Fake News, Weapons of Mass Deception, Great White MOPE

[grarpamp]

https://www.peakprosperity.com/weapons-of-mass-deception/


https://tomluongo.me/2020/11/16/great-white-mope-american-politics/



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Q&A On The Birth Of "Fake News" A Century Ago
11/17/2020

Submitted by Carl M. Cannon, Washington bureau chief for
RealClearPolitics; John Maxwell Hamilton, author of  “Manipulating the
Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda” (LSU
Press), discussed his new book with RealClearPolitics.

https://www.amazon.com/Manipulating-Masses-Woodrow-American-Propaganda/dp/0807170771

So “Fake News” isn’t something Donald Trump invented, is it? The
phrase has been thrown around for a long time, predating Trump’s
presidency by exactly 100 years.

More than a hundred years. A small book was published in 1914 on the
subject, “Fakes in American Journalism.” An 1897 book exposing
sensational reporting of the Spanish-American War was called “Facts
and Fakes About Cuba.” In World War I, as today, the term “fake news”
and its equivalents were put to many uses, some of them,
paradoxically, to promote falsehoods.

The Committee on Public Information, President Wilson’s wartime
propaganda agency and the subject of my book, discredited information
that ran counter to the administration’s point of view by calling it
“enemy talk.” It added weight to this by trying to convince Americans
that spies lurked everywhere, spreading pernicious information. By the
way, only one, rather dopey spy, was apprehended and found guilty.

Meanwhile journalists leveled charges of “fake news” against the CPI,
although the term they favored was “creeling.” This was in reference
to the hyperkinetic head of the CPI, George Creel. Today the word we
use for this is “spinning.”

Professor, I happen to know that you were researching this topic
before Trump entered politics, but I’ll hazard a guess that when he
popularized the phrase “Fake News,” you weren’t sorry. When did you
realize that you had more than an academic book on your hands — that
this is a subject every political practitioner, historian, and
journalist is obliged to know?

I knew the subject was relevant when I started. The CPI was our first
and only ministry of propaganda. It only lasted for the duration of
the war. But its techniques and mindset lived on. I wanted to show how
easy it is for a president to push the boundaries of propaganda. I
found more abuse than I expected – the use of front organizations and
other forms of deception, coercion, highly emotional appeals that
promoted hatred and fear, to name a few of those abuses.

And then, out of nowhere, in the middle of my research, President
Trump appeared to illustrate the point I was making on the ease with
which boundaries can be pushed. He has, from first to last,
aggressively appropriated the trappings of the presidency to enlarge
the Trump brand, down to putting his name on coronavirus relief checks
and playing “Hail to the Chief” while he declared, inaccurately, that
he won the election.

What would gratify me most with regard to this book is if it elevates
awareness of the danger that lies in the power the president has to
propagandize and if it prompts steps to fence back those powers.

Your new book documents the practice of disseminating premeditated
propaganda to the American people to the First World War. Yet, your
prologue is set in 2003, during the second U.S.-Iraq war. Do you think
U.S. presidents feel more entitled to deceive the American people
during wartime?

Government leaders were cognizant of the importance of public opinion
before the war and sought to sell themselves and their ideas. But
their approaches were as primitive as trepanning is for brain surgery.
The Great War accelerated the search for means to use and bypass the
news media to shape thoughts. The war – the first total war – required
national mobilization of matériel and minds. By the end of the war
governments had become much more sophisticated about mass
manipulation, and propaganda was an established part of governing, as
well as business.

War has, ever since, accelerated improvements, if that is the right
word, in propaganda. This is for an obvious reason. Wars are a matter
of urgent national security, or at any rate they are waged based on
that belief. Just as ammunition manufacturers ramp up production and
improvise when war occurs, so do propagandists. They believe that
nothing is more important than winning and that means getting public
opinion behind the war. And, yes, that means taking shortcuts to keep
people in line. At the end of the war, in a great moment of clarity,
George Creel said in a speech to Chicagoans, “With the existence of
democracy itself at stake, there was no time to think about the
details of democracy.”

In his excellent book, “When Presidents Lie,” Eric Alterman details
how presidents often shade the truth — not to protect troop movements
and the like — but to stage-manage public opinion into empowering them
to launch wars. Early on in your own narrative, you point out how
French officials imposed news blackouts in the fateful first week of
August 1914. Their aim was to eliminate coverage sympathetic to a
peaceful resolution of Europe’s crisis. It’s almost too profound to
contemplate the suffering and carnage that could have been spared had
World War I been avoided, isn’t it?

British Prime Minister Lloyd George acknowledged after the war that if
journalists had revealed the carnage on the battlefields, the public’s
demand for early peace would have been irresistible. There are very
good arguments why an earlier peace, one that did not have one side
winning overwhelmingly, would have led to a fairer peace, which would
have lessened the likelihood of a second world war. There was another
long-term consequence of the suppression of information during the
war. We often mark the Vietnam War, and the attendant withholding of
facts, as the point at which the public started to become deeply
cynical about the government. But this process started in World War I.
Large elements of the public felt they had been tricked. Frank Cobb,
the well-respected editor of the New York World, helped the
administration with propaganda during the war. Afterward he rued that
government propaganda had “goose-stepped” public opinion. And he
feared what would come next. “God forbid,” he cautioned, “that our
supreme achievement in the War should be the Prussianizing of
ourselves.”

“Manipulating the Masses” begins before the United States entered the
war in 1917. You remind us that during the 1916 presidential election
year in the United States, German propaganda was so heavy-handed that
it backfired — it helped get Woodrow Wilson reelected — while the
British propagandists demonstrated great caution and restraint, but
only for tactical reasons. Although we live in less-subtle times,
foreign powers are still trying to influence U.S. public opinion,
aren’t they?

Disinformation and other foreign meddling with public opinion has
become a threat to national security in the same way that terrorism
and nuclear proliferation are. Dealing with this threat is as high a
priority. It must be acknowledged, too, that as much as we decry this
activity by other countries, we do it ourselves to many of them.

Interference like this is a large part of the CPI story. British
archives are full of notes in which officials lamented that they are
ingénues in the arts of propaganda and that the Germans were
brilliantly insidious. British officials sincerely believed this, but,
really, they were the ones who were brilliant and insidious, not least
of all at persuading opinion leaders in the United States to favor
British interests.

Once the United States went into the war, the CPI actively sought to
shape public opinion in allied, neutral, and enemy countries. It was
not above using surreptitious methods, including the secret
subsidization of news.

Ironically, the CPI was suckered into a White Russian disinformation
scheme that prefigures the similar disruptions today. The duping of
the CPI is a complicated story, as disinformation plots always are,
but briefly it goes like this: White Russians faked documents to
portray the Bolshevik leaders as German agents who therefore had no
legitimacy. These documents were fed to Edgar Sisson, a senior CPI
official in Russia, who brought them to Washington. The CPI
successfully rammed them down the throats of American media.

The Wilson administration, which did not recognize the Bolshevik
government, welcomed the Sisson Documents, as they came to be called,
because they justified its decision to violate Russian sovereignty by
joining in an Allied invasion of Russia. Few Americans today are aware
of this invasion, but the Russians remember it. The Sisson Documents
fueled Soviet-American animosity, and they fueled the Red Scare in the
United States. They are a powerful example of the dangers that lie in
what we call today “confirmation bias,” that is to say, the  eagerness
people have to embrace fake news that confirms what they want to
believe.

Back to Wilson’s reelection in 1916. Tell our readers a little bit
about Robert Woolley, who headed the publicity bureau of the
Democratic National Committee.

Robert Woolley has not received the historical attention he deserves.
It is difficult to see how Wilson could have won without him. Woolley
had been a newspaperman, Senate aide, and longtime Democratic
political operative. At the start of the campaign it was generally
agreed that the victor would be Republican Charles Evans Hughes.
Woolley helped Wilson eke out a victory by changing the way campaign
publicity was done. He started on the campaign very early, prefiguring
the continuous campaign cycle that now exists. Then, as the
Republicans acknowledged afterward, Woolley expertly managed the flow
of information to the press and the public. Roosevelt credited him
with “the most brilliant achievement in the history of American
politics.”

Woolley is important to the CPI story for two reasons. First, his
publicity bureau became the test kitchen for the CPI. Woolley’s
deputy, incidentally, was Creel. Second, and related to this, this
episode established a pattern in which the way one uses information to
win election shapes how one governs. Consider President Barack Obama,
who harnessed social media in his presidential campaign. In office, he
created an Office of Digital Strategy to reach the public directly via
social media. More than half the staff had worked on an Obama
presidential campaign.

One final point, if I may. I think Hughes would have been a better
president than Wilson. This is certainly the case as it relates to
free speech. Later, as chief justice of the Supreme Court, he led the
way on privileging the First Amendment. Wilson subverted it.

Realizing that Woolley’s grandson is Chuck Robb, who was both governor
and senator from Virginia – and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s son-in-law --
who in modern American politics does Woolley bring to mind?

This is a difficult question. Maybe David Axelrod, a former Chicago
Tribune reporter and ardent Democrat who helped President Obama with
communications strategy. He has attested to the point I made above
about the link between campaigning and governing. Regarding the
selling of the Iran nuclear agreement, which deftly and
controversially used social media, he said the administration
“approached these major foreign-policy challenges as campaign
challenges, and they’ve run campaigns, and those campaigns have been
very sophisticated.”

In 2020, conservatives — and a handful of old-school journalists —
complained that the mainstream media essentially censored news
unfavorable to Joe Biden, especially regarding his son Hunter’s shady
business machinations in Ukraine and China. Although the establishment
news outlets scoffed at the very idea that they were censoring news, a
reader of your book might think, ‘They’ve been doing it for more than
a century.’ I’m thinking now of George Creel, the evil genius at the
center of your story. A well-known Midwestern muckraker in 1916, he
essentially lobbies the Wilson administration for the job of being
chief censor. What motivated Creel, who’d made his name as a
muckraker?

George Creel was, through and through, a fighter. He had a bulldog
face and spoke through clenched teeth. He was one of the more colorful
members of that group of journalists whom we call muckrakers.
Muckrakers spoke frankly of seeking to clarify public opinion by
providing the sunlight of fact. They often chose political sides when
they thought those sides would lead to better government. It was an
easy call for them in general and Creel in particular to join the CPI.
They would help the public understand. The problem was that these
trust busters created a government information-trust that inevitably
became an instrument of the administration. Creel, a longtime
supporter of Wilson, fought to get the job, using his connection with
the secretary of the Navy, newspaperman Josephus Daniels, whom he had
defended from criticism during the 1916 election. Creel was a poor
choice to head the CPI given the ease with which his emotions ran
amuck.

So Creel is put in charge of something called the Committee on Public
Information. What did the CPI do exactly?

The CPI had no plan to begin with. But it had energy. Creel was
correct when he said, “There was no part of the great war machinery
that we did not touch, no medium of appeal that we did not employ.”

The CPI shot propaganda though every capillary in the American
bloodstream. It was a publishing conglomerate, with a daily newspaper,
pamphlets, news services at home and overseas, syndicated stories and
cartoons, and thousands of press releases. The CPI made prepackaged
news a quotidian aspect of governing.

CPI advertisements were ubiquitous in newspapers and magazines.
Families watched CPI-produced films in theaters across the country.
Its Division of Pictorial Publicity produced nearly 1,500 poster
designs, cards, advertisements, seals, and buttons for 98 agencies and
committees. The CPI distributed tens of thousands of slides taken by
the military.

The CPI was creative in enlisting the motion picture industry,
advertising associations, universities, and others who could give it
pathways into American homes and minds. The Boy Scouts, traveling
salesmen, and corporate titans did the CPI’s bidding.

Did CPI suppress speech as well as disseminate the official government line?

We often think of propaganda one dimensionally, as only the provision
of information. But if one is eager to shape thoughts, it is essential
to suppress information that challenges the beliefs you instill in the
public’s mind.

When the CPI was created, the idea was that it would handle
censorship, which Wilson expected to be enacted in a law as
all-encompassing as the British Defence of the Realm Act. Congress
would not go this far. The military, the Post Office, and the Justice
Department did get legal powers to control speech. The CPI had
referred power from these entities to censor. Beyond that, the CPI did
what it could to bully the press to conform. Because the government
could block periodicals from the mail, refuse use of the cables,
withhold newsprint, and close movie theaters – and because Creel was
seen as so influential in such decisions – he had considerable
bullying power.

There are other several villains in your story, besides Creel. A hero
here and there, too, including the now-forgotten Vira Boarman
Whitehouse. What drew you to her story?

Not all propaganda is bad, and Vira Whitehouse shows us why. One of
the CPI’s great contributions was to conceive public diplomacy. They
did not use that term, but they understood the value of reaching the
man and woman on the street overseas. This can be very useful in
building goodwill abroad, if it is done honestly. But embassies at the
time did not want it done at all. They thought this was a waste of
time and if something like it was done, it should be done
clandestinely.

Whitehouse was wealthy and beautiful, and she was tough. She led the
successful drive in 1917 to win the right for women to vote in New
York. Creel, who was an ardent supporter of the suffrage movement,
sent Whitehouse to Switzerland where the legation gave her a reception
as chilly as the Alps. Allen Dulles, who was starting his career,
suggested that she pose as a journalist rather than work openly. She
declined and became so fed up with the embassy’s resistance that she
returned home and took the matter up personally with Wilson. To the
amazement of many, including Creel, she prevailed and returned to
Bern. At the end of the war, Dulles said, “Mrs. Whitehouse – I am
frank to admit – is doing good work, much better than I had thought
possible. She is having a real influence in placing American news in
the Swiss press and is in touch with a great many influential Swiss. …
The influence of America in Switzerland is tremendous now.” This,
however, did not stop Dulles from using journalists for intelligence
gathering and spreading false information when he became head of the
CIA many years later.

In 2020, Facebook and other social media firms were concerned about
how political speech, some of which included false or misleading
information, would be weaponized by the geometric nature of
communications in the Digital Age. But a century ago, George Creel
organized the “Four Minute Men” to accomplish a similar aim. This army
of 75,000 amateur orators delivered speeches in union halls, churches,
synagogues, and social clubs to tens of millions of Americans. Is
there anything sinister about this kind of thing -- then or now?

I would not use the word “sinister.” But I would say that the Four
Minute Men had a sleight-of-hand quality to them. These speakers were
leading citizens of their community. They were trusted. This apparent
grassroots authenticity, however, was carefully orchestrated by
Washington. The speakers were given new topics every few days, for
instance, to urge people to buy war bonds, donate their binoculars to
the Navy, and look out for spies. The speakers were given canned
speeches. Guidance was so detailed that Washington told state chairmen
how to run meetings with their local chairmen. Speakers were monitored
by local leaders and local leaders were monitored by state leaders,
and – well, you get the idea.

Last question, Jack. Knowing that our own government has been putting
its thumb on the scales of public opinion for 104 years and counting,
what do tell your journalism students at LSU about handling
government-provided information? What advice would you give in this
regard to working journalists covering American politics at this
contentious crossroads of American history?

I am deeply troubled by trends in journalism. We can blame the Trump
administration for perverting the White House press conferences. But
the press has done its part to turn them into circuses as a result of
reporters viewing them as an opportunity to get attention for
themselves. Some exceptional reporting is being done by print and
broadcast journalists, but too often the press shows its bias not only
in story selection but also in the way reporters characterize events.
It is disturbing to me that some journalists on our most esteemed
newspapers say neutral journalism is old-fashioned.

This is not so, and it is not what our school at Louisiana State
University teaches students. We teach them to give the government a
fair shake but also question and probe. We provide tools to do this.
For instance, we teach them how to interpret data. The house of
journalism is diverse. We have room for pundits and analysts. But an
enormous portion of that house must be a space for straight,
unembroidered reporting. That kind of reporting shows respect for
democracy. Democracy privileges process. It presupposes that open,
fact-based deliberation ensures better outcomes.

The story of the CPI is a story of good men and women who lost their
way when they worked for the government. As I said earlier, there is
much we can do to put boundaries around the power of government to use
our tax dollars to tell us what to think. But journalists have to
police themselves. And that policing should begin in journalism
classrooms in order that it may more readily carry on in newsrooms.
"