The Divergence of Propaganda and Persuasion during the Cold War

The third speaker in this packed IAMCR 2023 session is Barbie Zelizer, whose interest is in the ways Cold War logic hides propaganda in democracies. Practices of obfuscation are now ever-present, but our discussion changes depending on the type of regime (autocratic, democratic, …) we are talking about. In autocracies, information disorder is equated with propaganda, and linked to a long-term history of government control of information; in democracies, information disorders are seen as a new phenomenon linked to disinformation, and related to current conditions of polarisation, populism, and digital technology.

But during the Cold War, conditions in media and politics enabled propaganda to flourish undetected in western democracies; the US as a confident exporter of media logics has spread this Cold War logic around the world, too. In this view, democracies persuade, while autocracies propagandise, even though in the early years after World War II the US and its allies openly accepted their need to engage in global pro-democratic propaganda (e.g. through mechanisms such as Voice of America. But gradually this shifted, and the description of such efforts as a deliberate effort to subvert public opinion on the other side of the Iron Curtain was obfuscated.

The dominant language now shifted towards one of persuasion, borrowing liberally from advertising language and repositioning propaganda as a form of pro-democratic outreach to other nations and peoples. The effort to ensure that propaganda does not harm democratic ideology thus followed two patterns: externalisation, which repositioned propaganda as an entirely undemocratic activity by dictatorial states and described it as nefarious (i.e. unequivocally bad), ephemeral (i.e. short-lived in its activities and impacts), and simplistic (i.e. built only around easily understood messages); and invisibilisation, which rebadged the US’ own propaganda efforts as mere efforts to inform in order to provide a basis for free judgment and decision-making in unfree countries.

This enabled propaganda to continue freely, but unnamed, and led to a characterisation of disinformation within democracies as a problem executed by private firms on behalf of state actors, as polarisation for control, and as a result of the substitution of digital technology for legacy media. These emphases steer us away from a focus on the role of legacy media, and from a more comprehensive diagnosis of the major issues: if as a result it is difficult to identify propaganda in democracies, this also enables it to flourish.