Customer Reviews

Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World (Open Media Series) (Seven Stories' Open Media)

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I had never heard of the United States Information Agency until I read this book. Among other public diplomacy (read: propaganda) duties, the USIA is responsible for Radio Marti, the pro-US propaganda beamed in to Cuba and the Fullbright scholar program. The reason those of us living in the US don't know too much about the USIA's mission is that they are not allowed to use their propaganda skills on US citizens, even though their predecessor organization, the Committee on Public Information (CPI) was created during the Wilson administration specifically to convince the people of the US that fighting the Germans in World War I was critical to the security of the American homeland.

Post cold-war and especially during the Clinton administration, the USIA became the mouthpiece of NAFTA and the evangelization of people in other countries of the benefits of accepting American-style economies. This very brief book outlines much of this history and the author Nancy Snow makes it clear that any positive aspects of the program like the Fullbright program have been long buried under the pro-business propaganda machine of the Clinton and Bush the Younger administrations. The Fullbright program in particular became a tool to influence thought on market economics in Mexico and Canada, whose citizens were ambivalent about the promises of economic development promised by NAFTA.

Today, much of the USIA's work has been rolled into the State Department, headed by former advertising executive Charlotte Beers, who is charged with "rebranding America to the world" like the Uncle Ben's Rice she used to work on. The USIA is one of the vehicles of US economic and cultural hegemony, especially in countries that we can't go to war with. Snow's history and analysis ends with an action plan that is wider reaching than simply what to do with the USIA. It is really a series of concrete ideas for reforming the very government of our country.

This small book tells the story of the USIA (the US Information Agency), a government unit.
This institution was created with very good intentions (increase mutual understanding between people), but was diverted from its original goal and streamlined as a propaganda machine to promote the US economic system and business interests.

The author rightly stigmatizes harshly the democratic deficit in the US: a media monopoly, a political duopoly ruled by big business and big money, and a plutocracy which dominates without control public welfare, public lands, public airwaves and the pension trusts.
Prof. Snow proposes a seven point plan to restore true democracy, but the implementation will be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

This book should be read as a classic example of how particular interest groups take control of a public institution and turn it into a pro-private interests mouthpiece.

Not to be missed.

This book is lively and informative. I would say "shocking," but nothing shocks me anymore. If the author is correct, the USIA is a sort of shadow embassy of the U.S., selling skewed, altered, and sometimes false views of this culture to other countries, the intent being, in the end, to drum up business for American companies. There is nothing altruistic or moral about the agency's goals, just the crass ideal of selling American pop culture abroad while Americans themselves are kept totally in the dark about the agency's doings. What is sad is that, if Americans knew what the USIA was up to, they probably wouldn't care.

Snow presents a critique of U.S. foreign policy in a clear, accessible style. I was not at all familiar with 20th century U.S.-style propaganda (my background is in finance and marketing) but this little book got me thinking about how important it is for citizens to keep themselves informed about what the government does to promote our culture overseas. Snow doesn't just critique but offers some alternatives to the status quo.

Nancy Snow's modest little booklet points to an important strand in corporate America's thrust for global power: The take-over of the United States Information Agency. A propaganda organ of government since its WWI inception, the USIA now sells the Fortune 500 agenda to reluctant foreigners at tax payer expense. And here I thought only the bad old soviets made government an arm of the economy. Snow, a former employee of the agency, details this transition from cold war asset to America's neo-liberal mouthpiece to the world. Given big money's recent take-over of the Democrat party and other citizen institutions, Snow's revelation may not surprise most readers. Nevertheless, the details make informative reading, and while I would have preferred a more muckraking approach, her academic restraint undercores a deep disillusion, as reflected in her 7-Point Plan for Citizen-Based Diplomacy. The latter aims at challenging corporate dominance with citizen action and people priorities. Coming from a former insider, this speaks volumes. One hopes the message will resonate.

This book is the most intelligent written in ages. It tells the truth about how men and women are being brainwashed in our country...right along with people in foreign countries. Nancy Snow covers this brilliantly. You'll never see America the same way...

Someone please put this woman on TV!

Bad, both as history and as analysis, even the neo-Marxist sort that it unabashedly mimics. It's an embarrassment that the author has managed to turn this screed into an academic career as an expert on "public diplomacy." That she has done so offers a lesson on ambitious self-promotion in the academic world. She purports to tell the story about the former USIA, and ends telling no story at all.

She also misses the essential point about the former USIA: that its work was primarily in the field, people-to-people, and had little to do with politicized Washington policy-makers and attitudes of various administrations. Her litany of pleas for a sense of the real America of working-class people misses completely the large majority of Americans who are religious and socially conservative, exactly the kind of Americans who resonate well with Africans and Latin Americans, to name two important parts of the world. This isn't surprising for someone who freely cites Marxist Howard Zinn and places his photo on her website.

Ultimately, however, this non-book is just sad. USIA was a failure in many ways, but the story deserves to be told by a real historian, not a sham professor of "communications" who happened to do an internship in the now-dead USIA. Now that Snow has set the standard for interns, I'm waiting for Monica Lewinsky's analysis of the presidency.

The pamphlet (so it describes itself internally) is titled as if it were a discussion of the US propaganda establishment, but is in truth a sketchy and afactual memoir of a two-year Clinton-era
internship in USIA. The pamphlet is only 60 pages long, being
prefaced by laudatory and emotional prefaces that stretch to 30
pages, probably reflecting some demand of the printing process.
About 20 pages of the pamphlet is devoted to demanding that the USIA be disbanded, the remainder to rambling far-left invectives
against the NAFTA, "globalization", "hegemonic corporations" and
other betes noires. This pamphlet may well be part of a tenure-quest rather than a knowledge quest. The reader is advised to seek knowledge elsewhere.