Politico noted the ineffectiveness of domestic propaganda bans. "Officials get around the restriction on publicity agents by giving public relations staff such titles as “health communications specialist” or they outsource the spinmeister work to private communications firms. During an effort to cut back on PR in the administration of Harry Truman, the Air Force even classified some public affairs officers as chaplains."
World War I The first large-scale use of propaganda by the
U.S. government came during
World War I. During the Reconstruction era, newspapers and illustrated engravings helped shape a reunified national narrative, leveraging the wartime communications infrastructure for peacetime persuasion and identity-building rather than purely military propaganda. The 1915 film
The German Side of the War was compiled from footage filmed by
Chicago Tribune cameraman
Edwin F. Weigle. It was one of the only American films to show the
German perspective of the war. At the theater lines stretched around the block; the screenings were received with such enthusiasm that would-be moviegoers resorted to purchasing tickets from scalpers.
World War II During World War II, the official policy of the United States was to not produce propaganda, but the
Roosevelt government circumvented it by various means. One such propaganda tool was the publicly owned but government-funded
Writers' War Board (WWB). The activities of the WWB were so extensive that it has been called the "greatest propaganda machine in history". Response to the use of propaganda in the United States was mixed, as attempts by the government to release propaganda during World War I was negatively perceived by the American public. Initially, the US government had no centralized effective propaganda strategy, as
President Roosevelt in particular seemed hesitant to institute an official government propaganda agency—in part due to the negative legacy of World War I's propaganda, with it often remembered as being manipulative or coercive in its tactics. However, after the outbreak of war in Europe and in the subsequent years prior to America's involvement, Roosevelt set up a number of different agencies to address problems concerning the dissemination of information, national morale, and public opinion. The power of these agencies was limited, with Roosevelt still seeming reluctant to create a dedicated propaganda agency, and some of these agencies received criticism from Roosevelt's political opponents and the press. Eventually, it became clear that the information network of the government needed to be streamlined and restructured, culminating in the
United States Office of War Information (OWI) being created in June 1942, and consolidating the functions of the previously established agencies. The mandate of the OWI was to promote understanding of the war policies under the director
Elmer Davis. It dealt with posters, press, movies, exhibitions, and produced often slanted material conforming to US wartime purposes. These efforts built on earlier 19th-century uses of mass media, when illustrated newspapers and posters helped normalize visual persuasion in American politics. Another example of the OWI's efforts was
Why We Fight, a famous series of US government propaganda films commissioned by the OWI to justify US involvement in World War II. Cultural and racial stereotypes were used in World War II propaganda to encourage the perception of the Japanese people and government as a "ruthless and animalistic enemy that needed to be defeated", leading to many Americans seeing all Japanese people in a negative light. Many people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom were American citizens, were
forcibly rounded up and placed in internment camps in the early 1940s. From 1944 to 1948, prominent US policy makers promoted a domestic propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the U.S. public to agree to a
harsh peace for the German people, for example by removing the common view of the German people and the
Nazi Party as separate entities. The core of this campaign was the Writers' War Board, which was closely associated with the Roosevelt administration. The United States would make propaganda that criticized the Soviet Union. The American government dispersed propaganda through movies, television, music, literature and art. The United States officials did not call it propaganda, maintaining they were portraying accurate information about Russia and their Communist way of life during the 1950s and 1960s. The United States boycotted the 1980 Olympics held in Moscow along with Japan and West Germany, among many other nations. When the Olympics were held in Los Angeles in 1984, the Soviets retaliated by not showing up for the games. In terms of education, American propaganda took the form of videos children watched in school; one such video is called How to Spot a Communist.
Operation Mockingbird Operation Mockingbird was an alleged large-scale program of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that began in the early years of the Cold War and attempted to manipulate domestic American news media organizations for propaganda purposes. According to author Deborah Davis, Operation Mockingbird recruited leading American journalists into a propaganda network and influenced the operations of front groups. CIA support of front groups was exposed when an April 1967 Ramparts article reported that the National Student Association received funding from the CIA. In 1975, Church Committee Congressional investigations revealed Agency connections with journalists and civic groups.
War on Drugs , There has been an abundant amount of propaganda in the half-century-long "
war on drugs" that began under President
Richard M. Nixon in June 1971, when he initiated the first federally funded programs aimed at drug prevention in the U.S. The 1960s had seen the rise of a rebellious youth movement that popularized drug use. With many citizens using cannabis and other drugs, and many soldiers returning from Vietnam with heroin habits, there was widespread drug use in the U.S. One tactic of Nixon's initiative, still used today, was a national anti-drug media campaign aimed at youths. The government used posters and advertisements to scare children and teenagers into avoiding drug use. Between 1971 and 2011, the U.S. spent more than $2.5 trillion fighting the war on drugs. Nixon also dramatically increased the presence of federal drug control agencies, and pushed through measures such as
mandatory sentencing and
no-knock warrants. The
National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, originally established by the
National Narcotics Leadership Act of 1988, is a domestic propaganda campaign designed to "influence the attitudes of the public and the news media with respect to drug abuse" with a related goal of "reducing and preventing drug abuse among young people in the United States". Now conducted by the
Office of National Drug Control Policy under the Drug-Free Media Campaign Act of 1998, the media campaign cooperates with the
Partnership for a Drug-Free America and other government and non-government organizations.
Gulf War Shortly after Iraq's
invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the organization
Citizens for a Free Kuwait was formed in the US. It hired the public relations firm
Hill & Knowlton for about $11 million, paid by
Kuwait's government. Among many other means of influencing US opinion, such as distributing books on Iraqi atrocities to US soldiers deployed in the region, "Free Kuwait" T-shirts and speakers to college campuses, and dozens of video news releases to television stations, the firm arranged for an appearance before a group of members of the
US Congress in which a young woman identifying herself as a
nurse working in the Kuwait City hospital described Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators and letting them die on the floor. She had not lived in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion.
Iraq War In early 2002, the
U.S. Department of Defense launched an
information operation, colloquially referred to as the
Pentagon military analyst program. The goal of the operation is "to spread the
administrations's
talking points on
Iraq by briefing
retired commanders for
network and
cable television appearances," where they have been presented as independent
analysts. On May 22, 2008, after this program was revealed in
The New York Times, the House passed an amendment that would make permanent a domestic propaganda ban that until now has been enacted annually in the military authorization bill. The
Shared Values Initiative was a public relations campaign that was intended to sell a "new" America to Muslims around the world by showing that
American Muslims were living happily and freely, without persecution, in post-9/11 America. Funded by the
United States Department of State, the campaign created a public relations front group known as the Council of American Muslims for Understanding (CAMU). The campaign was divided in phases; the first of which consisted of five mini-documentaries for television, radio, and print with shared values messages for key Muslim countries.
Ad Council The
Ad Council, an American non-profit organization that distributes public service announcements on behalf of various private and
federal government agency sponsors, has been labeled as "little more than a domestic propaganda arm of the federal government" given the Ad Council's historically close collaboration with the
President of the United States and the federal government. According to the Ad Council official website they aim to make sure advertisements are not as biased and do not harm any individuals. They have a myriad of published press releases and news articles relaying around different topics in the United States.
Smith-Mundt Modernization Act In 2013, the
Smith-Mundt Act, colloquially known as the "anti-propaganda law" was amended. The amendment repealed the Smith-Mundt's act ban on disseminating "information and material about the United States intended primarily for foreign audiences".
Michael Hastings suggested that the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act would open the door to the dissemination of Pentagon propaganda to domestic audiences,
COVID-19 pandemic In April 2020,
President Donald Trump and the
United States government played a campaign video for the
Republican Party, which was widely regarded as a propaganda video. This video referred to a timeline of the U.S. government's response to the pandemic, only displaying favorable moments. Some commentators and analysts believed that this was to protect President Donald Trump and his
government's reputation, especially before the
country's 2020 presidential election. Supporters maintained this was to combat widespread media criticism stating that he failed to act quickly enough to stop the spread of COVID-19.
ChinaAngVirus disinformation campaign According to a report by
Reuters, the United States ran a
disinformation campaign in the Philippines, later expanded to Central Asia and the Middle East, from 2020 to 2021. It sought to discredit China; particularly its
Sinovac vaccine. The campaign was overseen by
Special Operations Command Pacific as well as the
United States Central Command. Military personnel at
MacDill Air Force Base in
Florida operated phony social media accounts, some of which were more than five years old according to Reuters. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they disseminated hashtags of
#ChinaIsTheVirus and posts claiming that the Sinovac vaccine contained gelatin from pork and therefore was
haram or forbidden for purposes of Islamic law. US diplomats aware of the campaign were against the idea, but they were overruled by the military, which also asked tech companies not to take down the content after it was discovered by Facebook and Twitter. A retrospective review by the DoD subsequently uncovered other social and political messaging that was "many leagues away" from acceptable military objective. The primary contractor for the U.S. military on the project was
General Dynamics IT, which received $493 million for its role. The campaign reportedly aimed to counter "
China’s COVID diplomacy." A Pentagon spokesperson noted to Reuters that China had started a "
disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19." ==International==