{"id":770,"date":"2010-01-04T14:51:28","date_gmt":"2010-01-04T19:51:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/?p=770"},"modified":"2011-12-16T11:38:39","modified_gmt":"2011-12-16T16:38:39","slug":"12010-book-on-propaganda-during-world-war-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/12010-book-on-propaganda-during-world-war-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Research Note: Recent Books on U.S. Government Propaganda"},"content":{"rendered":"

Should government serve the people?\u00a0 Or should people serve government?\u00a0 Or should people serve government so that government may serve the people?\u00a0 One enters this philosophical thicket whenever one speaks of government propaganda. I’ve caught word of these recent books on the topic, and hereby add them on my to-read list.<\/p>\n

(1) James J. Kimble, Mobilizing the Home Front: War Bonds And Domestic Propaganda<\/a> (College Station, TX: TAMU Press, 2006). Focuses on World War II.\u00a0 For one review of the book, see J. Michael Sproule, Rhetoric and Public Affairs<\/em><\/a>, vol. 11, no. 1, 2008, pp. 167-169.<\/p>\n

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(2) Alan Axelrod, Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda<\/a> (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). The publisher<\/a> describes this book on World War I propaganda thus:<\/p>\n

Selling the Great War<\/em> is the story of maverick journalist George Creel and the epoch-making government agency he built and led using the emerging industries of mass advertising and public relations to convince isolationist America to join World War I.\u00a0 Authorized by President Woodrow Wilson and created and run by Creel, the Committee on Public Information had one goal: to monopolize every medium and and avenue of communication in order to forge a nation of warriors for democracy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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(3) Susan A. Brewer, Why America Fights: Patriotism and Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq<\/a> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).\u00a0 The publisher describes this history of 2oth century U.S. propaganda thus:<\/p>\n

On the evening of September 11, 2002, with the Statue of Liberty shimmering in the background, television cameras captured President George W. Bush as he advocated war against Iraq. This carefully stage-managed performance, writes Susan A. Brewer, was the culmination of a long tradition of sophisticated wartime propaganda in America.\u00a0 In Why America Fights<\/em>, Brewer offers a fascinating history of how successive presidents have conducted what Donald Rumsfeld calls \u201cperception management,\u201d from McKinley\u2019s war in the Philippines to Operation Iraqi Freedom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(4) Brigitte L. Nacos, Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, Robert Y. Shapiro, Selling Fear: Counterterrorism, the Media, and Public Opinion<\/a> (University of Chicago Press, 2011). The publisher states,<\/p>\n

Drawing on in-depth analysis of counterterrorism in the years after 9\/11\u2014including the issuance of terror alerts and the decision to invade Iraq\u2014the authors present a compelling case that the Bush administration hyped fear, while obscuring civil liberties abuses and concrete issues of preparedness. The media, meanwhile, largely abdicated its watchdog role, choosing to amplify the administration\u2019s message while downplaying issues that might have called the administration\u2019s statements and strategies into question. The book extends through Hurricane Katrina, and the more skeptical coverage that followed, then the first year of the Obama administration, when an increasingly partisan political environment presented the media, and the public, with new problems of reporting and interpretation.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Should government serve the people?\u00a0 Or should people serve government?\u00a0 Or should people serve government so that government may serve the people?\u00a0 One enters this philosophical thicket whenever one speaks of government propaganda. I’ve caught word of these recent books on the topic, and hereby add them on my to-read list. (1) James J. Kimble, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-communications-and-or-propaganda"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pBCzY-cq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=770"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":776,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions\/776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}