[This piece will be running in newspapers in my very red congressional district (VA-06).]
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The word “propaganda” is generally used in a pejorative sense—something bad. But propaganda can be good or
bad.
Propaganda is messaging that’s intended to move the thoughts and feelings of the recipients.
Whether that’s good or evil depends on whether the message is valid or false, and whether the movement it induces makes the human world better or worse.
I thought about this lately as I watched a wonderful movie, Mrs. Miniver, that won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1942. The film was designed to move Americans toward supporting Britain as its survival was seriously threatened by ongoing attack from Nazi Germany. Apparently, the movie had that desired impact.
Mrs. Miniver depicts a wonderful British family, in a rather fine English village, whose lives are filled with beauty and goodness. People like ourselves, as we’d like to see ourselves, whose hopes and fears we can readily identify with.
(The film even gives us the huge flotilla with which the British people pulled off the heroic miracle of rescuing the British Army at Dunkirk.)
And meanwhile, the movie makers also kindles in our hearts the desire to destroy the Nazi force that threatens the good people of England. A brief episode has our heroine confronted by a downed German pilot, who gives voice to all the bestial ugliness of the Evil Master Race.
Propaganda, all the more impactful for being a great movie.
But good propaganda, that moved Americans to care about the survival of that brave island. “Good” because its message was fundamentally true:
- True that the Britain being threatened was a society well-deserving to survive. Despite its faults and sins, it was one of the more humane and free and prosperous societies in the history of civilization.
- True, too, that the ugly regime that had taken over Germany should be fought and defeated. (That force was even uglier than people could have imagined at the beginning of the war.)
Like the Americans on the eve of Pearl Harbor, I am grateful that those artist-propagandists who made Mrs. Miniver plied their gifts to help bring the two democracies together to make sure that Fascism didn’t take over the world.
The picture they present is idealized, but that just meant that they were accentuating important realities.
Two instances of “bad propaganda” come to mind, one famous from the past and one being exposed right now in the news.
A German woman made a brilliant film for the Nazis in the mid-1930s. The title translated as The Triumph of the Will, a documentary created by the gifted Leni Riefenstahl. The film depicts the new Nazified Germany with stunningly beautiful visual imagery. Beautiful Aryan youth, male and female. Beautiful order and strength. People adoring their Fuehrer.
Again, an idealization. The problem is, the picture was false: the Nazi regime was not beautiful. It turned out to be one of the ugliest things ever to stain the pages of human history.
But it was another instance of “bad propaganda” that – along with Mrs. Miniver– brought the whole issue of “propaganda” to my mind. Namely, what’s been exposed lately about how FOX News knowingly broadcast propaganda to deceive its viewers.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, FOX continually fed its audience he lie that the election had been stolen from their favored candidate – Donald Trump. A suit brought by a company FOX knowingly lied about has compelled FOX to reveal itself as an extraordinary source of bad propaganda.
Bad in that it is fundamentally false.
And bad in that its impact was destructive. For the lie FOX knowingly fed its audience was not just any lie, but a lie that undermines the foundation of American democracy.
Like the makers of Mrs. Miniver, the propagandists at FOX – from the stars in front of the cameras to the Chairman of the company – crafted messages to move people. But in FOX’s case, they had good and evil switched around, because it was they who were misrepresenting completely who was trying to pull of the “Big Steal.”
(While they were yelling, “Thief!”, the evidence shows that they all knew that they were the thieves.!)
And whereas the makers of Mrs. Miniver helped move things to help decency and good order, rather than cruel Nazi tyranny, govern Europe, the people at FOX helped deceive Americans into assaulting the constitutional order that is our bulwark against tyranny.
Good propaganda helped save Democracy from Fascism in the era of Mrs. Miniver. FOX’s evil propaganda helped a fascistic force trying to overturn American democracy. (It can reasonably be argued that had it not been for FOX’s evil choices, there would not have been the violent attack on the U.S. Congress and the rule of the constitutional process.)
The moral nature of those forces that align with such bad propagandists is not random. Good forces have no need to deceive people into thinking they are good. And good forces by their very nature are seeking to have a good impact on the world.
So this exposure of the bad propagandists at FOX provide an opportunity to weaken the forces of falsehood and brokenness. While it is before everyone’s eyes how FOX betrayed the nation, that propaganda network is vulnerable. And what drains power from FOX will drain power also from the wider force that threatens our American democratic heritage.