civics 101 - propaganda.mp3
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Nick Capodice:
What did you say your favorite card was again?
Hannah McCarthy:
Six of diamonds.
Nick Capodice:
Thought you said the Jack of Hearts
Hannah McCarthy:
No I didn't say the Jack of Hearts.
Nick Capodice:
All right, I'm gonna do a, um. A magic trick. Do me a favor. Uh, cut that deck anywhere you want.
Hannah McCarthy:
Okay.
Nick Capodice:
Now, I'm going to, um, just leave these here until the end of the recording. I'm not going to touch them. All right. Okay. This, by the way, is one of the first tricks I ever learned. And for anybody out there listening, I'm a terrible, terrible magician. But this is a technique called a force.
Hannah McCarthy:
What's a force.
Nick Capodice:
A force is when someone, like, takes a card believing that they had a choice, but they don't. I told you to cut the deck randomly and you take the card you cut to, but I'm forcing you to take the card I want. Choice is an illusion here, Hannah. And it doesn't just happen with cards.
Archival:
Interesting stories about dead people voting. Wow. Amazing. What free and fair elections we all have confidence in.
Archival:
Sharing of.
Archival:
Biased.
Archival:
And false news.
Archival:
Has become all too common on social media.
Archival:
I think it was one of the coldest Julys we've had in. So while while I don't know if that's going to really fly with climate change...
Nick Capodice:
you're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy:
I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice:
And today we are talking about propaganda.
Jennifer Merceica:
Propaganda is compliance gaining. It's a kind of force.
John Maxwell Hamilton:
Essentially propaganda is the an effort by someone to get you to think what they want you to think. Every time a king put on a robe, an ermine robe, it was an act of propaganda.
Jennifer Merceica:
It's persuasion without consent. It denies people their free will. It denies people their ability to consent or choose to believe what you have compelled them to believe. And it's anti-democratic and it's a lot easier than persuasion.
John Maxwell Hamilton:
My name is John Maxwell Hamilton. I'm a professor at Louisiana State University and a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.
Jennifer Merceica:
My name is Jennifer Mercieca, and I'm a professor at Texas A&M University. I teach classes in political communication, propaganda and the dark arts of communication.
Hannah McCarthy:
Hold on. Jennifer's class is called The Dark Arts of Communication.
Nick Capodice:
It is it explores propaganda, demagoguery and how our brains process information and how those natural processes lead to cognitive weaknesses that are exploited by dark arts techniques. And yes, that includes compliance gaining, which is forcing someone to act in a particular way.
Hannah McCarthy:
All right. I got to learn all about that. But first, can we just get a textbook definition of propaganda?
Nick Capodice:
Absolutely. Propaganda is a piece of information designed to get people to think or act in a certain way. But John's got a better definition than that.
John Maxwell Hamilton:
There's a wonderful definition that was done at the end of World War One. The Encyclopedia Britannica had no definition for propaganda in 1911. At the end of the war they had a very long one. And the reason for that was that they had not anticipated putting out a new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica for some years. But the war changed everything. And one of the things that changed was propaganda. And they had a British author who had been a propagandist write a wonderful essay on propaganda. And I read it to you because it's a superb definition. Those engaged in propaganda may genuinely believe the success will be an advantage to those who they address, but the stimulus to their action is their own cause. The diferencia of propaganda is that it is self seeking, whether the object be worthy or unworthy intrinsically or in the minds of its promoters.
Hannah McCarthy:
Let me try to say that another way so I can make sure that I understand it. People who make propaganda may feel they're doing something good for everyone, but what makes it propaganda is that it has a goal to fulfill regardless of whether the person creating it thinks it's good or bad. I think the closest thing in my mind is advertising, right? Like your goal is to sell toothpaste. So you make commercials saying this toothpaste is amazing, right?
Nick Capodice:
And it can be amazing toothpaste, but that is irrelevant. You may think it tastes like chalk, but if you're hired to make an ad for it, you're not going to put that in it. And I want to be clear. Propaganda is not the same thing as just persuading somebody of something.
Jennifer Merceica:
Persuasion is an invitation. You invite someone else to think like you do to value the same values that you value in the same way to remember or forget history. And you acknowledge that that person has free will. They have a mind of their own, and they may choose to change their mind and agree with you. But then again, they may not. Persuasion is really hard. It's very difficult to get someone to change their mind. We know that if people are invested in a topic, if they're knowledgeable about a topic, then they're very resistant to changing their opinions.
Hannah McCarthy:
But as Jennifer said, compliance gaining is different.
Nick Capodice:
It is. And it's a lot easier to do than persuading someone to change their mind. We're going to touch on other kinds of propaganda, but today I really want to focus on governmental propaganda. Not toothpaste, but policy.
Hannah McCarthy:
When I think of propaganda in America, the first thing that comes to mind are like World War posters, right? Uncle Sam saying, "I want you" depictions of the U.S. and our allies being these heroic figures versus the grotesque, often racist interpretations of various enemies as beasts. But are there any examples of it from earlier in US history?
Nick Capodice:
Oh, absolutely. Jennifer said that a document near and dear to our hearts could be viewed as propaganda.
Hannah McCarthy:
Which one?
Jennifer Merceica:
Perhaps the most important example of propaganda in that sense in the founding generation, the founding era is the Federalist Papers.
Hannah McCarthy:
Oh, yeah, I can see that. It's 85 essays selling people our proposed constitution.
Jennifer Merceica:
The Federalist Papers were written with one purpose, which was to get the citizens of the state of New York to agree to adopt the Constitution. And there was a lot of anti federalist sentiment in New York. And so they wrote the Federalist Papers as a joint project, but also as a propaganda campaign.
Nick Capodice:
They, by the way, refers to James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and sort of John Jay, who didn't even use their real names on these papers. They wrote them under the pseudonym Publius.
Jennifer Merceica:
And they even talked about it during the Constitutional Convention, when they talked about how they would get the Constitution ratified and the method by which they would ratify the Constitution. They said very explicitly, if you understood how to read what they were saying, that experience will dictate public opinion, that we will lead., We will lead the others to adopt this thing. And so they wanted it to have the approval of the public because they thought that was necessary for the legitimacy of the new government. But they also wanted to make sure that they led the public to approve it. And so the whole ratification of the Constitution is a fascinating propaganda campaign.
Nick Capodice:
And we think of these essays, the Federalist Papers, as their own thing. But the Federalists, the ones who are pushing the new Constitution, had lots of tools at their disposal to make that happen.
Jennifer Merceica:
It's part of this whole public relations propaganda campaign that was run by the Federalists. So counties and in some states they elected people and they gave them binding instructions. So we will elect you to the state ratifying convention as long as you agree to vote no. And then they voted yes. Or newspaper editors refusing to publish anti-federalist news articles or opinions. And if they did publish one anti Federalist one, they would publish five responses to it. Or the people who control the Postal Service were federalists. And so they would disappear letters that urged anti-federalist sentiment.
Nick Capodice:
And there are more examples of possible early American propagandists, including Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams, selling the revolution itself. Sam Adams produced an event every year called the Boston Massacre Oration, reminding everybody what happened on that day. This guy pushed that war.
Hannah McCarthy:
Wow.
Jennifer Merceica:
Some people even think that he stood behind a tree in the Battle of Lexington and fired the first shot to get like the war going as an agent provocateur.
Nick Capodice:
Look, last quick thing about Sam Adams. He wrote Pro Revolution articles under no fewer than 25 different pseudonyms. And Thomas Paine wrote the pamphlet Common Sense to persuade people to support the revolution. There were plays, op eds, public orations, catchy slogans.
Hannah McCarthy:
Like No Taxation without Representation.
Nick Capodice:
Yeah, or liberty or death. It was an onslaught. However, providing information is just one side of propaganda.
John Maxwell Hamilton:
The other side of propaganda that we have to keep in mind is that propaganda is also the suppression of information. You want to get people to think things by telling them what to think, and you want to keep them from thinking about things that get in the way of your message. So John Adams is president passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which put some journalists out of business as an effort to suppress information that he didn't like. So, sure, we have lots of examples historically.
Hannah McCarthy:
So propaganda has been a part of this country pretty much since the founding, Right. But we didn't use that word until much later. I mean, when did propaganda become propaganda?
Nick Capodice:
Well, I'll tell you about that. And the posters and the movies and the fascinating story of the four Minutemen right after this quick break.
Hannah McCarthy:
But first, if you want a little something that may or may not be full of propaganda at any one moment, yeah, then you want our newsletter. It's where we put everything that doesn't make it into these episodes. It's actually just very fun. It's one of the few enjoyable things you can find in your inbox every other Thursday, and we're not trying to sell you anything You can subscribe at our website, civics101podcast.org.
Hannah McCarthy:
We're back here on civics 101, and we are talking about propaganda. Nick, was there sort of a defining era that established the new American propaganda?
Nick Capodice:
Yeah. Here is John Maxwell Hamilton again. He is the author of Manipulating the Masses, Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda.
John Maxwell Hamilton:
What Changes with World War One is a recognition of the importance of public opinion, the rise of mass literacy and the rise of mass publications, which meant people began to be able to more readily come to their own conclusions based on third party writing and thinking. And a third party not being your neighbor, but being someone who was a punitive expert. The reaction of the government had to be, Then how do we control that? When the war came in April of 1917, even before the law was passed for conscription, Wilson a week later created something called the Committee on Public Information.
Nick Capodice:
The Committee on Public Information. The CPI.
Hannah McCarthy:
A committee?
Nick Capodice:
Yeah.
Hannah McCarthy:
What branch was it under?
Nick Capodice:
It was under the executive branch. And it's an independent agency.
Hannah McCarthy:
So like the EPA or the FCC, the Fed, etc.. Right. It's still around?
Nick Capodice:
Nope. It only lasted until 1919, but it had a massive effect in those two years.
Hannah McCarthy:
What was the CPI doing?
Nick Capodice:
Well, their initial goal was to censor information that they thought could pose a risk to national security. But bills giving them that power to censor never passed in Congress.
John Maxwell Hamilton:
But it had all kinds of referred authorities to censor because it worked with some censoring organizations like the post Office.
Hannah McCarthy:
The post office censored the mail?
Nick Capodice:
Oh, they did. You could be fined for sending anti government anti war or even anti liberty bonds mail. And while the CPI didn't explicitly censor, they took a different tack.
John Maxwell Hamilton:
It became very aggressive about providing information and it did it with every means of communication possible. Posters, ads, a news service. The list goes on. Movies. And so they they were providing messages to the public continuously.
Hannah McCarthy:
They made their own movies?
John Maxwell Hamilton:
Yeah, they produced their own movies. They also vetted movies. Now, they couldn't censor movies in the United States per se, but movie theaters were very worried about being shut down because there were lots of savings programs in the war. For example, you don't want to heat certain facilities because you want to save coal. So the movie theaters saw themselves being very vulnerable. So they would they would allow the CPI to opine on movies they were showing because they wanted to be on the right side of the government. This is an example of the referred authority they had. They also wanted to be able to export movies because that's how they made money. This is the beginning of the United States having a very strong influence on foreign movie production. That's why our movies tend to go abroad.
Nick Capodice:
The head of the CPI was a man named George Creel, who referred to their work as, quote, the world's greatest adventure in advertising. And they advertised the heck out of the war. Ad executives, journalists, actors, directors, artists, famous artists like N.C. Wyeth. All of them worked in the committee to sell the war to the American people. But the biggest, possibly most effective arm of the CPI was a group of 75,000 volunteers called the Four Minute men.
Hannah McCarthy:
All right, Who were the Four Minute Men?
John Maxwell Hamilton:
The Four Minute Men was a brilliant idea, which was that during the changing of movie theater, films, reels, leading citizens in whatever community you happen to be in would stand up and say something that they wanted the audience to think or do. In the case of doing, for example, they would get up and say, You need to donate binoculars to the Navy. The Navy didn't have enough binoculars, so and thousands of binoculars were donated. Another case of doing would be to buy Liberty Bonds to support the war.
Nick Capodice:
They were everywhere, Hannah. They weren't just at the movies. You'd take your kids to a Boy Scout meeting, or you'd go to a church and somebody you know, a member of your community stands up and says, Before we start today, I just want to thank all the folks out there who mailed a candy bar to their boys on the front last week. You go to a county fair and there's a guy dressed up like Uncle Sam, and he's telling you to buy war bonds. There's a mandatory all staff meeting at work where someone just stands up and waxes poetic on the pride he felt registering for the draft. You can't go about your day without being told how important you are to the war effort.
Hannah McCarthy:
So were these people government employees?
Nick Capodice:
No, no. I mean, they worked for the government, but they were volunteers. They were not paid.
Hannah McCarthy:
That is fascinating, right, that you have these people who you trust in your circle, in your community, giving these four minute speeches. On behalf of the government.
Nick Capodice:
Yeah, And not just people in your community. Also famous people like Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks Jr. These four minute men were everywhere. And to your point about, you know, it's in your community, there were four minute men who gave speeches in Yiddish, Sioux, Dutch, a dozen other languages, and they sounded inspired. They sounded improvisational.
John Maxwell Hamilton:
They appeared to be local and they appeared to be spontaneous. But in fact, they were highly scripted by Washington. They had themes every week. They were given instructions of what they were supposed to say. They could improvise, but they were given a they were given a very clear mandate and they were monitored.
Hannah McCarthy:
There were people secretly monitoring your seemingly improvised speech.
Nick Capodice:
Got to make sure you stay on message, McCarthy. And the four minute men got instructions every week, like this week's theme is buy war bonds. And don't say phrases like We all have to do our part that's hackneyed and doesn't have meaning anymore. And at the same time, members of the CPI were always looking out for journalists and activists who got in the way of their messaging.
John Maxwell Hamilton:
And maybe this is a lesson for people who care about democracy. Political leaders like to find ways to fence back information that they don't like. In the case of Trump, the phrase that he used was fake news.
Archival:
Because they are the fake, fake, disgusting news.
John Maxwell Hamilton:
In the case of the CPI, they had a phrase called enemy talk. And they actually ran a syndicated column called Enemy Talk. And the idea was these are things that you shouldn't believe in, the things that enemy wants you to believe. And then if you hear somebody saying this kind of thing and they have real examples, that's because the enemy planted it.
Hannah McCarthy:
So earlier, Jen said that compliance gaming is easier than persuasion. And this, I think, is a pretty clear example. If someone says something you don't like, it is not hard to counter with. Yeah, well, that sounds like enemy talk.
Nick Capodice:
Yeah. Get that guy.
John Maxwell Hamilton:
Well, I think the lesson for all of us needs to be and it's a bipartisan lesson when we hear people telling us that something shouldn't be talked about or thought about or a blanket phrase that tries to negate a classification of information, our antenna should go up. Because it's a shortcut to appeal to our emotions.
Nick Capodice:
World War One ended on November 11th, 1918. The committee was disestablished a year later. But before we make the jump to modern day propaganda, John told me that his intent in studying the CPI was not to demonize the people who worked in it.
John Maxwell Hamilton:
So, you know, the story of the CPI really is a story of good people doing bad things. But the people who were in the CPI were largely reformers. In fact, they were all reformers. They were progressives who wanted a better country and had been using their talents to make improvements. But the seductive nature of propaganda being what it is, they started taking shortcuts in our democratic procedures and decided it was better to get people to believe the right thing than to promote debate.
Hannah McCarthy:
So, Nick, the four Minute men approach is not, as far as I know, happening today. Nobody is standing up right before a Marvel movie to expound on inflation or student loan forgiveness.
Nick Capodice:
Yeah. And also, we're not going places. We don't gather in sort of public venues as much as we used to even before COVID. But it's still happening to us whether we like it or not. Both John and Jennifer said that one character trait of propaganda is that it is non-consensual and it's not necessarily the government trying to sell us on a war. It's political parties selling us policy, it's companies selling us their product, you name it. And now that we live in a digital world alongside our analog world, we are very, very vulnerable. Here's Jennifer Merceica again, author of Demagogue for President The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump. And she's going to lay out three vulnerabilities that propagandists exploit.
Jennifer Merceica:
Propagandists are really, really good at exploiting vulnerabilities, whether it's vulnerabilities and information or vulnerabilities in terms of how our cognitive processes work. So most of our information that our brain receives is processed cognitively without us knowing.
Nick Capodice:
Our brain processes things in different ways. So there's like the quick instinctive reaction, and then there's the more plodding, deliberative consideration. And Jen said to be aware, when you're receiving information that appeals to first impressions, that that makes you respond immediately.
Jennifer Merceica:
There are strategies that applications use and platforms. There are people on the Internet who talk really fast, and there's a reason why they do that. There's a reason why memes are so successful. It's very difficult to get people to think about what you want them to think about. You know, it's cognitively taxing and we are cognitive misers. And so the peripheral route to persuasion is that system. One approach which says, you know, people will use heuristic cues to decide things and they won't even be aware that they're deciding something.
Nick Capodice:
A second technique that Jennifer pointed out is called amygdala hijacking, taking advantage of how our brains process fear.
Jennifer Merceica:
If you were watching the news during the George Floyd protests, you might have seen images of looting or burning cars or destruction or whatever.
Archival:
Chaos in America, violent clashes erupting across the country. One person shot and killed at a Black Lives Matter protest in Austin, Texas.
Jennifer Merceica:
And those images would be playing continuously any time they talked about those protests, whether or not any of those images were relevant to that protest or that day's news. And so what we know is that most and I mean a great majority, 93 to 94% of those protests were peaceful. No violence at all. But the perception that people have is that they were incredibly violent. And that's because of the way that the media cultivate reality. They're going to show the most dramatic footage they have of the protest they're going to show, especially if they're against the protests. They're going to show what looks violent, what looks scary, that's going to draw people's attention. And your brain isn't analyzing the information critically as you're watching the news, Right? You are influenced by scary, stressful music. You are you are influenced by the stressful tone of voice. Your amygdala gets hijacked by conspiracy theory and by threats, by scary pictures that are run continuously on a loop. And that is all processed pretty cognitively. So you might not even realize that your heart is racing and why, but you have a really bad perception of what those protests are like.
Hannah McCarthy:
How do you counter amygdala hijacking?
Nick Capodice:
Jennifer says, Just notice it. Notice how your body is feeling when you watch certain news pieces and if your heart is racing, you can stop if you want to. But even that can be kind of hard.
Jennifer Merceica:
It's in a way even addicting because you're like, What should I be afraid of? I got to turn on that TV channel to find out. And then it keeps you there on the edge of your seat. And it, and you stay through the commercials, right? I gotta and see what's going to happen. What's the scary thing?
Nick Capodice:
And the third vulnerability that propagandaists capitalize upon goes back to what we were saying about sort of the public sphere, our need for social connections.
Jennifer Merceica:
Human beings absolutely have to be around and connected to other people. Fundamentally, we will go mad if we are not you know, we we have right now a a crisis of loneliness where people claim that they don't have any friends, they don't they don't feel connected to society. All of that creates distrust. The less social interaction we have with others, the less we trust others. It's a social glue, right? It's a social lubricant. It allows for the government to remain trusted and stable. We have a crisis in distrust in government right now, and so our connections are absolutely necessary. They're crucial to us as human beings, and they're crucial to society, but they're also very, very easily exploited. Right. Our need to connect makes us polarized, right? Because you create this sort of in-group versus this outgroup and you say, I'm going to do whatever I can to protect the group. Our connections online make us targets. They make us nodes in the propaganda game.
Hannah McCarthy:
Something that is particularly nefarious about propaganda is that it appeals to positive character traits.
Nick Capodice:
What? What do you mean?
Hannah McCarthy:
Like our love of country or our desire to make the world a better place? Or most often it seems the need for things to be fair. And just. Now those are good feelings and propaganda sort of touches our hard wiring. It can take good intentions and turn them into bad actions. So how do we change it? I get Jennifer's point that we have to first know when we are being exploited and then turn it off. But isn't there a better solution? Are people in power in this supposed beacon of democracy, the United States capable of doing anything to stop propaganda?
Nick Capodice:
John says, As of right now, not really.
John Maxwell Hamilton:
We need better laws and we need better enforcement and better supervision, and we don't have it. And so as a result, the power of the White House grows and grows because the number of tools they have, social media tools, for example, are now growing exponentially, while the number of journalists who actually cover government legitimate journalists is decreasing. And so the balance of power is changing. And that's a problem. It's a big problem.
Hannah McCarthy:
I mean, this makes me think of the fact that more and more often, most of us are not getting our news directly from the news outlet, but it's being pushed to us on social media like things that are suggested. Hey, you might like this on Instagram, right?
Nick Capodice:
Or YouTube or Twitter.
Hannah McCarthy:
Or Facebook or TikTok.
Nick Capodice:
Always Tick tock.
Jennifer Merceica:
Tick Tock is so good at figuring out who you are and what you believe and what you want to be exposed to, that it's essentially a confirmation bias machine. Everything about that algorithm is designed to feed you information that you already agree with and not to feed you any information that you don't agree with. So that's a problem.
John Maxwell Hamilton:
And and in a world where the government has so much information, power, propaganda, power, we have to be prepared to think critically about the people we like because of the potential of bias and not let ourselves be led down a path simply because it sounds good or appeals to something that we actually already believe but maybe needs more scrutiny.
Nick Capodice:
All right, Hannah. Look at your card. Ns How did I do it?
Hannah McCarthy:
Nine of diamonds! It was on top of the stack.
Nick Capodice:
You got it. Well, you know what?
Nick Capodice:
Today on Civics 101. This episode is made by me Nick Capodice with you, Hannah McCarthy. Thank you.
Hannah McCarthy:
Thank you. Our staff includes Jacqui Fulton. Christina Phillips is our senior producer and Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer.
Nick Capodice:
Music in this episode by Francis Wells, Czar Donic, The New Fools, Luella Gren, Arc de Soleil, Emily Sprague, Poddington Bear, Scott Holmes, Cooper Canell, Chris Zabriskie, the Grand Affair, and George M. Cohan
Hannah McCarthy:
Civics one One is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.
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