Propaganda

Thank you, David Shaw, for an excellent article, "Subverting the Press With Propaganda on the Rise" [Jan. 16], on the frightening use of the media by this administration for government propaganda. It seems that you are now one among the way too few in the media who have been willing to actually report anything remotely challenging to this administration, particularly as it pertains to their use (or misuse) of journalists, broadcasters, reporters and their ilk. Your column really belongs on the front page due to the urgency of bringing awareness to the majority of the populace of these scary abuses.

Sixteen years ago, I was one of The Times writers assigned to cover the Oklahoma City bombing. It was one of those wrenching stories that stand out in a reportorial memory that now extends back more than four decades, partly because my assignment was to each day write about the children killed in the day-care center beneath which Timothy McVeigh exploded his powerful car bomb. One of the things I recall with particular clarity was the numbing realization that, by week's end, I'd simply run out of adjectives to use in describing broken little bodies.

Al Qaeda is toast, roll the credits. If you can't annihilate the enemy on the battlefield, take the battle to a new dimension, complete with rousing music, saluting children, waving flags and soldiers so heroic you keep looking for pedestals beneath their boots. Good prevails in the scripts of Fadhel al-Olofi, a producer and film director for the Yemeni government, which lends him helicopters and ammo to destroy whatever bad guy haunts the imagination of a country stuck in a real-life civil war and bloodied by attacks by Islamic extremists.

I'd barely followed "A Gay Girl In Damascus" until last week, when Daily Beast columnist Peter Beinart posted something to Twitter: "This is really important — this woman is a hero," with a link to a story about Amina Abdallah Arraf, a Syrian American woman and the author of the blog "A Gay Girl In Damascus. " According to the story, Amina had been seized by Syrian security forces for her dissident writing. Quickly, Amina's arrest became a new Internet cause. Even the U.S. State Department joined the effort.

Since Martin Luther exploited the then-new printing press to spread Protestantism across 16th century Europe, the science of technology and the art of persuasion have been inseparable. Nowhere is the marriage more apparent--or insidious--than during warfare. As U.S. and British forces attack targets in Afghanistan, spin meisters from all sides recognize that propaganda in this conflict is a mix of old and new, from sophisticated Web sites to radio broadcasts to food rations dropped from bombers.

The new democratic government began dismantling the military's propaganda apparatus Friday, halting all local current affairs programming on state radio and television. The new information minister promised to overhaul the state media, which had been controlled by officials loyal to Port-au-Prince Police Chief Michel-Joseph Francois, one of the leaders of the September, 1991, military coup that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The stories about the lone civilian injured in a coalition airstrike didn't quite match. A man who claimed to be her father, Rajab Mohammad, said she was 18, and injured when she fell on her back after an errant bomb landed on the family farm. A man who claimed to be her brother said she was struck by shrapnel. A man who claimed to be the gardener said the hospitalized victim was an 8-year-old boy. The holes in the wall looked more like they were caused by small-arms fire than bomb fragments.

Re "Truth Is, Bush's Propaganda Hurts the U.S.," Commentary, March 16: The White House is producing so much propaganda these days that news channels may have to start labeling their product with tags such as, "This report was NOT paid for by the Bush administration." Rob Schmidt Culver City When are you, along with the broadcast "news" networks, going to do a special edition on Bush administration propaganda? Perhaps you could title it "Pravda." That seems to be an appropriate name for today's American "news" media.

The Army plans tests in Saudi Arabia of cannon shells that can carry thousands of printed messages, a Dugway Proving Ground official said. Each shell, called an XM951 projectile, can be programmed to eject as many as 10,000 messages over a populated area before continuing its flight--which can extend 14 miles--to land in an unpopulated area, project officer John Slater said. Tests have been going on for nearly two years and have been successful, Slater said.

The Cuban government said Saturday that it will return to American donors boxes of rice, beans and powdered milk destined for hurricane victims that it says were marked with "counterrevolutionary propaganda." The rest of the 32 tons of U.S.-donated food--about 24 tons--will be distributed, Prensa Latina, Cuba's official news agency, said in a dispatch from Havana. The dispatch was monitored in Mexico City.

Liberal Hollywood has been taking a beating in recent days, thanks to the fallout from a provocative new expose called "Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. " Written by Ben Shapiro, a 27-year-old Harvard Law School grad who is an executive at a conservative talk show radio network, the book is a sensation in the conservative media world, earning admiring coverage from virtually every corner of the...

"The Team" aired for three short weeks and never scored high ratings. It proved one thing, though. Amid sharpening divisions over Mexico's drug war, even a mediocre cop drama can be fuel on the fire. The TV series debuted on the private Televisa network in early May and ended Friday, capping 15 prime-time episodes. But the controversy around it may outlast the reruns. Was the series, featuring a coed team of elite (and muy attractive!) federal officers on the trail of drug traffickers, just an ordinary crime drama?

Though the majority of combat films made during World War II were propaganda dramas and action-adventures, a few service comedies managed to sneak into the mix. One of the most popular comedies, 1944's "See Here, Private Hargrove" just arrived on Warner Archive for Memorial Day. Based on journalist Marion Hargrove's bestselling memoir of his days in boot camp, the film made a star out of Robert Walker, who received acclaim as the baby-faced Hargrove....

As World War II was raging in 1942 in Europe, North Africa and Japan, Hollywood movie studios asked to have access to British and Canadian war documentaries, newsreels and combat films. So the then executive secretary of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences organized a conference attended by a representative of the British Ministry of Information as well as representatives from the studios. By the end of the meeting, the academy's War Film Library was born. "It is the oldest film collection housed at the academy," said the organization's film archivist Heather Linville.

One clear beneficiary has emerged from the wave of deadly riots that swept Afghanistan after members of a Florida evangelical church burned a copy of the Koran: the Taliban. The insurgents, according to Afghan and Western officials, have been able to exploit the ongoing tumult, using the riots as cover for attacks against Western and government targets and reaping propaganda benefits by allying themselves with popular fury over the desecration of the Muslim holy book. Moreover, the violence has fueled tensions among NATO allies, Western diplomats say, sparked as it was by an American figure, albeit a fringe one. The riots have tapped a well of anti-foreign and particularly anti-American sentiment that exists even among Afghans who do not condone the deaths that have occurred.

The stories about the lone civilian injured in a coalition airstrike didn't quite match. A man who claimed to be her father, Rajab Mohammad, said she was 18, and injured when she fell on her back after an errant bomb landed on the family farm. A man who claimed to be her brother said she was struck by shrapnel. A man who claimed to be the gardener said the hospitalized victim was an 8-year-old boy. The holes in the wall looked more like they were caused by small-arms fire than bomb fragments.

From news reporting and news manipulation of yesteryear to television of today: The links and profound differences are noted in the arrival of separate programs this week. First (at 10 tonight on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42) comes ABC's "Television--Revolution in a Box," a Ted Koppel special chronicling the technological changes--including wee videotape cameras called camcorders--that have drastically altered not only the nature of TV journalism but also global politics.

Deep inside this pestilential camp, where 300,000 Rwandan refugees struggle in a living nightmare, Alphonse Putsingile sat back Tuesday in a spacious compound, protected by young toughs and high walls topped with shards of broken glass. He has trucks, food and water, and a barefoot man squatted nearby pressing pants with an iron filled with hot coals. The agonizing death and disease outside seemed far away for the once-powerful local government leader of Rwerere district in northwestern Rwanda.

For seven long years, Song Byeok performed the soulless work of drawing idyllic North Korean propaganda posters for Kim Jong Il's totalitarian regime. The intricate images he produced were dictated by the state. Song was handed a sketch, always of people happy and smiling, which the young artist dutifully brought to life with brush and paint. "You had to do exactly what they wanted," he recalled. "If you did one little thing differently, your whole family could be imprisoned as enemies of the state.

Super Bowl Sunday will feature more than one marquee matchup in 2011. A Fox News spokeswoman and the White House each confirm that Bill O'Reilly, host of the Fox News Channel's top-rated prime-time show, will interview President Obama as part of the Fox network's pregame show before the NFL championship game on Feb. 6. The news was first posted by the Drudge Report. It won't be the first time Obama has sat down with "The Factor" host. During the 2008 presidential campaign, O'Reilly interviewed the then-Democratic nominee in York, Pa., on the final night of the Republican National Convention.