How to Know What’s Really Propaganda

Peter Pomerantsev, a contributor at The Atlantic and author of This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, is an expert on the ways information can be manipulated. For this special episode, Megan talks with Peter about the role of propaganda in America and how to watch out for it.

Looking for more great audio from The Atlantic? Check out Autocracy in America, hosted by Peter Pomerantsev and staff writer Anne Applebaum. Subscribe wherever you listen.

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Megan Garber: Andrea, when you think of propaganda, what first comes to mind?

Andrea Valdez: Mmm. Uncle Sam posters during the war effort: you know, I want you. And Rosie the Riveter: you know, We can do it. And, um, war posters from World War II and World War I, where they’re asking people to buy bonds or to ration food. I mean, I think even Looney Tunes had wartime cartoons that served as propaganda!

Garber: Ooh. Oh, wow. And it’s interesting; the history stuff is my first thought, too. These really bold, visually driven posters, basically almost like advertising billboards—except the products being sold are political causes.

Valdez: Right.

Garber: Yeah, exactly. And I guess there is something appropriate about that, because the people who’ve created propaganda historically learned some of their tactics from the advertising industry. And one of the core ideas in advertising is that while you’re in one way appealing to consumers’ rationality, you’re also—and often even more so—appealing to their emotions.

Valdez: Mm. And one of the most fundamental ways to appeal to emotions is really just using charged language. The platforms can change—posters, commercials, cartoons, social media—but one common denominator, throughout all of the history of propaganda, is the use of powerful language.

Garber: Yeah. And it’s interesting, too, that both of us, when we think about propaganda as language—just the word propaganda—we went to the past. Because, of course, propaganda isn’t just an element of the past, right? It’s very much a part of our present reality.

Valdez: Yes. And, you know, that gets to one of the core questions from our season, How to Know What’s Real. When it comes to information, what is real? This question feels especially urgent around our political realities. Right now there’s a presidential election coming up, and it feels like so many people, both here and abroad, live in their own individual political realities. Clearly, propaganda has played a big role here.

Garber: Yeah. And that has me thinking, too, about what makes certain kinds of messaging propaganda. And I guess how the ways it’s evolved and devolved might instruct us, um, as we try to figure out life in this moment. The technologies people use to create propaganda and to spread it might change, but its defining characteristics do stay the same.

Pomerantsev: The modern usage of the term starts with the Counter-Reformation. And the Catholic Church is worried about the spread of Protestantism, saying, De propaganda fide: “Go and spread the faith.” It’s not about information. It’s about persuasion. But it’s not a negative term. And one of the reasons some historians think that we use the term negatively is because in the Protestant tradition, anything associated with the Catholic Church is negative. So propaganda becomes a negative word in England and northern Europe, because it’s about Catholics. So, you know that might be one of the root causes of this neutral term getting a bad name.

Garber: So Peter, zooming out to the present moment, where propaganda does have this generally negative connotation, I’m wondering if you can help delineate how it’s different from other forms of information transfer. Because there are a lot of places, outside of politics but also within it, where the kind of persuasive information you’re describing—the new forms of “spreading the faith,” almost—is legitimate.

Pomerantsev: Propaganda essentially means forms of mass persuasion—that is, to the benefit of the person doing it rather than the person receiving it. So that’s how it’s different from public education. Public education is meant, in principle, to be for the benefit of the people receiving it. So, that doesn’t mean propaganda can’t benefit the persons receiving it, but it is not conceived with that aim. It is you trying to get somebody else to do what you want. Frankly, propaganda is usually used in a negative way, in the sense that it is usually somehow duplicitous; it is somehow deceiving people about the true nature of its aims. So, the way it’s become used, you know, in society is with that sense. You’re trying to get people to do something that you want them to do in a way that involves some sort of dishonesty. I think we have to go by campaign-by-campaign activity and decide: Is this okay for democracy? Or do we think this overstepped a line, which starts to mess up democracy?

Garber: I want to pivot, then, to one of your areas of expertise, which is Russia. You’ve not only studied propaganda in Russia, but you’ve lived in Russia, and you speak Russian fluently. And I wonder about the state of propaganda there—what does it feel like to live in an information environment where there is so much propaganda swirling around?

Pomerantsev: So look, it was a really unique experience until I moved to the U.S. and saw so much of the same stuff here. Um, you’re living in a world where truth is lost as value. A world of extreme doubt. I mean, Putin’s propaganda, unlike Communist propaganda, is defined not on a positive: you know, some story about the glorious Communist future. It’s defined by seeding doubt, conspiracy theory, suspicion, with an aim of making people so confused they don’t know what’s true and what’s not. Making them feel absolutely passive and essentially saying, Look, in this world where there are no values, no truth, total confusion, you need a strong man to lead you through the murk. You know, it’s quite bizarre moving to America and finding so many people who, echoing things that I’d heard in Russia, were like, “Oh, you can’t tell the difference between truth and lies, you don’t know who’s lying, you can’t trust anybody anymore. You know, I don’t trust anybody. I just go with my feelings.” Which is the most manipulable thing.

Garber: So I’d love to ask you about this idea that propaganda isn’t always just about truth and falsehood, but also about this idea that truth can’t really exist—the manipulations you’re describing leading to a form of nihilism, almost. Could you tell me a little bit more about how cynicism factors into propaganda?

Pomerantsev: Well, the sort of propaganda that Putin puts out is all about that. You know, effective propaganda always works with the grain of what people feel. There was a deep cynicism in the last sort of 30 years of the Soviet Union, um, when no one really believed in Communism, but still pretended that they did. So, that cynicism is encouraged, you know. It’s going with the flow, and it’s weaponized, sort of. You turn it against the world; you say, “Look, you may have hoped for a democratic future, but democracy doesn’t exist anywhere. It’s all a sham. There’s just a deep state in America, and, you know, it’s just elites controlling things.”

Yeah, we’re kind of corrupt here, but everybody’s corrupt. But it’s also kind of a funny paradox that I think, you know, it’s important to grasp. I think we all know it from our own experiences: that people who are super cynical—like, “Oh, you can’t trust the media, and you can’t trust the politicians”—they don’t end up free. They actually end up believing in crazy conspiracies instead. So there’s something about the human mind that does need to live in some sort of framework, and some sort of way of understanding the world, some sort of way of understanding which community you belong to, and some way of placing yourself in the world. And it’s a real paradox that in order to be free and independent, you have to be a little bit open-minded and trusting. Being super cynical doesn’t make you free. It actually makes you more dependent on propaganda. In Russia, at least, they have an excuse, sort of: It’s an authoritarian country where the government controls all the media. Here, people are choosing to live in this sort of space. And I’m yet to understand why they’ve made that decision.

[Music.]

Garber: This idea that we are sort of choosing to be manipulated—as far as the U.S. is concerned, I think of something like reality TV, for example, and how it shapes American politics. I’m thinking here of The Apprentice, in particular, which did so much to launch the political career of Donald Trump—to present him as both a celebrity and a leader. And to suggest that “celebrity” and “leader” might be, effectively, the same thing. So many of our politics, these days, come in the form of—and look like, and act like—entertainment.

Pomerantsev: So reality shows are something that I’ve thought about a lot, because my first career, actually, was to work in entertainment TV when reality shows were king. This was right after university; early 2000s. And I think reality shows are very very important. America had a president and might have a president very soon again, who was a reality-TV-show star. In Russia, people like [Vladislav] Surkov, sort of Putin’s great vizier of propaganda, would go to reality-show sets to learn how to kind of create political theater based on reality shows.

I think it’s very important to understand: When do reality shows emerge? They emerge in the 1990s, at this point when politics, post–Cold War politics, becomes bled of any ideological meaning. You have the emergence of these politicians—Tony Blair, Bill Clinton—who don’t really have any strong ideology, but they’re really good at showmanship. Politics becomes all about personality, rather than ideas. This is the moment where the reality show emerges as our definitive entertainment genre. You have the rise of politicians who are just about personality, with little substance—and politics becomes all about personality clashes. And you have the rise of reality shows, which are all about clashing personalities.

The media, which is actually completely complicit in this process, starts to cover politics as a series of tactics: Who’s going to outsmart the other—Clinton or Gingrich? It’s a game, you know? So politics becomes about tactics, rather than about policies. Like a reality show. Everyone’s complicit in it. I don’t want to blame the reality-show producers. I don’t want to blame the media. I don’t know. I think it just is the moment where personality clashes replace policy debates.

But I think now we’ve got to a point where we’re very conscious of what we’re doing, and I’m not sure we’re stopping. Take American presidential debates, they’re designed how we used to design reality shows. They’re designed in a way to get people to attack each other in the lowest possible way. Now, everybody who’s a member of a reality show knows that the way you get to dominate the show is: You attack someone. And they’ll attack you back. And you guys, you’re the heart of the conflict, and you dominate the series. It’s all about you. By giving debates the same logic as we gave reality shows, we’re doing everything to further a political culture where reality-show stars are going to win and keep on winning.

Garber: In terms of where we’re at in the U.S. right now—what could we even do at this point to resist that?

Pomerantsev: So let’s say it was solutions orientated, like, “Here is a policy problem; show us how you’re going to work together and how you’re going to work with the other side to get this through.” Yeah, it’s still a competition. You’re still forcing people to compete, which—we want competition. We want to see who’s better, but you’re setting a completely different set of challenges. I don’t know; we’d have to test it out. We have to test out whether it could still be entertaining. Um, I think that, you know, people do have a desire to watch mean conflicts. We do all enjoy that, but we also like to see people collaborating together for a greater aim. I’m looking at some social research at the moment about which bits of history Americans admire the most. And it’s things like, well, the civil-rights movement obviously comes up on top. But beyond that, it’s things like the moon landing and the Hoover Dam and bits of, like, successes in the Cold War and the Normandy landings. Because they all show people working together for a greater aim. So there is also a pleasure in collaboration and achieving things together. And if you’re creating TV that’s actually both entertaining and for the public good, then that’s the sort of challenge you need to solve.

Garber: In your observations, whether in a broader global context or in the U.S., have you seen things that have worked when it comes to fighting back against propaganda? Have there been strategies that have proven successful?

Pomerantsev: So I teach a course about propaganda at Johns Hopkins. And one of the things we look at is, we look at photographs from the Great Depression. Photographs that every American knows of; you know, the heart-wrenching photographs of people left destitute by the Great Depression. And these were photographs by some of the greatest photographers of the age, that have become completely iconic in the American imagination, which were sponsored by, you know, the government in order to promote the need for a New Deal. And I asked my students: Is this propaganda or not? But that is a wonderful example of how you use communication for something positive, because however you feel about the details of the New Deal, the fact is, you are setting up empathy. So I think propaganda in the negative sense—and in its most vile sense, and in its most extreme sense, and its most dangerous sense—is about dehumanizing the other. So the first thing is to start to live in a culture where we do humanize each other. And I think that you do do that through culture. You do that through films, through movies, through photography. You know, we talk about identity a lot, in a toxic identity politics, where it’s all about “my tribe” and “the other tribe is evil.” But it doesn’t have to be like that. You know, you can have a much more open-ended identity, where you realize that actually, you know, we’re all connected, dependent on each other, and so on and so forth. Now, I don’t mean anything fluffy, by the way. I certainly don’t think you should hug fascists. I think you should defeat fascists. But, if we’re talking about, you know, a society managing to live together, it starts with overcoming that dehumanization. That’s Step No. 1.

Garber: What’s Step No. 2?

Pomerantsev: Once you’ve done that, you can move on to the next phase, which is agreeing on what we think evidence is. Yeah? It’s not about agreeing on the facts, but can we at least agree what counts as evidence? And then finally, I think, democratic discourse—and how it’s different from in a dictatorship like Russia—is that this leads to decision making and political change. So people aren’t just screaming into the abyss, or screaming at each other, through Twitter. They’re actually getting somewhere, yeah? We’re actually affecting something. And when we look at theories of a democratic public sphere, that’s what makes it special. It’s people debating, gathering evidence, and then coming to decisions that become policy. So it’s all those stages—and I think today we really need to think through about how we’re gonna get there.

You know: What’s the role of movies? What’s the role of online platforms and how we design online platforms? And then, what’s the connection of all those discussions to political change? If you don’t have those photographs at the start, if you don’t have the humanization process, nothing else is possible.

Garber: I’d love to know what you say to people who might say that concerns about propaganda are overblown—that, you know, politicians have always lied. That there’s always been misinformation. That nothing’s really new about this moment. How would you respond to those arguments?

Pomerantsev: Whenever a new technology emerges, whether it’s the printing press or radio or the internet and social media today, it causes huge ruptures. So we’re clearly in a phase like that—you know, online technologies have produced incredible excitement, but they’ve also produced huge opportunities for those who wish to unleash destruction and violence. So, um, I am not alarmed when a politician is lying. That is, you know, fairly standard for that profession. But when something has gone wrong in our societies, when people can no longer trust each other enough to communicate with each other, when hate has become normalized, when violence has become normalized, I think we’re in a very dangerous place.

[Music.]

Valdez: Megan, in this past season, you invoked the media theorist Marshall McLuhan a couple of times. Your conversation with Peter has me thinking of another very famous media theorist named Neil Postman. Postman had an essay called “Propaganda” that he published in the 1970s. And in it, he wrote, “of all the words we use to talk about talk, propaganda is perhaps the most mischievous.” I love this definition of the word. It really gets at what Peter was talking about. That propaganda can be many things to many people. It’s not inherently good or bad. It’s malleable.

Gabrer: Mmm, and that’s such an important way of looking at things. In part because it highlights the challenges we’re facing, or at least one of the challenges, when it comes to propaganda in our own political lives. It would be so much easier if propaganda were clear cut and easy to define—almost like those posters you mentioned at the beginning of this episode, with their blunt messages and really obvious aims. But propaganda doesn’t look like that always, and especially now. The bright colors are actually gray areas.

[Music.]

Valdez: Megan, our season of How to Know What’s Real is over, but Peter, along with staff writer Anne Applebaum, will be the new hosts of a new podcast coming from The Atlantic called Autocracy in America.

Garber: I’m really excited about this show—it’s a five-part series, and unlike a lot of coverage right now, it’s not just a warning. It’s about how America is already transforming, in part due to the types of psychological manipulation we’ve been talking about.

Valdez: Anne and Peter explore how the recent consolidation of power, and the way we permit secrecy in politics, makes democracy ever more vulnerable. And how some of our other vulnerabilities were actually baked into the American system by the founders.

Garber: The series is an effort to mark what’s changing in America and to recognize what we’re losing before it’s too late. Follow the show now, wherever you listen.