Hello! And welcome to another episode of Inside The Newsroom. Second newsletter of the week, after the elections in Cameroon, Ireland and Azerbaijan, which saw violence, confusion and division. Great. Today’s guest is… Brian Klaas, author, political scientist at University College London, columnist for The Washington Post and host of the Power Corrupts podcast. Brian is an expert on democracy and world politics, and he delved deep into the history of dark propaganda in his latest podcast episode. So below is a post-game analysis of everything we talked about and more. But first, my most interesting articles of the week… Enjoy! 🤓
Malcolm X — Manhattan district attorney considers reopening case after Netflix documentary
Coronavirus — Shameful plug for my visual guide on how the virus has spread to 29 countries and killed 1,300 people and counting
Clearview — Friend of the pod Kashmir Hill examined the end of privacy as we know it in a truly disturbing piece
Brian 👇
What Is Propaganda?
Not to be confused with marketing or public relations, our friends at Merriam Webster define propaganda as “the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.” It’s impossible to pinpoint exactly when propaganda was first used because, well, propaganda is as old as time. But the earliest records point to The Behistun Inscription in 515BC when Darius The Great engraved his military prowess into a large cliff in the ancient Persian Empire, aka Iran, followed by how he was the chosen one by God. Sound familiar? Around 200 years later, Alexander The Great, king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon put his face on coins, monuments and statues as a form of propaganda. Yep, definitely sounds familiar.
That all seems pretty harmless right? But as millennia, centuries and decades passed, propagandist techniques became far more nefarious. It’s generally agreed that the Catholic Church formalized propaganda and actually coined the term itself. In 1622, Pope Gregory XV set up the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome, and then in 1627, Pope Urban VIII followed that up and created the College of Propaganda, both of which provided a library for research and a school to train priests and missionaries to spread the church’s message overseas. We can tell just by the names of those two institutions that the concept of propaganda was still relatively benign and unknown to the general public. But as even more centuries and decades have passed, propaganda has become a term associated with some of the greatest atrocities and darkest evils the world has ever seen.
When Did Propaganda Turn Evil?
One can’t talk about the dark side of propaganda without mentioning the Nazis, so let’s do just that. Perhaps the most common question people have is why the German public couldn’t see through the Nazi propaganda machine, similar to how most sane people see right through Donald Trump’s bullshit (more on that later). Many Germans did, and many voiced their opposition to Adolph Hitler’s rhetoric well before the country went to war with the world in 1939. Many Germans were punished in unthinkable ways.
But as Brian pointed out on the podcast, propagandists like Hitler and his sidekick Joseph Goebbels didn’t just spread their lies and falsehoods right away. A smart propagandist first builds trust and credibility. For Hitler, that meant using events in the aftermath of World War One to his advantage. When the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919 to formally end WW1, Germany was brought to its knees economically by the Allied Powers, who forced Germany into surrendering land and ordered them to pay reparations in the realm of $269 billion in today’s money. Naturally, Germany endured a devastating depression, which paved the way for Hitler’s rise.
In hindsight, it was only a matter of time before the Nazis gained power, but the seeds were sewn well before they finally did gain power in 1933. Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and detailed Hitler’s personal struggle in post-war Germany, as well as his nationalist and anti-Semitic views. As a sign of how people felt at the time, Mein Kampf had sold six million copies by 1940. This isn’t a newsletter rehashing World War Two, so let’s move onto propaganda in 2020 and visit our favourite Mango Mussolini…
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Propaganda 2020 🇺🇸
The Propagandist-in-chief is by far the most overtly lying president we’ve ever seen. Barry Goldwater came close, but he lost convincingly to Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential race. Trump has lied to us ever since he entered our lives decades ago, and has lied so much since he became president, CNN journalist Daniel Dale has carved out a niche role for himself literally fact checking every single statement the president makes. I couldn’t find how many lies he’s uttered since he became president, but I know that the number is well into the thousands. Since July 8, 2019, he’s made 1,729 false claims, an average of eight per day. I actually had Daniel on the podcast last year while he was still at the Toronto Star, which you can listen to below…
Trump didn’t create right-wing angst, he’s merely a symptom of years and years of lies and misleading framing by Fox News, aka the propagandist machine of today. It’s actually quite surprising how Fox continues to have such a large influence in corrupting public discourse in a media environment that’s so fragmented. But when you scan the right wing media landscape and see how many conservative outlets also living in alternate reality that were started by former Fox employees — Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV and Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report to name just a couple — you start to really see Fox’s impact.
Looking ahead to the rest of 2020 is depressing enough (sigh), and we can expect much more of the same from 2016. That’s because Facebook, which is the largest propaganda machine of them all, will allow political candidates to place false ads, a policy they claim supports free speech. Its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has become completely deluded and is living in an alternate reality himself, becoming the most powerful propagandist in the world.
North Korea: An Unimaginable Alternate Reality
It’s hard to imagine what life in North Korea is like. No elections, no freedom, no truth. North Korea is in its own league when it comes to propaganda. Shortly after Korea was divided into two zones at the end of WW2 — the north occupied by the Soviet Union and the south by the U.S. — the Kim dynasty took over the north. Heavily influenced by the Soviet communist dictatorship, North Korea has smothered its citizens with lies and barbaric living conditions, so much so that there isn’t a place like it in the world.
Like with any dictatorship, cracks have begun to show in the country’s 70-year propagandist history, and the Kim dynasty’s days could be numbered. The country is so dependent on its agriculture industry that a poor harvest season has and will send the country into deep economic depression. The UN estimated that more than 10 million people — around 40 percent of the population — face severe food shortages. Because the country can’t provide for itself, North Korea relies so heavily on aid from other countries, mostly from China, but also recently from South Korea whose citizens have many relatives living in the atrocious conditions up north. Other countries include Russia, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, Norway, France, Germany, Denmark, Finland and Ireland. I’ll leave you with Vice founder Shane Smith’s documentary of life inside the country, which is simultaneously gripping and heartbreaking.
Last Week…
#62 — Krystal Ball (The Hill) on the rise of left- and right-wing populism
… Next Week
I finally had Paula Jean Swearengin on the podcast, who was one of the stars of the Netflix documentary Knock Down The House alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is currently for the U.S. Senate from West Virginia.
Job Corner
Each week I’ll feature a selection of new journalism jobs. Staying on brand this week, below are a selection of investigative openings…
Boston Globe Spotlight Team — Investigative Journalism Fellowship
Dolcefino Consulting — Investigative Media Reporter
Environmental Investigation Agency — China Media and Policy Analyst
Oklahoma Watch — Executive Director, Executive Editor
Project On Government Oversight — Director of Research
The New Humanitarian — Editorial Intern
#63 — Brian Klaas (Power Corrupts Podcast)