The public has gotten used to seeing advertisers ape news show formats in TV infomercials. So the Department of Health and Human Services must have been surprised when the General Accounting Office announced recently that they'd be investigating the department's use of the same techniques to promote the Administration's prescription-drug bill. The department sent out a video news release to extol the virtues of the bill, complete with fake reporters and a shot of President Bush receiving a standing ovation as he signed the bill.
On Comedy Central's "Daily Show," one of John Stewart's mock-correspondents described that kind of bogus newscast as "infoganda," and worried that it might drive genuine fake newscasts like Stewart's off the air. And in The New York Times last Sunday, Frank Rich extended "infoganda" to the range of ploys the Administration has used to spin news coverage, from the manipulation of the Jessica Lynch story, the "Mission Accomplished" photo op aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, and the editorial direction it offered to Showtime's movie "DC 9/11" to the TV blitz by Condi Rice and others aimed at discrediting Richard Clarke.
As it happens, "infoganda" has been around for a while -- it first appeared in the press during the Gulf War of 1991 as a name for the reports and footage that the Pentagon was furnishing to journalists.1 But the word may very well have been independently coined on several occasions. It seems like a natural name for this sort of thing -- it fits the pattern of those spliced-together portmanteau words like "infotainment" and "docudrama." I think of those names as genre benders. They're the media's version of "Junkyard Wars" -- there's nothing new under the sun, apart from what you can cobble together from the stuff that's lying around the shop.
But what's curious about "infoganda" is that anyone would feel the need for a new word to describe those government-produced news videos. There was a time when that territory would have been adequately covered by "propaganda" -- a genre that has always worked best in drag.
"Propaganda" was originally coined by the Jesuits in the 17th century as the name of the Vatican committee charged with propagating the faith. But it didn't become part of the everyday vocabulary until the time of the First World War, when the British and Germans began to use the new techniques of mass advertising and public relations to rouse popular support for their cause. As one journalist observed, "Before 1914, 'propaganda' belonged only to literate vocabularies and possessed a reputable, dignified meaning… Two years later the word had come into the vocabulary of peasants and ditchdiggers and had begun to acquire its miasmic aura."2
Americans got into this game when the country entered the war in 1917. President Wilson set up the Committee on Public Information, modeled on the British Department of Information. It became known as the Creel Committee after its chairman, the journalist George Creel. The committee churned out posters, pamphlets, and press releases, and enlisted 75,000 people to serve as "four minute men," who gave short prepared speeches and lantern-slide shows at theaters and public gatherings, urging people to enlist or buy liberty bonds.
Most of that material was pretty purple stuff, laced with phrases like "bombs or bondage" and "If you don't come across, the Kaiser will." But Creel denied that the committee was trafficking in propaganda, a word he associated with "deceit and corruption." "Our effort," he said, "was educational and informative throughout. No other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of facts." 3
As time went on, public suspicion of propaganda turned it into an orphan word that no one would own up to. In 1939, a poll showed 40 percent of Americans blamed propaganda for the US entry into the First World War.
In that environment, propagandists took greater pains to disguise their product. In 1938, one New York editor objected to the deluge of phony press releases from the "news services" that had been set up by foreign governments to win favorable coverage. He warned that they threatened to break down the line of demarcation between news and propaganda, particularly if papers began to rely on them to fill their pages.4
But of course that was the point of the exercise. By then it was clear that propaganda was most effective when it masqueraded as objective news. In 1941, when FDR wanted to drum up support for extending the draft and increasing American aid to the British war effort, he established an Office of Facts and Figures, headed by Archibald Macleish.
Some isolationist senators accused the Administration of trying to set up a centralized propaganda bureau, but New York's mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who had been an advocate of the program, reassured the public that "the office is not a propaganda agency… We don't believe in this country in artificially stimulated, high-pressure, doctored nonsense." Even so, in a private memo to Roosevelt, LaGuardia admitted that the agency's goal was to provide the public with what he called "sugar coated, colored, ornamental matter, otherwise known as 'bunk,'..." 5
By 1942, the Office of Facts and Figures had become part of the Office of War Information, which adopted the same principle in encouraging Hollywood to make movies that roused patriotic sentiments. In the words of the agency's director, the journalist Elmer Davis: "The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most men's minds is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment picture."6
Ultimately, the American propagandists' greatest victory was to discredit the word "propaganda" itself. By the time of the Cold War, "propaganda" only referred to what the other side said -- and said crudely, at that. The word conjured up the bombast and strident language of the Soviets, not the soft-sell productions of our side. Propaganda programs were the ones that played the Red Army Chorus in the background, not the ones that played Stan Kenton.
So it isn't surprising that the use of "propaganda" declined with détente, the end of the Vietnam war, and then the fall of Communism. Over the past five years, the word has been only a tenth as common in the press as it was in its Cold War heyday.
That may be why people felt the need to coin the new word "infoganda" to describe the fake news shows and contrived photo ops that are designed to blend seamlessly into the media background.
There may be nothing new about these techniques, but the current administration has exploited them more deftly than anyone since Roosevelt's day. And they've found a fertile ground for their plantings in the modern media setting, which already blurs the lines between journalism and advocacy and reality and fiction.
As a Department of Health and Human Services spokesman said in defending the fake news spot about the prescription drug bill, "Anyone who has questions about this practice needs to do some research on modern public information tools." It's hard to argue with that. In a world of infomercials, advertorials, and docudramas, what's one more imposture?
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