Sheldon Rampton's News Articles

Books on Propaganda

by Sheldon Rampton — July 7, 2009 - 3:11pm

A student who is writing a paper that "explores the legal limits of US government propaganda" contacted us recently. He asked if we could recommend any books or essays that "deal with the limits of US legislation concerning PR and propaganda." Unfortunately, there is a scarcity of books written about this particular topic, although there are several that discuss how U.S. government propaganda techniques were developed and practiced, often to the detriment of democracy. Among the more recent books that discuss U.S. government propaganda, of course, there are the books that I co-authored with John Stauber -- Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq and The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies and the War in Iraq. And there are a number of articles on PRWatch.org, written by myself and by my colleague, Diane Farsetta, about the Pentagon military analyst program that was exposed last year by New York Times reporter David Barstow. The articles we've written that are most relevant to this topic include:

Answering a Few Questions

by Sheldon Rampton — April 8, 2009 - 11:55am
  • Topics: Iraq, Propaganda

    • We recently received an email query from a high school student asking some questions about one of the books that John Stauber and I have written about the war in Iraq. Rather than answer those questions individually, I thought I'd answer them publicly here:

    1. What are the top techniques deployed by the government to falsely inform the public?

    There are a range of techniques used by governments, corporations and other parties to misinform the public.

    Position Announcement: Executive Director

    by Sheldon Rampton — February 19, 2009 - 9:54am

    The Center for Media and Democracy, an independent, nonprofit public interest organization located in Madison, Wisconsin, is seeking an inspired Executive Director to oversee, manage and grow the organization. CMD's primary mission is promoting transparency and an informed debate by exposing corporate spin and government propaganda, and by engaging the public in collaborative, accurate and fair online reporting.

    Fiddling With iTunes While the Country Burns

    by Sheldon Rampton — January 14, 2009 - 11:03am
  • Topics: Right Wing, U.S. Government

    • I've been following some of the recent writings of Patrick Ruffini, a former "eCampaign Director" for the Republican National Committee who is part of an effort to reinvent and reinvigorate the Republican Party in the United States. Ruffini is overall a fairly smart guy who is realistic enough to emphatically reject some of the more ridiculous conservative talking points. I've seen him write some astute analyses, particularly when writing about online political organizing.

    Online Ammo

    by Sheldon Rampton — January 2, 2009 - 9:54pm


    Viral marketing     strategist David Meerman Scott says he was surprised recently to discover that the U.S. Air Force has its own Twitter feed, staffed by Captain David Faggard, who holds the title of Chief of Emerging Technology at the Air Force Public Affairs Agency in the Pentagon.

    Scott interviewed Faggard and reports that his team's "mission is to use current and developing Web 2.0 applications as a way to actively engage conversations between Airmen and the general public." Faggard says the focus is on "Direct Action within Social Media (blogging, counter-blogging, posting products to YouTube, etc.); Monitoring and Analysis of the Social Media landscape (relating to Air Force and Airmen); and policy and education (educating all Public Affairs practitioners and the bigger Air Force on Social Media)."

    In addition to a Twitter feed, Scott reports that

    Capt. Faggard writes The Official Blog of the U.S. Air Force; has pages on YouTube, MySpace and Facebook; helps publicize a Second Life area called Huffman Prairie; contributes to iReport (user name USAFPA); and is on Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious, Slashdot, Newsvine, Reddit. There's Air Force widgets. And there's even a video mashup contest for high schools to show school spirit sponsored by the Air Force.

    Other branches of the military are also getting into the social networking game, along with other branches of government. The Army also has its own Twitter feed, as does the Department of Homeland Security, the Bush White House, and the U.S. Joint Forces Command, the U.S. Department of State, and the Israeli Consulate in New York.

    Just a few months ago, U.S. military analysts raised concerns that Twitter and other online social networking technologies could become terrorist tools. It appears they've decided that they can be useful for their own purposes as well.

    The Cost of SLAPPing Down Journalism

    by Sheldon Rampton — December 30, 2008 - 3:49pm
  • Topics: Journalism

    • Alan Rusbridger, who edits the British Guardian, thinks fear of libel lawsuits from big corporations may have contributed to journalists' failure to adequately report on the dangerous economic decisions that led to the recent implosion of the global financial system. In an article for the New York Review of Books, he recounts his own paper's "most recent serious brush with the British defamation laws" earlier this year when it was sued for libel by Tesco, one of the largest public companies in Britain and the fourth-largest retailer in the world.

    The case centered around a report in the Guardian in which Rusbridger admits that the newspaper got some of its facts wrong. It reported correctly that Tesco was using complex financial deals to avoid paying taxes, but its reporters misunderstood the particulars of the arrangement, and "the sums avoided were much less than we had supposed."

    The ensuing libel lawsuit from Tesco consumed more than a million dollars in legal fees, and threatened to go to millions more before it was settled out of court.

    The Clean Coal Bait and Switch

    by Sheldon Rampton — December 27, 2008 - 1:16pm
  • Topics: Journalism, Global Warming, Public Relations

    • The coal industry's campaign to "make coal sexy again" has included every trick in the book -- even a music video ad featuring supermodels dressed up as coal miners.

    David Roberts, an environmental writer for Grist.com, has written a great critique of the coal industry's "clean coal" campaign, pointing out that "it's an obvious scam -- easily exposed, easily debunked. Just because it's obvious, though, doesn't mean the media won't fall for it. Indeed, the entire 'clean coal' propaganda push is premised on the media's gullibility."

    Roberts notes, as have others, including a recent report by the Center for American Progress (CAP), that "the companies funding 'clean coal' PR aren't spending much on carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) research." They have therefore made no progress in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that make coal a potent cause of global warming. The concept of "clean coal" was invented to answer concerns about global warming, and its advocates play a rhetorical game of bait-and-switch on precisely this topic. When pressed about how coal can be clean, Roberts observes, "they revert to the other definition of 'clean' -- the notion that coal plants have reduced their emissions of traditional air pollutants like particulates and mercury (as opposed to greenhouse gases)."

    Clean Coal for Christmas

    by Sheldon Rampton — December 11, 2008 - 10:42am

    Viral emails have become a pleasant staple of the holiday season. A couple of weeks ago, I sent one myself to a few friends and family -- an "Elf Yourself" video featuring me with my wife and one of our cats. (You can find it on my personal website if you're interested.) "Elf Yourself" includes an understated advertising message for its sponsor, OfficeMax, but the dancing elves are kind of cute, and I figured my loved ones are strong enough to handle an occasional bit of commercialism.

    It's a different story, though, with the "Clean coal carolers" video shown here that was just released by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a front group for the coal industry. This latest PR ploy features animated lumps of coal singing Christmas carols with the wording changed to deliver pro-coal propaganda.

    Reporters Help CIA Torture the Truth

    by Sheldon Rampton — December 10, 2008 - 6:09pm
  • Topics: Journalism, Iraq, Human Rights

    • "There is a fierce battle going on over what kind of a CIA director Barack Obama should appoint, when he should close the prison camp at Guantanamo, and whether there should be a full scale investigation (and possible prosecution) of the torture advocates in the Bush administration," notes Charles Kaiser in the Columbia Journalism Review. Unfortunately, reporting on this issue in the New York Times and elsewhere has been flagrantly one-sided, from a position that falsifies the facts and defends torture.

    "Most of the Times's sources don't think that anyone who formulated or acquiesced in the current administration's torture policies should be excluded as a candidate for CIA director, or prosecuted for possible violations of criminal law," Kaiser writes. A recent story by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, for example, falsely repeated John O. Brennan's description of himself as a "strong opponent" of torture, even though "most experts on this subject agree that Brennan acquiesced in everything that the CIA did in this area while he served there."

    Let's Destroy Your Health to Save the GOP

    by Sheldon Rampton — December 9, 2008 - 10:51am


    The insurance industry helped kill health reform under Bill Clinton with a campaign that included the "Harry and Louise" ads shown here. Will it succeed in killing reform under President Obama as well?

    Michael F. Cannon, a pundit at the libertarian Cato Institute, has written a blog post that highlights the importance of what I believe will be one of the most important issues in play once Barack Obama assumes the U.S. presidency. "Blocking Obama's health plan," he writes, is "key to the GOP's survival."

    To explain this point, Cannon cites the analysis of Norman Markowitz, a professor of history at Rutgers University. Cannon gasps with horror that Markowitz is some kind of Marxist, but he nevertheless agrees with Markowitz on the following points:

    A "single payer" national health system -- known as "socialized medicine" in the rest of the developed world -- should be an essential part of the change that the core constituencies which elected Obama desperately need. Britain serves as an important political lesson for strategists. After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party when health care, social welfare, education and pro-working class policies were enacted by labor-supported governments. ...

    The best way to win over the the portion of the working class in the South or the West that supported McCain and the Republicans is to create important new public programs and improve the social safety net. National health care, significantly higher minimum wages, support for trade union organizing, aid to education should all be on the agenda. These programs will improve the quality of our lives lives directly, giving us greater security and establishing the social economic changes that will bring reluctant voters into the Obama coalition. That is how progress works.

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