Psychological warfare from it's inception has also targeted the people of the United States.
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.
Development theory is an interdisciplinary theory. It's very much the fond dream of academics to have these interdisciplinary developments. It combines communication research, sociology, political science, bits and pieces of psychology, and so on. It's really quite an arrogant idea, to figure out some sort of formula by which every country in the world would 'develop' along the lines that the hegemonic power wanted it to develop.
There was a cold war going on; the Americans weren't the only players in this game. What happened was that the various developing countries in the world, the countries that came out of the colonial yoke, were caught in this crossfire; to their great disadvantage. Even Pope John Paul the II, who who was no radical by any stretch of the imagination; argued that this so called development, in the midst of the cold war, has been extraordinarily damaging to most of the people of the world. Most particularly in those countries that became centers of contention between east and west development theory.
The dominant paradigm of the period proved to be that the appropriateness and inevitability of elite control of communication was taken as a given. As a practical matter, the key academic journals of the day demonstrated only a secondary interest in what communication is. Instead they concentrated on how modern technology could be used by elites to manage social change, extract political concessions, or win purchasing decisions from targeted audiences.
At least a half dozen of the most important centers of US communication research depended for their survival on funding from a handful of national security agencies. Their reliance on psychological warfare money was so extensive as to suggest that the crystallization of mass communication studies into a distinct scholarly field might not have come about during the 1950's without substantial military, CIA, and US information agency intervention.
One of the institutions which served to a large extent as a vehicle for the communication of some of the concepts such as development theory, is the Public Opinion Quarterly and that publication in many ways epitomizes the crossover between psychological warfare and communication research. Public Opinion Quarterly is a very well known academic journal that specializes in how public opinion is measured and during the early 1950's it was really rather straightforward in that it viewed itself as participating in psychological warfare. It would publish articles describing what the various tactics in the west had been against the Germans in World War II and that sort of thing. That was on the first and sort of most obvious level. The next level is that the journal itself promoted particular attitudes about what communication is, what society is, and even down to such things as what's the correct line on strategy for dealing with the Russians, or the Italians, or whomever.
So the journal itself was, although it didn't present itself in these terms was a propaganda organ. On the third level what one sees, is a very close inbreeding between the senior editors and the editorial board of the journal on the one hand, and the intelligence agencies on the other hand. The founder of the journal back in 1937 was a man by the name of DeWitt Poole, who was then on sabbatical from the state department. His specialty was anti-communist propaganda. That's what he did for a living. Moving in to the post war period, he eventually became senior executive with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty operations that were founded by the CIA.
This is the sixth installment of an original series from No Agenda News. Read the final installment here.
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