Throughout history, governments have employed propaganda to influence and manipulate citizens. Present-day America is no different. As discussed in previous chapters, the post-9/11 “war on terror,” which is entering its twentieth year with no end in sight, has been intertwined with government propaganda from the start. The ubiquity of government propaganda has both short-term and long-term consequences for a free society.
In the short-term, propaganda contributes to the adoption and persistence of policies that are not in the interests of many citizens. If the policies were in their interests, then the political elite would seek their genuine consent by making their case with an accurate presentation of the relevant information, and citizens would happily acquiesce. The use of propaganda by the state indicates that officials do not believe citizens will grant consent if provided with unbiased and complete information, meaning that policies purporting to serve the best interests of the citizenry may have the opposite effect.
In the long term, the institutionalized use of government propaganda threatens the foundations of a free society. As the Hoover Commission reported in 1949,
Whether the immediate purpose of Government propaganda is good or bad, the fact remains that individual liberty and free institutions cannot long survive when the vast powers of Government may be marshaled against the people to perpetuate a given policy or a particular group of office holders. Nor can freedom survive if all Government policies and programs are sustained by an overwhelming government propaganda.1
This runs counter to the idea that propaganda may be used in a noble manner to further the interests of citizens who may lack the knowledge or will to do so on their own.2 As the Commission noted, even if we assume that propaganda is used benevolently, it still threatens liberty by empowering state actors at the expense of the citizenry.
Further, there is reason to believe that the first-best case of benevolent propaganda rarely holds. As economist Roger Koppl notes, “while the interests of participants in the entangled deep state [his term for the U.S. national security state] often conflict, members of the deep state share a common interest in maintaining the status quo of the political system independently of democratic processes.”3 Appreciating that those in power wish to maintain their privileged position in conjunction with the corrosive effects on the foundations of a society of self-governing citizens makes clear the long-term threat posed by propaganda. This is especially troublesome in liberal democratic societies because the use of state propaganda runs parallel to the operation of political institutions predicated on the rhetoric of openness, transparency, citizen governance, and consent.
Given the immediate and long-term problems associated with propaganda, the central challenge facing the American people today is as follows. The national security state imbues government officials with substantial powers. Officials can use these powers to pursue their own interests by advancing a culture of militarism. Checking this power is difficult because of the secrecy that permeates all corners of the security state. The severe information asymmetries between the American people and their government incentivizes the dissemination of state propaganda that is biased toward achieving the goals of those in power.
What can be done to overcome this challenge? In this concluding chapter, we critically consider four potential solutions to overcoming the information asymmetries that allow those in government to use propaganda. In doing so, we discuss the limitations of each solution as well as the conditions under which each alternative is likely to be effective.
SOLUTION 1: GOVERNMENT LAWS
Self-constraint by those in power is one way to limit the deleterious effects of government propaganda. This involves members of the U.S. government passing and enforcing laws intended to check the behaviors of current and future officials. In the past, those in government passed some laws intended, at least in word, to limit the domestic use of state propaganda.4
Antipropaganda Statutes
In 1919, Congress passed a law (5 U.S. Code § 3107) restricting the use of “publicity experts” by federal agencies to influence policy. Specifically, the law stated that “appropriated funds may not be used to pay a publicity expert unless specifically appropriated for that purpose.”5 In that same year, Congress also passed another law (18 U.S. Code § 1913) intended to prevent agencies from using budget appropriations to influence government policy and limit the ability of agencies to use government funds to lobby members of Congress and the general public for favorable treatment. The statute stated that “No part of the money appropriated by any enactment of Congress shall, in the absence of express authorization by Congress, be used directly or indirectly to pay for any personal service, advertisement, telegram, telephone, letter, printed or written matter, or other device, intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress, a jurisdiction, or an official of any government, to favor, adopt, or oppose, by vote or otherwise, any legislation, law, ratification, policy, or appropriation.”6
In 1948, Congress passed the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act (Public Law 80-402), also known as the Smith-Mundt Act. The act allowed the U.S. State Department to use congressional appropriations to broadcast information to foreign audiences. In response to the concerns of some senators regarding the negative effects of government propaganda at home, the act included a provision restricting the domestic dissemination of materials distributed abroad.
On the heels of the U.S. Senate’s payola investigation in the 1950s and 1960s, Congress passed a law (47 U.S. Code § 317) requiring radio broadcasters to disclose funding sources. The statute states that “all matter broadcast by any radio station for which any money, service or other valuable consideration is directly or indirectly paid, or promised to or charged or accepted by, the station so broadcasting, from any person, shall, at the time the same is so broadcast, be announced as paid for or furnished, as the case may be, by such person.”7 The idea behind the law was that listeners would be able to identify the sponsor of a broadcast, including the government, which would provide context to the content being aired.
Finally, in 2000 Congress passed the Information Quality Act (Public Law 106-554), also known as the Data Quality Act. This act requires that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issue general guidance to federal agencies for “ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity” of publicly disseminated information.8 It also requires each federal agency to establish guidelines for information quality and clear mechanisms for correcting information when there is a disjoint between the information disseminated and OMB guidelines. The purpose of this statute is to ensure that members of the public are provided with accurate and reliable information from federal agencies.
In principle, these laws place some parameters on the dissemination of information by U.S. government agencies. However, there are several key issues with these laws that limit their effectiveness in preventing the members of the government from disseminating propaganda as it pertains to matters of national security.
The Weakness of Government-Created Law
Currently, there is no single federal agency with the responsibility of overseeing the communication activities of other federal agencies to ensure that they are using congressional appropriations appropriately.9 Absent mechanisms of proactive oversight, members of Congress must wait for a complaint to be filed and then work through the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which determines whether to pursue an investigation. Even if the GAO does decide to investigate a complaint, however, it lacks the power to impose penalties. Instead, the GAO must refer cases to the Department of Justice (DOJ), which determines whether to impose punishment. Since the DOJ is a federal executive department, the implication is that punishment for the dissemination of propaganda ultimately “requires executive branch action, and when it comes to propaganda, the executive branch has demonstrated little interest in punishing wayward executive agencies.”10 This reality significantly undermines the effectiveness of the aforementioned statutes in protecting citizens from the use, and abuse, of government propaganda.
There are additional issues. The notions of “propaganda” and “publicity expert” are not concretely defined in existing statutes and are determined on an ad hoc basis by the GAO. The result is that “thus interpreted, the laws prohibiting the hiring of publicity experts and the expenditure of appropriated funds on publicity and propaganda place very few limits on agency public relations activities. GAO findings of agency wrongdoing have been infrequent.”11 The lack of concrete definitions results in a significant amount of discretion on the part of the GAO as the enforcer of these laws. The interpretation of the language is so elastic that it is easy to make the case that government agencies rarely, if ever, engage in the production and dissemination of propaganda. In the rare instances where agencies are accused of engaging in propagandizing, they can use the broad and ill-defined language of the statutes as a defense of their actions.
Similar issues of definition and interpretation affect newer legislation, such as the Information Quality Act. The requirements of the act apply to information that is deemed “influential” for “important” public policy. But what constitutes “influential” and “important” is left ill-defined, granting significant scope for interpretation by both the agencies affected by the law and those enforcing the law.12
The ineffectiveness of the most recent legislation should not be surprising, as the earlier antilobbying statute (18 U.S. Code § 1913), passed in 1919, has been rendered entirely useless. To date, no one has been indicted under the law. The reality is that “the GAO has, in effect, held that an agency may lobby the public to support a program, a proposed reform, or to encourage the public to adopt a particular viewpoint.”13 This interpretation of the law creates an environment conducive to the dissemination of government propaganda. It has also set a precedent whereby subsequent legislation is viewed as toothless.
In the case of the Smith-Mundt Act, the language of the original statute relates to the activities of the U.S. Department of State. Since the Department of Defense (DOD) was not explicitly identified in the original act, it was unclear whether the law applied to its activities. Its inapplicability to the DOD was made clear in 2012, when Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act (H.R. 5736).14 In addition to lifting many of the constraints on the Department of State to broadcast information domestically, the act clearly states that the provisions “shall apply only to the Department of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governors and to no other department or agency of the Federal Government.”15 The result is that DOD activities are not subject to the law, granting space for those in the agency to propagandize the American public.
Taken together, the result is that the domestic statutes related to government-produced information are ineffective in protecting the public from the pernicious effects of state propaganda. In practice, government actors are legally able to disseminate symbols, images, and claims with little to no fear of legal recourse. This goes for agencies across the government, including those that constitute the national security state, which have an incentive to take advantage of significant information asymmetries to pursue their own goals.
There is no reason to believe that new, additional laws will change the status quo. When considering how to constrain the U.S. government’s propaganda activities, Kevin Kosar, an analyst with the Congressional Research Service, wonders whether new laws would lead to less propaganda by government agencies. He concludes that “absent an infusion of antipropaganda prosecutorial zeal into the DOJ, the answer would appear to be ‘not likely.’” He goes on to note that “executive agencies have an interest in aggressively promoting themselves and have shown themselves willing to do so in spite of the plain language of the law (inadequate though it may be) and Congress’s wishes.”16
Anthony de Jasay, a philosopher and economist, noted that a constitution is like “a chastity belt whose key is always within the wearer’s reach.”17 This is certainly the case for those in the national security state, where existing incentives encourage maintaining and extending entrenched power while avoiding democratic deliberation and other constraints on that power. The main takeaway is that Americans cannot rely on government self-constraint to limit the dissemination of propaganda.
SOLUTION 2: WHISTLEBLOWERS
Whistleblowing, which refers to an insider revealing an organization’s wrongdoings, can ameliorate the negative effects of propaganda and political opportunism.18 The pervasive secrecy of the national security state enables those in power to engage in self-interested behaviors at the expense of those they supposedly represent. In disclosing information regarding the actions of government officials, whistleblowers play a key role in bridging the information gap between those in power and the citizenry. In doing so, whistleblowers reveal the partial, biased, or inaccurate information contained in state-produced propaganda.
From this perspective, whistleblowing can be understood as a “fire alarm,” alerting citizens and legislators to opportunistic behavior by political actors.19 This type of fire alarm is especially important given the aforementioned weaknesses in state-provided law pertaining to propaganda, including the absence of a dedicated agency to actively patrol the activities of other agencies for violations of existing statutes. In government agencies, there are three main barriers to external monitors—citizens, watchdog groups, and oversight committees—gaining information to prevent abuses of power. Whistleblowing helps to overcome each of the three.
The first barrier is the ability of outsiders to understand the internal operations of the agency and the nuances of the processes through which bureaucratic outcomes emerge. Outside monitors often lack basic information regarding the day-to-day operations of an agency, making monitoring difficult. Because whistleblowers are embedded in the daily operations of the bureau, they are better able to differentiate between normal operations and abuses.
The second barrier is that external monitors are often dependent on agencies to self-report information about their activities. This allows bureaucrats to strategically control the content and timing of information flows to serve their interests. Whistleblowers can mitigate this problem by revealing information that otherwise would be delayed, downplayed, or kept secret by bureaucrats.
The third barrier is that a large portion of the information related to national security state activities is classified and not available for review.20 Only a small number of members of Congress, for example, might have access to certain information regarding the government’s surveillance activities. Even then, the information under consideration is that produced by the bureau, as previously discussed. In this case, whistleblowers serve as a means of revealing information regarding political opportunism to the public and legislators who otherwise would be excluded from accessing this information.
Because of these three barriers, whistleblowers are especially crucial for checking the national security state, where officials possess monopoly control over information pertaining to highly clandestine activities. This role was succinctly captured by former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder in relation to the Edward Snowden revelations, when he noted that “we can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made.”21 A key part of whistleblower effectiveness in providing this “public service” is the incentives they face to reveal information when they observe potential opportunism.
Laws Related to Whistleblower Protection
The effectiveness of whistleblowers will depend on their ability to reveal information to relevant parties. The channels of communication can be internal—that is, reporting wrongdoing through procedures within government—or external—that is, revealing information to the media or public. Over the past century, the members of the U.S. government have enacted laws to create internal channels for whistleblowers to report wrongdoing.
The Lloyd–La Follette Act of 1912 gave federal employees the ability to communicate information directly to Congress instead of having to obtain supervisor permission to do so. The intention was to facilitate the transfer of information to Congress while removing the ability of supervisors to strategically block employees from reporting on activities that were potentially damaging to the bureau or its leaders. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 established the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), a quasi-judicial agency, to discourage retaliation against federal employees for coming forward with information about wrongdoing. This allows federal employees who believe they are mistreated to file an appeal with the MSPB, who investigates the claim. The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 clarified the procedures for reporting potential retaliation for engaging in whistleblowing.
Despite these laws, there are numerous historical cases where whistleblowers related to the national security state chose to forgo internal channels and publicly sound the alarm on government opportunism (e.g., Daniel Ellsberg, Mark Felt, Thomas Tamm, Thomas Drake, and Edward Snowden). These whistleblowers brought information directly to the public via the media. In order to understand why some whistleblowers choose external versus internal channels to reveal information, it is important to understand the incentives facing whistleblowers, which are shaped by the unique rules governing the national security state.
The aforementioned whistleblower protection laws do not apply to a significant portion of the national security state, which is instead covered by the following legislation. The Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 established a chain of command for reporting misconduct to Congress related to classified information. The whistleblower first reports the wrongdoing to the agency’s inspector general, who reports it to the agency head, who then determines whether to share the information with Congress. One issue with this process is that if the agency head is involved in opportunism, or if the agency head wants to protect their agency from negative publicity, they can strategically withhold information from Congress.
Because the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act did not offer protection against retaliation, President Obama signed Presidential Policy Directive 19 (PPD-19) in 2012. PPD-19 prohibits retaliation against whistleblowers and requires security agencies to implement policies for employees to file claims of retaliation.22 It is important to note that the protections apply to intelligence community employees but not to contractors, who make up a large portion of people employed by the security state.23
The protections offered by PPD-19 involve perverse incentives. According to one report, “under PPD-19, the initial review of an improper retaliation allegation occurs within the agency wherein the whistleblower allegedly faced retaliation. This could raise questions regarding the initial review’s impartiality, and thus effectiveness at achieving accurate results.”24 An external review process by a three-member inspector general panel does exist if an employee believes the internal review process is unfair. However, the panel’s final decision, which is not binding, is reported to the head of the agency where the whistleblower resides, resulting in the same fairness issues as the initial internal review.
There is further evidence of the weakness of existing mechanisms intended to protect those using internal whistleblowing channels. In February 2018, journalist Kevin Poulsen published an article discussing a report by the Office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community regarding retaliation against whistleblowers.25 The report, which has not been publicly released, reviewed 190 cases of supposed retaliations against internal whistleblowers across six intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the NSA. In only one instance did the agencies find in favor of a whistleblower who claimed retaliation for revealing perceived wrongdoing through formal, internal channels. Moreover, according to Poulsen, the review process in that one case took a total of 742 days.
Parallel to the dysfunctions with formal rules is strong norms of secrecy, patriotism, and loyalty, which disincentivize whistleblowing in the national security state. As Daniel Ellsberg notes, “the mystique of secrecy in the universe of national security, even beyond the formal apparatus of classification and clearances, is a compelling deterrent to whistleblowing and thus to effective resistance to gravely wrongful or dangerous policies. In this realm, telling secrets appears unpatriotic, even traitorous.”26 In conjunction with problematic formal protections, this deep-seated culture discourages revealing wrongdoing and weakens internal whistleblowing as a means of checking those in the national security state.
Laws Related to Leaking Information
Four key federal statutes shape the incentives facing whistleblowers pertaining to the handling and transfer of classified information.27 The first is the federal law (8 U.S.C. § 641) regarding the theft of public money, property, and records. While this law, which dates back to 1875, was not intended to deal with matters of national security, it has been used that way by the U.S. government. The text of the law prohibits the theft or misuse of a “thing of value,” which has been interpreted by government officials to include government information leaked to the press.28 The U.S. government has relied on this law in several cases to charge national security leakers, including Daniel Ellsberg (1973), Samuel Morison (1985), and Jeffrey Sterling (2010).
The second is the Espionage Act passed in 1917.29 The law, which was initially intended to prohibit interference with military operations and recruitment during World War I, has been amended on several occasions to expand the scope of what is covered.30 For potential whistleblowers, the relevant aspect of the law can be found in Section 793, which makes it a crime to engage in activities “for the purpose of obtaining information respecting the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States.”31 Violations of the law carry penalties ranging from fines, to imprisonment, to death.32
Before 2009, the U.S. government used the Espionage Act rarely. Those charged under the act included Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo (1973), Samuel Morison (1985), and Lawrence Franklin (2005). The charges against Ellsberg and Russo were dismissed, while Morison and Franklin were convicted. Under President Obama, however, the use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers expanded dramatically, with eight people charged during his administration—Shamai Leibowitz (2009), Thomas Drake (2010), Stephen Jin-Woo Kim (2010), Chelsea Manning (2010), Donald Sachtleben (2012), Jeffrey Sterling (2010), John Kiriakou (2012), and Edward Snowden (2013).
The third piece of relevant legislation is the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (42 U.S.C. § 2011–2021). This law operates in a similar spirit to the Espionage Act to limit the public dissemination of information related to national security. The focus of this law is on information specifically related to the U.S. government’s atomic weapons or nuclear materials. To date, this law has not been invoked in cases related to individuals leaking national security information.
The final piece of legislation is the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 (50 U.S.C. §§ 421–426), which makes it a crime to intentionally reveal the identity—either directly or through the sharing of classified information—of a covert intelligence agent of the U.S. government. The law disincentivizes whistleblowing because its language is so broad that it could potentially be used to prosecute “not only the malicious publicizing of agents’ names but also the efforts of legitimate journalists to expose any corruption, malfeasance, or ineptitude occurring in American intelligence agencies.”33 To date, the act has been invoked once in a whistleblowing case. In 2012, John Kiriakou, who was initially charged under the Espionage Act, pled guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in exchange for the other charges being dropped.34
Together, these laws are intended to disincentivize the public dissemination of information related to national defense and security.35 One effect of these mandates, however, is to weaken the effectiveness of whistleblowers as a means of checking political opportunism and the use of state-produced propaganda.
SOLUTION 3: THE MEDIA
The media refers to the various private people and organizations that report news. In its role as the “Fourth Estate,” a free media can potentially play a key role in countering the negative effects of government propaganda in two ways.
First, by communicating information to the public, the media can help ameliorate the information asymmetries inherent in democratic politics by fostering transparency. This can serve as a counter to government-disseminated information, including propaganda, which might be selective, biased, misleading, or false.
Second, free and competitive media allows for the contestability of ideas and information. This serves as a potential internal check on other members of the media—with each media outlet checking the reporting of others—while also offering an array of perspectives and viewpoints regarding the activities of the government. With technological advances, the cost of participating in media falls, thus increasing the number of media sources and increasing the contestation of ideas and information. Contestability may weaken the deleterious effects of government-produced propaganda by offering an alternative narrative to the public. As Brian Anse Patrick and A. Trevor Thrall note, “even during times of greatest official control over information, the existence of a diverse marketplace of news providers offers the greatest chance for an informed public capable of deliberating matters of war and peace.”36
The effectiveness of media in these dual roles is determined by the degree of autonomy from government influence and the legal structure in which members of the media operate.37
Factors Influencing Media Effectiveness
The independence, or autonomy, of media from government interference is central to whether it is able to communicate information to the public. The government can limit autonomy through a variety of channels. In some instances, the government might outright censor the media, preventing its members from revealing information. In other cases, political gatekeepers might limit access to information, conflict zones, or to certain key decision makers based on which members of the media have, in the past, provided favorable coverage.
Or, related to whistleblowing, the government might take steps to limit the flow of information from those inside organizations to the members of the media. This influence directly affects the types of stories covered as well as the way they are communicated to the populace. If members of the media are unable to access and review information, they cannot disseminate it publicly, and the information asymmetries between political officials and the citizenry will persist.
Issues of autonomy are closely tied to the legal arrangement governing the relationship between the media and government. If the law allows those in government to delay or limit the public dissemination of information, then government actors can strategically conceal or reveal information to align with their own narrow interests.
Legal Statutes Affecting the Media
The first major U.S. court case involving the national security state and the media occurred in 1971 when the New York Times sought to publish the Pentagon Papers.38 President Nixon sought to use his executive authority to stop the media from publishing classified information. In New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), the Supreme Court weighed the freedom of speech of the press against the power of the government to maintain secrecy in the name of national security.39 They decided that the media—the New York Times and the Washington Post—could publish the classified Pentagon Papers without government censorship.
While the decision reinforced the precedent that government censorship of the media was unconstitutional, the case left open the legality of post-publication punishment of journalists and those that provide information to the media. “In dicta, some of the justices indicated that the newspapers could or should be prosecuted under the Espionage Act, even if the government could not prevent publication.”40 Since the Supreme Court’s finding in that case, the courts have failed to reach any kind of comprehensive consensus on the relationship between government’s control of information and the press.41
Members of the media often rely on those internal to government agencies as a crucial source of information. As a result, the four main legal statutes pertaining to the leaking of information discussed above (see “Laws Related to Leaking Information”) also matter for journalists. To date, the U.S. government has not charged a member of the media under the federal law (8 U.S.C. § 641), or under the Espionage Act. However, as discussed in the previous section on whistleblowing, the government has charged media sources who provided information to journalists. This matters for two reasons.
First, there is the possibility that members of the media could be charged under the Espionage Act in the future, which may make some hesitant to critically report on the activities of the national security state. Indeed, although not formally charged under the Espionage Act to date, members of the media have certainly been affected by the government’s enforcement of the law.
Consider the case of Donald Sachtleben, a former FBI agent, who was charged under the Espionage Act for leaking classified documents about a foiled terrorist plot in Yemen to the Associated Press. Sachtleben was only identified as a suspect in the case after the U.S. government secretly accessed the phone records of reporters at the Associated Press.42 The ability of the government to secretly seize the communications of journalists raises a host of legal issues related to media independence and freedom.
Second, whistleblowers often choose to publicly reveal wrongdoing and typically use the media as the mechanism to disclose information regarding government misconduct. The use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers adversely affects the ability of insiders, who believe that members of the government are engaged in malfeasance, to publicly share information. This weakens the effectiveness of both whistleblowers and the media as a check against political abuse.
To date, the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 has been invoked by the government once, in 1979, to secure an injunction to prevent the publication of a story in the Progressive detailing the process of making a hydrogen bomb.43 Finally, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 has been invoked once in the context of the media. In 2003, the DOJ investigated journalist Robert Novak, who published the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame, to see whether he had violated the law.44 No charges were filed.
Together, these four federal statutes serve as the legal architecture influencing the behavior of both sources of information (whistleblowers) as well as members of the media as it pertains to the activities of the national security state. Even though these laws have rarely been invoked against members of the media directly, they have been used against information sources who serve as a crucial input in allowing the media to serve as a check on political propaganda. Moreover, even though these laws have not been used to target members of the media directly, they remain on the books and could be invoked in the future to try to limit media’s ability to reveal the realities of national security state operations.
Media Complicity
To be an effective check, the media must be willing to critically report on the government and reveal instances of political malfeasance. Members of the media, however, may be hesitant to do so in matters of national security. Media complicity with the security state can take several forms.
In some instances, editors may hesitate to publish information critical of the government’s war efforts. Consider the case of journalist James Risen, who wrote a story for the New York Times that was critical of the Bush administration’s intelligence regarding the Iraqi government’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection to al-Qaeda. Risen writes that “the story ran, but it was badly cut and buried deep inside the paper. I wrote another one, and the same thing happened. I tried to write more, but I started to get the message. It seemed to me that the Times didn’t want these stories.”45 Editors may choose to engage in such behaviors either at the request of government officials or because they do not want to anger political gatekeepers whom they rely on for information.
In other cases, members of the media actively embrace and broadcast government-produced war propaganda in an unquestioning manner. They do so to stay in the good graces of the political elite while bolstering their own resume by having privileged access to political decision makers and the associated “behind the scenes” access to war. Chris Hedges, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, notes that during the Gulf War, “television reporters happily disseminated the spoon-fed images that served the propaganda effort of the [U.S.] military and the state.”46 He goes on to note that this propaganda “did little to convey the reality of war” and instead was intended “to make us [the U.S. populace] feel good about our nation and ourselves.”47 As these quotes indicate, the members of the independent media often become willing participants in disseminating the government’s war-related propaganda.
This is not always a matter of narrow self-interest for purposes of career advancement. A sense of patriotism and nationalism can also contribute to members of the media being biased toward their government’s war effort. The famous broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite captured this dynamic when commenting on American media reporting during World War II and the Vietnam War, noting,
I think it was about as objective as we can expect in a war time situation where journalists are covering the military of their own country. I wouldn’t expect a reporter to be anything less than understanding of their own troops in action. The temptation to use the word “we” is almost inescapable. It was the same situation in the second world war, in Vietnam. When we’re down in the trenches with the troops, we’re part of that operation.48
As this suggests, even if pro-government bias and self-censorship is not intentional, it is bound to happen given that members of the media are also members of the society whose government is engaged in war. In this scenario, the unifying, patriotic effects of war can diminish, if not outright undermine, the ability of media to check political propaganda and opportunism.
It is because of war’s tendency to unify that media complicity with the state is likely to be greatest during times of conflict. As Chris Hedges argues, “the state spends tremendous time protecting, explaining, and promoting the cause. And some of the most important cheerleaders of the cause are the reporters. This is true in nearly every war.”49 Problematically, times of war are also the time when there is significant slack in constraints on government power and where checks on abuses of that power are of crucial importance.50 For this reason, the media will often be limited in its effectiveness as a check on government-produced, wartime propaganda and its perverse effects on policy and society.
SOLUTION 4: CITIZEN INOCULATION
In his essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Václav Havel, a Czech political dissident, future president of Czechoslovakia, and first president of the Czech Republic, explored the relationship between the communist regime and the citizenry. To illustrate the nature of this relationship, Havel provides the example of a grocer who displays a propaganda sign reading “Workers of the world, unite!” in his shop. The grocer does so not because he supports the regime or what it stands for but rather out of fear of the repercussions for not publicly signaling his support for the state.
Havel employs this example to highlight a core tension between the state and the individual living under the ruling regime. In order to avoid punishment, citizens must not only embrace a lie—their support for the ruling regime—but also perpetuate that lie by publicly signaling their support and acquiescence to the state. The cumulative effect is the entrenchment and extension of state power over the lives of the citizenry. As Havel writes,
Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as if they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or go along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.51
For our purposes, Havel’s essay is important for two reasons.
First, it reiterates the various roles of propaganda and its harmful effects. The state employs propaganda to directly influence consumers of the government’s message. At the same time, the state is able to use the citizenry, such as the grocer who displays the poster, to publicly disseminate propaganda and reinforce the messages contained therein. Together, the dual role of the citizenry—as a consumer and disseminator of propaganda—contributes to what Havel calls a broader “panorama of everyday life” that “reminds people where they are living and what is expected of them. It tells them what everyone else is doing, and indicates to them what they must do as well, if they don’t want to be excluded, to fall into isolation, alienate themselves from society, break the rules of the game, and risk the loss of their peace and tranquility and security.”52
Second, as the title of his essay suggests, Havel argued that ordinary members of society—those typically perceived as being powerless—possess significant power in their relationship with the state. Because everyday people are both victims and supporters of the system, they possess the power to remove their support. To illustrate this, Havel imagines what would happen if the grocer refrained from participating in the system by removing the propaganda poster and refraining from acts that legitimize the regime. Such small acts can potentially have significant effects. As Havel notes,
By breaking the rules of the game, he [the grocer] has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal.53
As this crucial insight makes clear, ordinary people are the most important mechanism for limiting the pernicious effects of state-produced propaganda.
Although Havel was focused on what he called a post-totalitarian regime, his insights can be extended to all types of governments, including democratic governments, that employ propaganda. Across all regimes, the populace is the ultimate target of the state’s propaganda. The power of the citizenry is demonstrated by the very fact that those in government—both in the past and present—invest significant resources in crafting and disseminating propaganda to convince the populace of the necessity and legitimacy of state actions. Those in power would not expend this effort unless they required consent from the citizenry to pursue their desired ends.
Ultimately, this means that it is up to the members of the populace as to whether they choose to accept or reject the messages communicated through government propaganda. Inoculation against the deleterious effects of state-produced propaganda can only occur under certain conditions and with certain commitments by citizens.
Conditions for Citizen Effectiveness
For people to combat the negative effects of state-produced propaganda, they first need to internalize Havel’s core insight regarding the nature of power relations in society. Many believe that the power in society comes from the state itself. However, as Havel made clear, while ordinary people can be victims of state power, they are often supporters of the very system that victimizes them. A similar point was made by political scientist Gene Sharp, who noted that a government’s power is “determined by the degree of obedience and cooperation given by the subjects” and that this “obedience remains essentially voluntary,” which means that “all government is based on consent.”54 Like Havel, Sharp’s point is that people have the choice to be free and need to decide whether to exercise their power in relation to the state, which includes the ability to reject state propaganda.
Second, citizens must be willing to bear the cost of exercising this power. The burden on citizens to be active, self-governing participants in politics is a costly one in ordinary, day-to-day politics. This burden is even greater in matters of national security, given the extreme secrecy surrounding the state’s activities. The political elite leverage these information asymmetries to shape the message communicated to citizens. These include perpetuating fear through threat inflation while advancing a culture of militarism through the myth that a massive national security state apparatus is necessary for order and people’s safety and freedom.
The same asymmetries that make citizen monitoring of politicians so difficult, however, are also what make citizen involvement so crucial to the maintenance of a free society. As discussed, the members of government are unlikely to restrain themselves, and there are limits on the effectiveness of whistleblowers and the media as constraints on government power. Even where whistleblowing and the media are effective, they are ultimately inputs into self-governance, which requires an engaged citizenry that cares about limiting unscrupulous political behaviors.
When citizens are disengaged or disinterested, the information provided by whistleblowers and the media will fall on deaf ears, the result being the persistence of political opportunism and the erosion of liberty due to the corrosive effects of state propaganda. As the economist Joseph Schumpeter put it, “without the initiative that comes from immediate responsibility, ignorance will persist in the face of masses of information however complete and correct.”55 This suggests that citizens must not only recognize the power they possess over the state but also feel the “immediate responsibility” to exercise that power in order for it to be effective.
Third, people must appreciate the realities of politics and the role that propaganda plays in all political systems, including democracy. For citizens to constrain government, they must appreciate that democratic politics offers those in power significant space to pursue their own ends. People do not need to understand all the nuances and pathologies of democratic politics or the national security state. They do, however, need to understand the risks to freedom that exist when large amounts of discretionary power are concentrated in the hands of a small number of people, especially when those same people possess monopoly control over information related to clandestine activities. These realities are defining features of the U.S. national security state.
Many Americans view the activities of the U.S. security state as central to protecting their liberties and freedoms. As documented in previous chapters, the members of the security state invest significant resources in producing propaganda to reinforce this belief. But the activities of the security state also pose a significant threat to the very liberties the government purports to protect.56 As Robert Higgs notes, the state’s national security power is best understood as a “master key” because it “opens all doors, including the doors that might otherwise obstruct the government’s invasion of our most cherished rights to life, liberty, and property.”57 By priming citizens to accept expansions in state power, government-produced propaganda hastens the process through which these doors are opened. A crucial aspect of citizen inoculation against government propaganda is an awareness of this reality. Unless people have some sense of the nature of politics, regardless of political party, and the incentives facing those that operate in that system, they will remain easy targets for state-produced propaganda.
The activities of the national security state, including the production and dissemination of propaganda, are couched in democratic rhetoric and rituals. The result is that while these behaviors appear to be part of the democratic process, they erode those very institutions as the relationship between the state and the citizenry is turned on its head. Instead of the political elite viewing the citizenry as the source of their power, they instead come to view people as an annoyance preventing them from achieving their desired ends. Given this view, those in power feel comfortable, if not justified, employing propaganda to influence and manipulate the citizenry as a way of overcoming the barrier they represent. This is the very opposite of governance by a self-governing citizenry that is at the core of a free society.58
Citizen inoculation against state propaganda requires thinking through the answers to crucial questions related to militarism, such as those put forth by retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) William Astore:
How is the dominant military power of which U.S. leaders so casually boast to be checked? How is the country’s almost total reliance on the military in foreign affairs to be reined in? How can the plans of the profiteers and arms makers to keep the good times rolling be brought under control?59
To answer these questions, Astore argues that people must take the national security state off its pedestal and apply a critical eye toward the realities of how government operates. This involves realizing that militarism is a choice and that citizens possess the power to curtail efforts by government actors to expand their influence through the dissemination of propaganda. It is up to each person to decide whether and how they choose to exercise the power they possess.
Those concerned with a free society would be wise to consider the words of journalist Frank Chodorov, who warned of the corrosive effects of war and propaganda on a free society. To combat these nefarious effects, he argued, “we [the people] must train our minds as an athlete trains his body, against the inevitable conflict with the powerful propaganda that will be used to destroy our sanity. Now, before it is too late, we must learn to think peace in the midst of war.”60 This mental training begins with an appreciation of the role that propaganda plays in the policies and activities of America’s national security state that threaten individual freedom in the very name of protecting it.