Propaganda works best in a pliant population with common goals, hence its impact in wartime and need for a common enemy. But the more disparate the audience, the less likely it is to be effective. The BBC World Service was always more effective during the Cold War than its American counterpart, the Voice of America, because of the stridency of the latter and the much more nuanced voice of Britain. Whereas the Voice of America spoke from the self-evident assurance of right, with everything framed metaphorically by the star-spangled banner, the BBC gave an apparent range of opinion and experience, normally in the voice of people from the respective regions. They were frequently exiles, from the Iron Curtain countries or other regimes, so not entirely impartial, but nor did they appear to be mouth-pieces for the British government. There was an apparent commitment to truth and objectivity.
The subtlety is in which truths and positions were most valued and frequently expressed. This is known as the propaganda of omission, rather than commission. The former, like a polite relative at a family do, merely avoids talking about things that are uncomfortable and that don’t serve their worldview. The latter brashly asserts whatever their beliefs are, irrespective of their impact on or unacceptability to the recipients. The BBC World Service is financed through a grant in aid from the Foreign Office, and has to be seen to serve British interests, through concentrating on issues and areas that serve that purpose. Thus, during the Cold War, stories about the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc were of paramount importance and their respective language services well-endowed. Now that the government’s priority has shifted to the Middle East, most of those language services have been closed to fund the BBC Arabic Television Service36and BBC Persian.37This is not about the propagation of lies, more evidence that ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’.
There was a gleam in Western governments’ eyes when the Al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11 offered the promise that ‘everything was changed’, giving them the chance to take actions hard to justify before, from suspending civil liberties to taking pre-emptive strikes against sovereign states. The so-called ‘Bush doctrine’ was based on the President’s bellicose announcement that ‘Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’38– and so justifying facing the full weight of Amer-ican military might if they believe you are a threat, as nation or individual. Cashing in the vast credit of human sympathy in the world for America’s loss with the Twin Towers, Bush sought to suppress opposition and criticism, and for some considerable time achieved it on the US front. But, as the whole ‘war on terror’ and its strategies unravelled, an opposition eventually found its voice and began to interrogate the propaganda machine that had whirred into action so effectively. One documentary film among many charts 40 years of US government use of propaganda during wars from Vietnam to Iraq. In his book of the same name, Norman Soloman’s War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death quotes approvingly Voltaire’s maxim: ‘As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.’
When the huge news outlets swing behind warfare, the dissent propelled by conscience is not deemed to be very newsworthy. The mass media are filled with bright lights and sizzle, with high production values and lower human values, boosting the war effort. And for many Americans, the gap between what they believe and what’s on their TV sets is the distance between their truer selves and their fearful passivity.
Conscience is not on the military’s radar screen, and it’s not on our television screen.
But government officials and media messages do not define the limits and possibilities of conscience. We do.39
The pictures that soldiers took in Abu Ghraib helped undo the Operation Iraqi Freedom myths so carefully built with the co-operation of a servile media and its embedded correspondents. It is a truth widely held that a reporter in bed with his subject is unlikely to retain an absolutely uncompromised objectivity in his coverage. But, as we have discovered, reporters were offered the freedom of that relatively comfortable compromise or risk the kind of ‘friendly fire’ that killed ITN’s Terry Lloyd in March 2003. A 2006 inquest found that Lloyd was unlawfully killed by American fire that targeted the makeshift ambulance taking him to hospital, after he had already been wounded in crossfire.40With modern telecom-munications, it is not possible to control and censor all comtelecom-munications, as the British Ministry of Defence had managed to do in the remote and isolated terrain of the Falklands War in 1982. It is easier to control access to the story, influencing the circumstances in which it is assessed and how it is received. After the PR disaster of the Lebanon war in 2006, the Israelis mounted a highly effective propaganda machine to justify their violent incursion in Gaza in January 2009, banning all correspondents from Gaza and lining up a well-briefed team of apologists to fill the hole thus created.
In Afghanistan – a conflict that has become more bitter, protracted and hopeless even than Iraq – there has been a growing resentment among the press corps at the way the British Ministry of Defence attempts to massage the message. Reporters talk of a ‘devastating breakdown of relations’ between reporters and the MOD. ‘Dealing with the Ministry of Defence is genuinely more stressful than coming under fire,’ says The Daily Telegraph’s defence correspondent, Thomas Harding. ‘We have been lied to and we have been censored.’41 Because the war in Helmand province is so dangerous and inaccessible, the only viable access is as ‘embeds’ on army helicopters, and the reporters claim these trips are severely rationed to suit the anticipated spin, favouring uncritical coverage from TV stars like Ross Kemp or flag-waving tabloids over more critical correspondents like Harding. ‘They manipulate the parcelling-out of embeds to suit their own ends’ he says. ‘They use it as a form of punishment to journalists who are off-message or critical of strategy or tactics.’42
The Guardian’s James Meek says: ‘I was told quite candidly that the priority was the tabloids and television because it was important for recruitment’.43That not only requires a positive spin on stories, but the softening of negative stories, especially the mounting death toll. A voluntary agreement drawn up between the MOD and news editors, the Green Book, obliges reporters to email their copy to the Army to ensure their ‘press freedoms’ do not compromise Opsec (operational security). We are supposed to understand that this is neither censorship nor propaganda, merely an attempt to save lives. Yet, by May 2008 Afghanistan was claiming more US servicemen’s lives than Iraq and, in July 2009, 22 UK servicemen died there, with British military deaths in action in Afghanistan long having exceeded the total Iraq war. These are stories barely reported in the UK press, because the reporters cannot get there. Can this be an unintended, accidental outcome?
Conclusion
In some ways, a government does attempt to define the limits and possibilities of conscience.
It is for the reporter and filmmaker to resist the blandishments of power and interrogate the spinners of tales who would recruit us to their propaganda purposes. The rise of government news agencies supplying news packages to cash-strapped radio and television in both the UK and the USA is a dangerous extension of political influence that may not be made clear to its audience. Labelling – of increasing interest to consumers keen to find where their food comes from and what it contains – should equally be demanded of information sources. The internet has given us a plethora of sources but created a logarithmic problem in identifying the wheat from the chaff, the truth from the spin. It is no surprise that it is government departments that make some of the most extensive use of this informational shop window but, Freedom of Information Acts notwithstanding, there are still powerful forces at work filtering the latter-day version of ‘all the news that’s fit to print’.44
That said, there are propagandist ends that one can agree with – health education for example. The word ‘propaganda’ literally means ‘propagating’ – more familiarly used by gardeners about plant reproduction – and comes from the Roman Catholic Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Sacred Congregation for Propagating the Faith).
At least that origin indicates the sense of dogmatic persuasion, but the use is secularised in Spanish-speaking South America, where it simply means ‘advertising’ and carries no pejorative overtones. In fact, Propaganda is also the name of a successful contemporary British advertising agency, which appropriates the powerful associations of its name in the service of its new branding business:
Propaganda’s BrandLab team knows how to talk to consumers to get the truth, and not just focus-group answers. We believe in asking ‘why’ till we cannot ask ‘why’ anymore.
Only then can we get a true brand insight. And only then can we develop an insight-rich marketing and advertising campaign brief that will influence your consumers in the way you want.45
So propaganda would appear to be emerging from the dark shadows associated with its use in the twentieth century, to find a morally relativist role in the twenty-first century. Brands are the new allegiances, their messages the new mantra. Call it influence, or persuasion, propaganda has always had the potential to be benign, and is clearly seen to be by those who share its ideological goals, just as the deeply religious feel compelled to share their
‘enlightenment’. Tele-evangelism, long a mainstay of US television, is only a recent arrival in the UK, and Ofcom rules forbidding it to appeal for money on air were only relaxed in 2006,46presaging a new phase of propagandising television in the digital age.
At the start of the Cold War, with equal and opposite ideologies apparently tooling up for a Third World War, George Orwell naturally imagined an extreme dystopia controlled absolutely by propaganda. ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’ In fact, the (Western) human face is being flooded by media moisturiser, massaging away human wrinkles, cares and thought in a deluge of consumer indulgence. And the dread unseen tyranny of 1984’s Big Brother has been expropriated as the most successful international television brand of the twenty-first century, where the world’s wannabes subject themselves to the glare of 24/7 screened humiliation in pursuit
of transient fame. Orwell would no doubt be appalled, but not necessarily surprised by this ironically dumbed-down outcome. He had long been exercised by what he saw as the decadence of language and yet believed that its decline could be arrested, and he derided the liberal position that ‘language merely reflects existing social conditions’.47For 1984, he invented the idea of Newspeak, where language is progressively sanitised by the state, history and literature rewritten, and dissidence finally deprived of the truth, references and words to exist. He reckoned it might take until 2050 to achieve that:
The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.48
Expert briefing – psychological filmmaking: going for effect
The vast majority of documentary films are commissioned and financed to serve a purpose other than the filmmaker’s desire to make that film. It may be to meet a particular channel objective or social need, to celebrate an event or idea, to expose wrongdoing or sell a product. The filmmaker should enter a deal in the full knowledge of the financier’s objectives and only sign a contract with the will and ability to deliver on those goals.
Few projects announce themselves as propagandistic, but many are to some degree and it pays the filmmaker to understand that expectation and examine their conscience at the outset. Film is a psychological weapon and can be turned to many effects:
1 Raising the temperature: Many of the highest-regarded films are those which expose some social ill and sufficiently disturb their audience so that there is some resultant pressure for change. This involves the often harrowing revelation of individual stories of emotional upheaval in such a way that individual members of the audience empathise strongly. That in turn requires the filmmaker not only to understand what aspects of the story can be made to have that resonance, finding the points of common connection, but also encouraging the subject to reveal their innermost trials and tribulations. This means employing emotional intelligence to recognise which aspects of the story and its impact on the subject will connect directly with the hearts of the audience. Having someone break down on camera is one of the more commonly contrived devices, but not necessarily exploitative if the subject is fully apprised of, and sympathetic with, the objects of the film and agrees with the use of that material. For many people, the interest of others represented by the camera can provide a form of catharsis; many use the interview as a form of confession, a washing away of sins, including those visited upon them. So a sensitive handling of such moments need not just be revelatory, but can bring closure. As long as they are well shot and handled, an audience reads such moments as privileged insights and reacts as to a personal exchange.
2 Feeling the pulse: Political and wartime propaganda is the kind that requires a mass reaction, welding the many to a single purpose. Traditionally it is the drum that accompanies troops to war, and music still remains the most potent tool for marrying an emotional reaction to a particular idea, as in a national anthem or football stadium chant. The instillation of a shared sensation is obviously easier with a crowd, as in the
theatre, but television still has the power and the tools to bring a nation together, as for Diana’s funeral. The beat of the music not only drives the tempo of the narrative but conveys its aim: hence the use of martial music at train termini in the morning rush hour and soft jazz in hotel elevators. The timbre and key are equally important: major key for engendering positive and upbeat response, changing to minor key for setbacks and contemplative moments. Suspense we all know comes either with those sharp, high notes on the strings or deep bass notes echoing a pounding heart.
A film’s music score can take its audience through an emotional rollercoaster ride, depositing them in exactly the state of mind required, which in American film is almost invariably with everything neatly resolved, jeopardy, tension and fear packed away.
But propaganda may want those rabble-rousing emotions allied to their cause, the soundtrack delivering the required sensation.
3 Checking the eyes: As hypnotists prove, the eyes are susceptible to suggestion up to a level that can make people do anything. Even the notionally conscious can be persuaded to perceive things that are not there, from faces in the clouds to threats that do not exist. Long before the wonders of CGI (computer generated images), the camera could frame, focus and contrast images so as to heavily freight their meaning.
From heroic images of Soviet workers to the monumental group of soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima, some pictures have the power to sear the retina and carry a complex ideology without words. Totems like flags, like the swastika, act as detonators for the explosive mixtures of idea and emotion that characterise belief systems, be they political or religious. This is the same mechanism that advertising seeks to trigger, by defining the brand and its packaging so well that instant recognition conveys meaning and desire. The pack shot at the end of an ad has to draw together the threads of information that precede it in one memorable frame, just as the single inanimate relic of a human tragedy can be the most eloquent memory of a complex life wasted.
4 Powering the lungs: While images may be worth a thousand words, that worth has probably been built through the words that preceded it. Words chosen as carefully as by a poet, and delivered with the power of the orator, can resonate long beyond the moment. Think of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, with its classically rising rhetorical triplets culminating in the aspirational ‘free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last’.49No words are wasted, but every one counts and their repetition has the cumulative, emotional effect of the greatest music. The words carry more meaning in their shared experience and hope than any image could, and nothing could serve their purpose better. Barack Obama drank deeply and spoke passionately from this cup of knowledge. Words fulfilled human needs for many thousands of years before the birth of film, and national leaders such as Hitler and Churchill owed their popular standing to their powers of oratory. Television demands a different kind of performance from today’s leaders, the appearance of normality and sincerity that Clinton and Blair practised, and the word use is very different, emphasising popular argot, evading verbs and commitments. A well-chosen word can define the meaning of the moment, a bad one can wreck it.
5 Reflexes and movement: All of these parts are subservient to their impact as a whole entity, a film whose editing has marshalled its orchestral forces to deliver a symphonic effect. The juxtaposition of sounds and images, the use of light and shade both visual and metaphorical, and the narrative journey through a range of landscapes and emotions to the desired conclusion are all master-minded in the post-production
process. An awareness of the state of mind of the audience, its prior knowledge, interests and sympathy, will help fine-tune the mix – hence television’s obsession with ratings, audience research and focus groups – but the elemental forces film can muster reach beyond the everyday, consumerist consciousness to a visceral connection with the human psyche. The extremes of human emotion and experience are the natural preserve of film and, used to creative ends, constructive or destructive, have the power to change not just minds but lives.
6 Agitating the viscera: Jamaican sound systems are so loud, the DJs can target resonances on specific organs of the body, one chord palpitating the lungs while
6 Agitating the viscera: Jamaican sound systems are so loud, the DJs can target resonances on specific organs of the body, one chord palpitating the lungs while