American Journalism Author Interview
Elisabeth Fondren
Elisabeth Fondren is an assistant professor of journalism at St. John’s University in New York. Her research explores the history of international journalism, government propaganda, military-media relations, and freedom of speech during wartime. She received her Ph.D. in Media & Public Affairs from Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication.
How did you get started in this research area? How did you find out about the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA)?
My research is on the history of propaganda and journalism in the 20th century. I became interested in exploring the historical origins of the idea of promoting American propaganda literacy. I think that today most communication scholars, media historians, and also educators agree that media literacy is an important skill, and it helps individuals, societies, kind of build skills and defend the principles of democratic communication. The idea of propaganda literacy really intrigued me. Most of my research so far has focused on government propaganda during World War One, and specifically how some countries (in particular, Germany) struggled with modern propaganda. After the experiences of the Great War public intellectuals, journalists, and progressive educators in Europe and the United States began studying the ways in which they could raise awareness for the dangers, or how they could analyze the content of one-sided political messages that are spread via modern mass media including radio, movies, newspapers, and then also public speeches.
The history of the IPA is unique in that way because it really was the first institutional effort where educators in the United States tried to train the public how to think for themselves and rather than telling them how to think. The idea of propaganda literacy isn’t a new phenomenon. It dates back to the late 1930s and early nineteen 1940s the period leading up to World War Two, including the Depression Era and the New Deal reforms, when propaganda, both domestic and from foreign countries, was really ubiquitous in American life. This means that propaganda was at an all-time high and people were consuming it through modern mass media technologies like radio, movies, advertisements, newspapers, billboards, and so on. At the same time, there were some real anxieties about the potential persuasive power of this kind of political and commercial propaganda, which is what really started my interest in researching this concept of how some scholars and journalists tried to promote propaganda literacy.
Was there anything that surprised you in your research? Something very interesting or unexpected?
I think that while the history of the IPA has been discussed by quite a few other scholars and many historians of propaganda, much of that conversation focuses on the IPA’s definition of propaganda which they gave in 1937. At that time, they also introduced seven propaganda devices– name-calling, glittering generalities, transfer, testimonial, plain folks, card stacking, and bandwagon. I spelled these out in the article. These devices have become a part, an established part of political communication scholarship.
From this starting point, I was looking at what my article can contribute to the conversation. I’ve focused specifically on their concept of using publicity to promote a sort of literacy about propaganda and how members of the IPA interacted with journalists. I was really impressed by how members of the IPA countered fascist ideas, and the way in which they tried to analyze hate speech with their materials in their monthly newsletter, “Propaganda Analysis.”
In this newsletter, for example, they would analyze, or they would help readers analyze Joseph Goebbels’ speeches in fall 1939, right after Germany invaded Poland. The IPA argued that what he was doing was using the card stacking technique to try to rally support for Nazi crimes and his anti-Semitic rhetoric. What I really found interesting was how the IPA and the secretary, Clyde Miller, tried to expose extremists and fascist propaganda groups in the United States. Through this work, they also tried to generate money from Zionist granters, but what I just found really interesting was how Miller warned Americans that there would be an increase in Nazi propaganda after 1939, and this propaganda was designed to divide Americans on the issues of how Nazis would justify the persecution of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants in Germany.
The other focus of the article is how critics responded to the IPA. The U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was also called the Dies Committee for the chairman, Martin Dies. HUAC criticized the IPA and argued that in analyzing all propaganda they were actually giving these “un-American propaganda” a platform.
After the United States entered World War Two against the Axis powers, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, I found that many subscribers didn’t renew their subscription to the newsletter. Financial support kind of collapsed and there was no more philanthropic money. Previously the work of the IPA had been funded by the Good Will Fund, but that money just ran out. Edward Filene was the kind of financial magnate behind the IPA, and he gave over $1 million over the course of the IPA’s existence from ‘37 to ’41. I think more broadly what had happened after the United States entered the war, was that it created this social political climate that even analyzing opposing, and of course enemy, propagandists were seen as unpatriotic and un-American, and some members of the IPA went to work for U.S. government information agencies. That’s just kind of how the IPA folded in 1942.
I was just very surprised by what I found in my research, how this group was advocating for tolerance, at a time where mass propaganda increasingly appealed to Americans’ patriotism and national interest, and how they actively tried to combat political nationalistic propaganda misinformation. How they tried to expose kind of the dangers that this sort of communication could have.
I think that it relates to our modern struggle, and our anxieties around propaganda because now, just as then, hate speech and political propaganda are a widespread phenomenon and they have become part of the global sphere and almost part of our daily lives. I think also today journalists and educators are still wrestling with people’s anxieties about propaganda. We are searching for democratic tools to counter this new form of digital-born propaganda.
How does your research relate to current media literacy?
Fundamentally what I think is or interesting is how the IPA tried to connect their anti-propaganda work, their movement, with the broader values of how democratic publicity could be utilized to support the values of a liberal democracy. They even refer to themselves as “Propagandists for Democracy” and this is what I chose for the title of my paper because I think that today, nobody would make that claim anymore. Nobody would say “we are propagandists,” because propaganda has such a negative connotation, especially as it is associated with World War One, World War Two, and the Cold War when nations used mass publicity and really manipulated modern media to try to influence people and spread their doctrines. I think it’s just so interesting that the IPA branded themselves as “Propagandists for Democracy” in the early 1940s when anti-democratic messages were on the rise in the United States and in Europe. After World War Two, of course, the propaganda continued especially during the Cold War era, but it was called Information Services, Educational Publicity, or just Public Affairs.
I think what the IPA tried to do and how they tried to do it with this approach that they called it “a science for democracy.” They tried to really use publicity materials and there were plans to go on the radio. I don’t think that ever happened but in internal conversations, they planned to host radio shows. Really this philosophy of trying to make the public be more skeptical is such a valuable lesson because I don’t think that people, and especially students and schoolchildren, can be too critical of political information. I think that what history shows us, skeptics are what propagandists fear most. In my own research starting from World War One, propagandists are afraid that the public will become critical and therefore their messages will fall on deaf ears.
So, the lesson of the IPA, or the legacy of what this case study can show us is how in one way, we are all propagandists for democracy, at this moment. In education, we have a unique opportunity and responsibility to help make the case that it is difficult to balance emotions with intelligence. Especially, if you look at how modern propagandists target people online, on their phones, and they use microtargeting, it is important that we continue to make the public more skeptical and critical of those messages.
Can you elaborate a bit more on that and share how we might use this information in educating future generations?
The purpose of doing this type of historical Media Research is not always trying to connect the past with the present, but sometimes it works. I think with this history of the IPA, if we really study what they tried to do, and of course other communication scholars. Renee Hobbs is a communication professor; she just last year published a fantastic book called “Mind Over Media” and she relates the historical work of the IPA with media literacy tools today in the digital sphere. She makes this case how educators have the responsibility to teach students how to identify and how to analyze and then with a goal to disarm this new form of mass persuasion online.
One other thing that IPA did is they didn’t just focus on propaganda, they also tried to promote the critical study of modern mass media. In their newsletters, each month they had a different focus, then they had the main essay, and then supporting research activities. They tried to really build awareness for what today we would call “the agenda setting function” or “power of media.” They would analyze newspapers, they would try to help the readers of their newsletter understand who controlled newspapers, what are editorial decisions, what might be a bias, etc. They would constantly argue that it’s important to read more than one newspaper and to read a local paper but also a paper that focuses on world events and national events.
The IPA similarly studied public relations which was a new industry that emerged after World War One, and Edward Bernays, he’s been dubbed the “Father of a Public Relations.” The IPA studied how public relations strategists also used these techniques, they called them “glittering generalities,” which means today we would say they would that PR professionals use euphemistic language to sell something and try to promote an image. The IPA would also focus on that, they would discuss the role of movies and the arts. They would discuss the role of Hollywood leading up to World War Two. It really wasn’t just this anti-propaganda work, they tried to promote an understanding of the role and how modern mass media functioned in American society.
Where would you direct someone looking for more information on this subject?
The article has two illustrations of the IPA, one is sort of an advertisement where they were saying “For your Thinking Friends.” This kind of gives you an idea of who they were targeting you know they failed in targeting the masses because they targeted educated, journalists, “elite” people. The other illustration is the cover of the “Decide for Yourself” packages, which were really interesting, and, in those packages, you would have, for example, a speech by FDR, and a speech by Goebbels, which today seems unthinkable that we would publish this. Those illustrations are part of the article.
Where can interested readers find more? The Institute’s archival records are located at the New York Public Library “manuscripts and archives” division. The IPA’s published works, including all of the 52 editions of their newsletter, monthly newsletter, propaganda analysis, are available online as digitized volumes. So are the books that they published, so there’s a lot of material there to dig in and maybe even use their material in modern-day classrooms.
In terms of scholarship, I would highly recommend that readers look at the works of J. Michael Sproule, who has written the most comprehensive history about the IPA, then John Dewey’s writings on media social responsibility and the notion of participatory democracy, which highlights the relationship between the press and the public and emphasizes the role of education in a democracy. Also, there’s Renee Hobbs’ Mind Over Media, which is a really fantastic discussion of media and propaganda literacy in the digital age.