Propaganda Through Non-Propagated Information

Discussions over propaganda and public diplomacy probed my peripatetic mind while I walked home from class.  I couldn’t help but wonder, if the term propaganda is not just taboo, but outdated, then is propagandist activity still going on in America today? And, if so, who is targeting what to whom?  I tried to think of government-funded ads on TV or the radio, but none came to mind.  We do not have a governmental department that releases media per se.  The FCC monitors content, but its mostly for obscenities.  Although, its classifications for “appropriate” material certainly promotes an “American” ideology.  But I couldn’t think of anything particularly jarring.  A friend of mine from Zimbabwe told me about a political ad she saw on her last trip.  It showed a small car driving through an intersection being by a large SUV.  The title said, “Don’t commit suicide, Vote Mugabe.”  America doesn’t have such a clearly pronounced message

So, if it’s not the government directly at hand, than the control of information must be coming from other powerful sources.  In searching for examples, I remembered an out of print book my friend recently bought online.  It was called, “We Charge Genocide.” The book detailed William Petterson and Paul Robeson’s petition to the UN charging the U.S. with Genocide for the lynching of African Americans. How outrageous! America has been charged with genocide and I never knew about it.  I had never heard of this book or any attempts at a formal accusation of genocide in the U.S. How did this information seem to stay out of my civil rights units in high school or my classes of international organizations and human rights in college.  I suppose its not surprising that the book is kept quiet, how could the U.S. take a firm stance against a nation where genocide of hundreds of thousands is occurring without being hypocritical.  It would gunk-up the cogs of political action by undermining the moral high ground on which the U.S. hegemony rests.

The romanticized conspiracy theories of my generation are overplayed:  repudiating the notion of a free society and bashing America’s contrived information machine.  But after examining the history of propaganda and its subtle implications, its difficult for me to rule out those opinions. We think that information control happens, “over there,” in China with goggle or in the UAE with Black Berry’s.  It’s comforting to learn that there’s enough research to deny the “laser beam” affect of political indoctrination that we can and do think beyond what is presented. Suppressing certain information to promote an ideology is a form of propaganda, than how do we avoid it if we don’t know what is not being communicated?

-Christina Cerqueira