mass-communication-theory

THINKING
about
THEORY
attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of
patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It
works the same in every country. (In Crowther,
2004, p. 12)
But to many of the war’s supporters this was
betrayal. They had believed their government, and
their government had misled them. Michael Getler,
ombudsman for the Washington Post (an early supporter
of the invasion), explained, “Almost everything
we were told [by the administration] before the war,
other than Saddam Hussein is bad, has turned
out…. not to be the case: the weapons of mass destruction,
the imagery of nuclear mushroom clouds,
the links between al-Qaida and Saddam, the welcome,
the resistance, the costs, the number of
troops needed” (quoted in Rich, 2004, p. 12). More
dramatically, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter concurred:
“All the manufactured justifications for going
to war crumbled on a bloody bone pile of deception
and dissolution” (2004, p. 62).
Still other war supporters argued that the manufactured
justifications really didn’t matter. The war was a
good thing—it removed a madman from power, freed
the Iraqi people, and would bring democracy to the
Middle East. In other words, they accepted Edward
Bernays’s idea of the need for the government to engineer
consent—the “freedom to persuade … because
in a democracy, results ‘do not just happen’”
(quoted in Sproule, 1997, p. 213). They accepted
Lasswell’s fatalism, that in our modern society “it is
no longer possible to fuse the waywardness of individuals
in the furnace of the war dance…. Anewflame
must burn out the canker of dissent and temper the
steel of bellicose enthusiasm. The name of this new
PROPAGANDA COMES TO THE UNITED STATES
Chapter 4 The Rise of Media Theory in the Age of Propaganda 79
ENGINEERING CONSENT: WMD AND THE WAR IN IRAQ
(CONTINUED)
hammer and anvil of social solidarity is propaganda”
(Lasswell, 1927a, pp. 220–221). Six years after the
invasion, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted
that this was the Allies’ goal all along. He told
the BBC that Saddam Hussein’s presence in the
Middle East was enough of a threat to justify the
war, but “obviously you would have had to use and
deploy different arguments about the nature of the
threat” (in Ritchie, 2009).
What do you think? Do you believe that the government
has the right (or obligation) to engineer your
consent, because “in a democracy, results don’t just
happen?” Do you agree with Goering, that use of the
“we’re being threatened” master symbol works the
same in all countries? Do you think that it is appropriate
for our leaders to propagandize us into the
“furnace of the war dance” and actively suppress
“the canker of dissent”? In a democracy, can dissent
ever be a “canker”? Or do you agree with Canadian
scholar Stanley Cunningham, who argues that government
propaganda is always a “disservice” to democracy
because
it plays upon perplexity; it cultivates confusion;
it poses as information and knowledge; it generates
belief systems and tenacious convictions;
it prefers credibility and belief states to knowledge;
it supplies ersatz assurances and certainties; it
skews perceptions; it systematically disregards
superior epistemic values such as truth, understanding
and knowledge; it discourages reasoning
and a healthy respect for rigor, evidence, and
procedural safeguards; it promotes the easy acceptance
of unexamined belief and supine ignorance.
(2000, p. 6)
Americans first began to give serious consideration to the power of propaganda in
the years following World War I. The war had demonstrated that modern propaganda
techniques could be used with startling effectiveness to assemble massive armies
and to maintain civilian morale through long years of warfare. Never before
had so many people been mobilized to fight a war. Never before had so many
died with so little to show for it over such a long period of time and under such
harsh conditions. Earlier wars had been quickly settled by decisive battles. But in
this war, massive armies confronted each other along a front that extended for
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