestioningly. One reason that propaganda often works better on the educated than on the uneducated is that educated people read more, so they receive more propaganda. Another is that they have jobs in management, media, and academia and therefore work in some capacity as agents of the propaganda system — and they believe what the system expects them to believe. By and large, they’re part of the privileged elite, and share the interests and perceptions of those in power”
―Noam Chomsky, Propaganda, American-style
” In the West the calculated manipulation of public opinion to serve political and ideological interests is much more covert and therefore much more effective [than a propaganda system imposed in a totalitarian regime]. Its greatest triumph is that we generally don’t notice it — or laugh at the notion it even exists. We watch the democratic process taking place—heated debates in which we feel we could have a voice — and think that, because we have free media, it would be hard for the Government to get away with anything very devious without someone calling them on it.
…the new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn’t just propaganda any more, it’s prop-agenda. It’s not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it’s the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone’s talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false intelligence and selected leaks. (What else can the spat between the BBC and Alastair Campbell be but a prime example of this?)
With the ground thus prepared, governments are happy if you then use the democratic process to agree or disagree — for, after all, their intention is to mobilise enough headlines and conversation to make the whole thing seem real and urgent. The more emotional the debate, the better. Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.”
―Brian Eno, Lessons in how to lie about Iraq
“It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and government malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality of the command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance. (Emphasis Added)”
―Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent