Psychological warfare from it's inception has also targeted the people of the United States.
Edward Barrett ended up as the dean of the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University, founder of the Columbia Journalism Review and so forth. Barrett, talking about where his colleagues from the Office of War Information were as of 1953, said they were the publishers of Time, Look, Fortune, and several daily newspapers. Editors of magazines such as Holiday, Coronet, Parade, and Saturday Review. Editors of the Denver Post, the New Orleans Time-Picayune. Heads of Viking Press, Harper Brothers, Krauss, Strauss and Young, two Hollywood Oscar winners, a two time Pulitzer Prize winner, the board chairman of CBS, and a dozen key network executives, President Eisenhower's chief speech writer, the editor of Reader's Digest international edition, and at least 6 partners of large advertising agencies. The point being here, not that these people all thought alike or that they were engaged in some big conspiracy, but that they had a common war time experience and a set of common preconceptions about what communication is and how it was supposed to be used and how it could be studied and so on. It has had enormous impact on what we today take to be communication.
This word communication; it's trickier, it's richer in meaning than it seems at first. The root word comes from latin comminunia which means sharing of burdens. The spirit there is in a two way exchange of information; a two way sharing of burdens. Now, of course, that doesn't mean the burdens were necessarily equally shared. But nonetheless, this basic characteristic of communication as having a two way character or a multi-way character remains true. You see it in other words that are related to it like commune or communion and so on. But nowadays communication, particularly the way it's talked about in schools and the way it's used in commercial enterprise, it has quite a different meaning. It means how I can tell you what to do.
The relationship between psychological warfare and communication research solidified with the development of the post-World War II national security state in NSC directives.
NSC is the National Security Council, and they're the principal advisers to the President on national security issues. That council was set up mainly because up until the end of the Roosevelt Administration, the military advisers shouting in one corner, and the political advisers shouting in the other. And while President Roosevelt was crafty enough to handle both, as a new world emerged, Truman and his successors wanted a staff to combine the military and the political questions in to a single group of advisers. One of the very first things that this combined staff did was to work on the question, or the issue, of psychological warfare and the combination of propaganda on the one hand; and violence on the other hand.
An example of this is NSC document #4. This was rated confidential. A confidential document is the lowest level of government secret and ten's of thousands of government employees have access to it. So while it is nominally, and officially, and even legally a 'secret' as a practical matter, confidential information is seen on the front page of newspapers everyday. That has been the case for decades. So NSC #4 was a confidential decision. The US had to set up psychological warfare operations to counter the Russians and this will consist of what was the predecessor of the US information age, and the early Voice of America and so on. So psychological warfare, in this officially secret but really public definition, was propaganda itself in the way it was presented. You saw it written up in US News and World Report and magazines of that sort minutes after NSC #4 was created.
Then the National Security Council took up NSC #4A which is a top secret decision and a top secret classification is considerably stricter than confidential. One of its aspects, is that the very existence of a top secret decision is secret. No government official can legally acknowledge that a top secret decision has been made. Well NSC #4A said that these little propaganda operations; USIA, the Voice of America, and so forth, would be supplemented by systematic campaigns of sabotage, guerrilla warfare, covert operations, assassination, insurgency, counter-insurgency, etc. The authority to do this at this stage was pretty vague because the different security agencies were still arguing over who would get the brief to carry out this type of warfare. The decision on that came about 6 months later with the decision that was called NSC 10/2. NSC 10/2 created an entirely secret agency, the Office for Policy Coordination. The function of this entirely secret government agency was specifically to carry out these types of covert operations. That secret government agency eventually became the Operations Directorate of the CIA which has basically the same functions today
The real job that most of the mass media is involved in; is the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers. And its all broken down rather precisely. If you want to buy advertising on a particular show, the network can tell you with great precision how many million men between the ages between 16 and 25 watch this program and how many women between the ages 25 and 35 watch that program. If you watch, particularly the sitcoms, you can see precisely in the advertising who it's aimed at. So what a TV station really does, is not put on entertainment. Where its money comes from is selling your eyeballs to advertisers. In order to make that work, there have to be ways to count how many eyeballs are being sold. There have to be ways to survey this, and to put forward a plausible argument from the media to the advertisers as to why the advertisers should come up with a billion dollars a year to sell cosmetics, or comparable numbers to sell automobiles, and so on. Where the academic field of mass communication research began, was in the development of these techniques to do precisely that type of measurement. To measure how many ears in those years, because we're talking about radio when the thing originated, were tuned to a particular advertisement; and what effect did that have on sales. And to what degree did the person reading an advertisement remember that advertisement. There are lots and lots of studies you can find in the library that elaborate on these themes.
This is the fifth installment of an original series from No Agenda News. Read part six here.
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