Propaganda as a tool and its definition
In a 2022 episode, economist Abigail Hall, discussing her book Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror, offers a definition of propaganda with three criteria: it is “purposefully biased, misleading, or false information”; it is “used to promote some sort of political cause”; and it is “bad from the perspective of the recipient because it inhibits them from engaging in rational decision making” Manufacturing Militarism: A Fresh Look at Propaganda (2022). She notes that propaganda “almost universally in a contemporary context has a negative connotation,” and that she and her co-author adopt that connotation. She also acknowledges that others define the term more broadly — some argue that all advertising is propaganda — a definition she calls unhelpful because it “explains everything and nothing at the same time.”
Hall frames the book around what she calls the noble lie: the argument that government may need to lie to its citizens to achieve particular ends. She raises three problems with that argument. First, there is no reason to believe officials will consistently promote good outcomes rather than protect their own “monopoly control that they have over information.” Second, citizens are “prevented from getting the necessary information that they need to be able to make an informed opinion or an informed decision.” Third, propaganda “fundamentally neglects the damage that propaganda does to the foundations of a free society” — it is, she says, “fundamentally illiberal,” its “entire purpose” being “to cloud or to obfuscate reality.”
Bob Zadek presses the question of whether Hall objects to propaganda as such or only to propaganda in service of militarism, asking whether she would complain if a government used propaganda to promote “the disarming of the world,” free markets, limited government or federalism. Hall does not concede the point directly; she distinguishes government propaganda from private communication by noting that the private company in Zadek’s hypothetical “is not the group that is attempting to or executing U.S. foreign policy.”
Television as a left-wing outlet
In a 2011 episode, Ben Shapiro, author of Primetime Propaganda: The True Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, tells Bob Zadek that “steadily over the last 50 years, and really since the 1970s, television has become a complete left-wing outlet” Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011). He says it has been “infiltrated by a group of people who are ideologically driven, not simply market-driven,” ranging from executives to creators, who are in “soft cahoots” in putting political material into their programming.
Shapiro argues that television is more susceptible to this than film because of what he calls market inefficiencies. With a movie, the audience “either accepts it or it doesn’t” — viewers “plunk down your dollar.” With television, viewers pay the cable company rather than the producers or the network, leaving “tremendous kind of wiggle room” that “allows a steadier diet of leftist material.” He offers Green Zone, starring Matt Damon, as an example of a film that went “too far off the track” and that nobody went to watch; on television, by contrast, “even if nobody watches it, you still may be able to monetize it.”
Zadek characterizes the effect on viewers as subtle but profound, suggesting that audiences and their children are being influenced in their social mores without knowing it. He calls the prospect of “surreptitiously affecting the minds of kids, if not grown-ups” scary, comparing it to The Twilight Zone.
The GE “propaganda mill”
In a 2019 episode on Amity Shlaes’s book about the Great Society, Shlaes describes a corporate effort she calls a “propaganda mill” at General Electric Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019). She says GE’s “soul was divided”: on one side a marketing-minded culture that worked with government cynically, on the other the older GE of Thomas Edison, “a man alone in a lab.” The company was concerned that unions were “pricing American innovation out of its own market.”
Shlaes credits Lemuel Boulware, an executive she calls “completely forgotten,” with creating the effort. Boulware, she says, made “essentially an intellectual policy, a philanthropic bet”: he needed to train people in the merits of free-market capitalism and the history of GE, reminding them “where growth comes from.” He created the mill to teach more than 100,000 workers about the benefits of capitalism, mimeographing pamphlets about Hayek and about Henry Hazlitt, who “popularized Bastiat and Hayek.”
Boulware hired “an aging actor who was not very popular” and was at that time “a rock-ribbed Democrat” — Ronald Reagan — to be spokesman for these capitalist ideas. Reagan, Shlaes says, needed a job and liked it but “wasn’t really sure about the capitalism at first.” He traveled the rubber chicken circuit giving lectures to workers and in town halls. Shlaes says Reagan gradually became convinced of the ideas; one reason was that he followed GE stock and bought some for his son so the son could see how markets worked and “the beauty of compounding.”
The effort collapsed when GE was caught up in what Shlaes calls its own hypocrisy: executives had been colluding illegally with Westinghouse and other companies to fix prices and charge too much to the Tennessee Valley Authority. There was a “bloody court case,” GE executives went to jail — unusual in antitrust, she notes — the stock “went in the toilet,” Boulware’s department fell apart, Boulware retired, and Reagan was fired and his show GE Theater was canceled.
Shlaes’s point is about duration: Boulware’s “long-shot propaganda philosophy effort” paid off years later, when Reagan went into politics and gave speeches about markets and the socialization of medicine. She observes that a project of political or philosophical education may not pay off for ten or twenty years, or until after one’s death, and that this does not make the undertaking worthless. Reagan, she says, corresponded with Boulware when he ran for governor of California.
Private interests and government propaganda
Zadek poses a hypothetical to Hall: a Hollywood production wants access to Boeing’s factory and head office for a film featuring a Boeing aircraft; Boeing grants access in exchange for script approval and asks for changes so it “comes out looking a little bit better.” The producers make a dollars-and-cents judgment and accept. Zadek asks why Boeing’s behavior is benign economic self-interest while government behavior in the same shape offends Hall and prompts the word propaganda Manufacturing Militarism: A Fresh Look at Propaganda (2022).
Hall answers that the incentives are understandable on both sides — the producers are “in this game to make money,” and she jokes that she would not want to look terrible in a movie about herself. The “primary difference,” she says, is that the private company “is not the group that is attempting to or executing U.S. foreign policy.” She concedes that some people would call Zadek’s Boeing example propaganda, and that she does not deny propaganda can come from other areas; the book limits its focus to government propaganda.
Zadek adds that government has a different relationship with its audience than business or unions do, because government is “the only institution that is allowed, if not encouraged, to kill people.” He notes that government often has exclusive access to information, which affects public opinion and therefore the vote, and invokes public choice theory — the idea that governmental actors behave in their own self-interest like non-governmental actors. He raises the question of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction as an example of a decision justified to the public.
The TSA as a case study
Hall identifies the Transportation Security Administration as the case study she will discuss in detail. She describes the message a traveler receives: “See something, say something” on the subway, the same message at the airport, and then the TSA — a consistent message that “flying is unsafe, terrorism is a real and salient threat,” and that citizens must be hyper-vigilant while the TSA searches persons and property, sometimes multiple times. The message, she says, is “that you’re unsafe and government is the solution to the problem” Manufacturing Militarism: A Fresh Look at Propaganda (2022).
Against that message she sets the work of John Mueller of Ohio State University and the Cato Institute, and his co-author Mark Stewart, on relative risk. Their finding, as she reports it, is that the risk of terrorism to someone in the United States is “remarkably low” — one is more likely to be killed by a dog, bees or snakes. Even within the context of 9/11, she says, the risk would not register in the top ten causes of death even if 9/11 were repeated over and over for several years.
Hall says the book walks through post-9/11 incidents — the “underwear bomber,” the “shoe bomber” — and the security measures implemented after them, including body scanners and the requirement to remove shoes for those without TSA PreCheck. She says the book spends considerable time on the body scanners and the Federal Air Marshals program, and that the pattern repeats: the actual threat is remarkably small, “in some cases, not really statistically different from zero,” while the message sent is that you and your family are not safe and that government agents and policies are necessary to protect you.
Across episodes: the same question in different settings
The three episodes approach propaganda from different directions — Shapiro on entertainment television, Shlaes on a corporation’s internal education effort, Hall on government communication in the war on terror — and the excerpts show no shared development or direct engagement between them. The recurring question, raised most explicitly by Zadek to Hall, is whether propaganda is objectionable in itself or only when it serves ends the speaker opposes; Hall answers by distinguishing government from private actors, while Shapiro and Shlaes describe propaganda-like efforts without adopting Hall’s three-part definition.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state whether Shapiro’s or Shlaes’s subjects would accept Hall’s definition of propaganda, nor whether Hall would classify the GE pamphlets or television programming as propaganda under her criteria. The excerpts do not give the outcome of any court case beyond Shlaes’s statement that GE executives went to jail, and do not name the statute or amendment involved. The excerpts also do not cover the ending of Shlaes’s sentence about higher budgets, which breaks off.