In order to stay informed about the news of the world, we all must place our trust in whoever is doing the reporting. There is simply not enough time in the day to do all of the information-gathering, source-verification, and fact-checking ourselves. While we may be able to do a portion of this legwork about issues we really care about, we offload a vast majority of this process to journalists and reporters and trust them to bring us back the truth.The problem with this process is that people (and institutions) don’t always report the objective truth—everyone is driven by incentives. Usually people are incentivized by money, however, when governments are involved, it is more often power. So, while we must place our trust in someone to report the news, we must be diligent about who we choose and do our best to recognize what their incentives are.With this in mind, we can observe that media content distributed by governments is propaganda: its purpose is to not inform the public of facts, but rather to frame the news in its own best interest. Government sanctioned media outlets employ propaganda techniques in a variety of ways, two of which examined in this book are the U.S. government’s dichotomous treatment of ‘worthy’ versus ‘unworthy’ victims’ and also their portrayal of ‘legitimate’ or ‘meaningless’ Third World elections.In the first case study, our authors note the difference in media treatment given to two different victims: one a Polish priest named Jerzy Popieluszko who was assassinated for resisting his country’s communist regime; the second a group of four American missionaries murdered in El Salvador for helping refugees of the Salvadoran civil war. Based purely on these objective facts, we would expect the American missionaries to be the main story in American news. A propaganda model suggests otherwise.The U.S. press portrayed Popieluszko in a sympathetic light and his assassins in a negative one. What was the reason for this? Their incentives: anti-communism in any and all endeavors. Popieluszko was murdered for being anti-communist, a sentiment shared by the U.S. government, and the account of his tragic death was therefore prominent news. His story was carried by all of the major news networks, for many weeks, with kind language attributed to him and inflammatory language assigned to his assassins. Our authors compare this media treatment to that of four American women who were kidnapped and murdered in El Salvador. These women received a mere fraction of the attention that Popieluszko did because the U.S. government was friendly with the Salvadoran government and did not want to invite attention to their crooked dealings. Despite numerous reports that the women were murdered by the military, with approval from the Salvadoran government, it was still downplayed. The U.S. was in cahoots with the Salvadoran government and were incentivized to keep quiet any negative press about them.In the second case study on elections, a similar theme can be found, using elections in El Salvador and Nicaragua as examples. In the Salvadoran election, rebel disruption was a central feature of the U.S. government’s propaganda frame because the rebels opposed the election. This frame was set by the U.S. because they wanted the current Salvadoran government—one they were friendly with—to stay in power. “In the case of Nicaragua, the propaganda format was reversed—the rebels were the good guys, and the election held by the bad guys was condemned in advance.” This frame was taken because the U.S. wanted the leading Sandinista coalition to lose and for the rebel party they were friendly with—the Contras—to win. The U.S. mass media followed the government’s agenda in both cases, even though it meant an exact reversal of the standards they applied to each election. Once again, we can trace this behavior back to the incentives of the U.S. political elite.Another example of the U.S. government’s propaganda model examined in this book is their portrayal of the carnage in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The war in Indochina was presented to the American people as the “struggle between Communism and the Free World.” The Vietnamese were presented as “merely agents of Moscow and Peking whose primary means of gaining support was through terror and force” while France was “a gallant ally…fighting alongside the United States to preserve liberty and justice in Asia.” All of this despite the overwhelming evidence that the U.S. were the aggressors, dropping thousands of bombs on poor and defenseless peasants in the countryside. Although civilian casualties were overwhelmingly the result of U.S. firepower, attribution of responsibility by television was “weighted by a 10 to 7 ratio to the account of the enemy; its ‘calculated policy of terror’ contrasted with the unfortunate but legitimate side-effects of U.S. operations.”The same can be seen in Cambodia by the media portrayal of their leader Pol Pot. At one extreme, he was described as “having forged new patterns of genocide comparable to the worst excesses of Hitler and Stalin,” reports that were downplayed and minimized by U.S. sanctioned media. At the other extreme, Douglas Pike, former head of the University of California Indochina Archives, a man much admired by the New York Times, described Pol Pot in November 1979 as the “charismatic leader of a bloody but successful peasant revolution with a substantial residue of popular support, under which on a statistical basis, most of them [peasants]…did not experience much in the way of brutality.” Once again, we can understand the portrayal of these dichotomous views on Pol Pot by understanding the incentives of the U.S. government: Despite the fact that Pol Pot’s genocide was extensively documented, being friendly with his regime (the Khmer Rouge) was politically advantageous to the U.S. government. Through this lens, it becomes obvious why they chose to highlight his actions in a friendly manner: keeping themselves in positions of power.These are just a few case studies brought to light in this book, but the overall message is clear: all news brought to the public by government institutions is propaganda. Whether it is an outright refutation of the truth, the choice of what to highlight and what to ignore, or even the words chosen to describe people and events, everything is crafted carefully to adhere to the incentives of the politically powerful. Their objective is always to preserve and expand their power. For those of us consuming media, this is paramount to understand. We must always look below the surface and examine the reasons why a story is being told. Who stands to gain from information presented in such a way? What are the underlying incentives? And, most importantly: Who do we trust to deliver us the news?