Guest Column
by
Kit Klarenberg*
The man Joe Biden tapped to head Washington’s umbrella agency for international media is a fan of internal propaganda. The practice is a well-established one in the US, despite repeated attempts to end it. Joe Biden named Richard Stengel as lead transition volunteer for the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) review team. USAGM manages five global media brands – Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio y Television Marti, Radio Free Asia, and Alhurra.
Advancing US propaganda
During his lengthy public diplomacy and public affairs tenure, he was responsible for creating the Global Engagement Center. While its ostensible raison d’etre is “combating Russian disinformation,” Grayzone suggests the initiative actually amounts to “a massive vehicle for advancing US government propaganda around the world.” After leaving his post, he became a fellow at dubious ‘think tank’ the Atlantic Council, NATO’s intellectual wing-cum-propaganda arm, which is funded to the tune of millions annually by the State Department, US embassies of UAE and Bahrain, Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, defense giant Raytheon, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and other questionable sources. He concurrently served as an MSNBC analyst.
WESTERN MEDIA HEGEMONY
Grayzone moreover exposed a number of absolutely extraordinary comments Stengel made during a May 2018 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) panel discussion, Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News. Over the course of the talk, Stengel advocated a “rethink” of the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and the press in the US, and laughingly referred to his State Department role as “chief propagandist.”
“I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful,” he added.
Information warfare at home
Stengel’s support for internally targeted propaganda, and unabashed self-characterization as the State Department’s “chief propagandist,” is particularly disquieting given that the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act explicitly banned stations like Voice of America from broadcasting its programming domestically.
The legislation was in-part influenced by fears of US government propaganda agencies unduly influencing public opinion and discourse at home. In the 1970s, as tensions between Washington and Moscow began to thaw, there was even a push to end BBG’s externally directed activities, led by Democratic senator and then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair J. William Fulbright. In 1972, he suggested Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty “should be given an opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.” Fulbright’s entreaties have been ignored ever after, even when the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, and there was by definition no more Cold War to fight.
The intervening years saw the creation of a dedicated, secret US government department for domestic propaganda. Founded in 1983, the Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD) sought to influence public opinion. In 2005, the Bush administration’s aggressive use of ‘prepackaged news’, or ‘video news releases’, was revealed. The Departments of Defense, State and others had produced hundreds of slick video clips indistinguishable from actual news reports, which were subsequently provided to national and local news stations and broadcast without changes, or disclaimers identifying them as government-made advertisements.
In May that year, the GAO issued a damning report, and its appraisal was indistinguishable from its ruling on the ODP. Government departments which had produced and disseminated ‘prepackaged news’ had “violated the federal prohibition on the use of appropriated funds for purposes of publicity or propaganda not authorized by Congress.”
However, penalties, much less action to end the policy, were not forthcoming – the office merely wrote a circular letter to the heads of all federal agencies “to remind them of the prohibition on publicity or propaganda.” As of November 2020, no government department or employee, or news network, has been punished in any way for engaging in the practice.
*Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.(Article edited for size)
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