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How to Know What's Real: How to Know What’s Really Propaganda
00:23:38
How the history of propaganda helps us understand our current reality
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- [00:02]
Narrator
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- [00:30]
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- [01:04]
Megan Garber
Andrea when you think of propaganda, what first comes to mind? Mm.
- [01:10]
Andrea Valdez
You know, Uncle Sam posters during the war effort, you know, I want you and Rosie the Riveter. You know, we can do it. And you know, war posters from World War II and World War I, you know, 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.
- [01:33]
Megan 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. 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, you know, while you're in one way appealing to consumers, rationality, you're also, and often even more so, appealing to their emotions.
- [02:11]
Andrea Valdez
Mm. And one of the most fundamental ways to appeal to emotions is really just using charged language.
- [02:19]
Megan Garber
Mm.
- [02:20]
Andrea Valdez
The platforms can change posters, commercials, cartoons, social media. But one common denominator throughout all of the history of propaganda is, is the use of powerful language.
- [02:31]
Megan Garber
Mm. Yeah. And it's interesting, too, that both of us, when we think about propaganda as language, just the word propaganda 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.
- [02:47]
Andrea Valdez
Yes. And, you know, that gets to one of the core questions from our season, how to know it'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.
- [03:16]
Megan 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 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.
- [03:40]
Peter Pomerantsev
I actually called my second book this Is Not Propaganda, and then virtually never use the word in the book because.
- [03:47]
Unnamed Expert
I thought this word has become so.
- [03:49]
Peter Pomerantsev
Polluted and contentious that it's become kind of meaningless.
- [03:53]
Megan Garber
That's Peter Pomerantsev. He's an Atlantic contributor and the author of several books, including Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible. And this Is Not Propaganda. Peter's work is especially urgent right now, I think, because he is an expert on the ways information can be manipulated historically, but also in the present. For this special episode of How To, I talked with Peter about the ways everyday people can contend with messaging that tries to skew our sense of reality. But we started with what propaganda actually is.
- [04:32]
Unnamed Expert
The modern usage of the term starts with the Counter Reformation, and the Catholic Church is worried about the spread of Protestantism, saying, di propaganda fide. Go and spread the faith. Go and defend 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 that might be one of the root causes of this neutral term getting a bad name.
- [05:10]
Megan 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, since there are a lot of places outside of politics but also within it where the kind of persuasive information you're describing, almost these new forms of spreading the faith, is legitimate.
- [05:35]
Unnamed Expert
Propaganda essentially means forms of mass persuasion. 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 to 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. So, frankly, propaganda is usually used in a negative way, in the sense that it's usually somehow duplicitous, it's somehow deceiving people about the true nature of its aims. So the way it's become used 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 campaign by campaign, by activity, by activity, and decide is this okay for democracy, or do we think this overstepped line which starts to mess up democracy.
- [06:36]
Megan Garber
And I want to pivot from that 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?
- [07:00]
Unnamed Expert
So, look, it was a really unique.
- [07:02]
Peter Pomerantsev
Experience until I moved to the US and saw so much of the same stuff here. Look, you're living in a world where truth has lost its value, a world of extreme doubt. I mean, the Putin's propaganda, unlike communist propaganda, is defined not on a positive, but, you know, some story about, you know, 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 muck. And, you know, it's quite bizarre moving to America and finding so many people who. Echoing things that I'd heard in Russia, like, oh, you can't tell the difference between truth. 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, you know, which is the most manipulable thing.
- [07:58]
Megan Garber
Yeah, and I'd love to ask you about this idea that propaganda isn't always just about truth and falsehood, but it's also about this broader idea that truth itself can't really exist. So 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?
- [08:21]
Peter 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, you know, There's a deep cynicism and in the last sort of 30 years of the Soviet Union, when no one really believed in communism but still pretended that they did, so that cynicism is encouraged, it's going with the flow and it's weaponized. 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 it's just the 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 is 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.
- [10:10]
Narrator
St. John's College is for students who seek meaning in their lives, who ask hard questions of themselves and their world, and who dare to free their minds. In vigorous discussion based classes, students grapple with fundamental ideas by engaging with works by some of the world's greatest writers and thinkers, from Homer, Plato, Seneca and Euclid to Nietzsche, Einstein, Wolff and Baldwin. St. John's program of study includes over 200 great books from across 3,000 years of history, including philosophy, literature, politics, math, science and music. At St. John's faculty are known as tutors and not professors. This is because they will never profess to know anything. Rather than telling you what to think, they will help you ask great questions. Questions like how can human flourishing be maximized? What kinds of leaders do we want and need? Can personal peace exist when social chaos reigns at St. John's you will learn to listen deeply and across perspectives, to speak and reason with precision, and to honor the value that each student brings to the conversation. St. John's graduates, who are systems thinkers in a world of specialists, go on to become writers, judges, diplomats, lawyers, school leaders, ethicists, linguists, scientists, researchers, and more. Explore 3,000 years of human thought in just four years or two for graduate students on St. John's two campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Annapolis, Maryland. Learn about our robust financial aid and our academic programs at sjc.edu. that's sjc.edu.
- [11:53]
Megan Garber
This idea that we're sort of choosing to be manipulated as far as the US 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. And so many of our politics in the US These days comes in the form of and looks like and acts like entertainment.
- [12:32]
Unnamed Expert
So reality shows are something that I thought about a lot because my first career was to work in entertainment tv when reality shows were king. This was right after university in the early 2000s. And I think reality shows are very important. America had a president and might have a president again very soon who was a reality TV show star. And in Russia, people like Vladislav Surkov, he was sort of Putin's great vizier of propaganda. He would actually go to reality show sets to learn how to create a 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 in politics, post Cold War, politics becomes bled of any ideological meaning. It's when you have the emergence of these politicians like Tony Blair or Bill Clinton, who don't have any strong ideology, but they're really good at showmanship. Politics becomes all about personality rather than deep ideas. That is the moment when the reality show emerges as our definitive entertainment genre. You have the rise of politicians who are all 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. Media are actually completely complicit in this process because they start to cover politics not as a series of arguments and policy debates, but as a series of tactics. Who's going to outsmart the other? Clinton or Newt Gingrich? It was like a game. So politics became about tactics rather than about policies, like a reality show. Everybody was complicit in it. I don't want to Blame the reality show producers. I don't want to blame the media. I think it's just the moment when 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 in the way we used to design a reality show. They're designed in a way to get people, candidates to attack each other in the meanest 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, that 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, where we're doing everything to further a political culture where reality show stars are gonna win and keep on winning.
- [15:11]
Megan Garber
In terms of where we are in the US Right now, what could we even do at this point to resist that?
- [15:17]
Peter Pomerantsev
So let's say it was about. It was solutions orientated, like, here is a policy problem. Show us how you're gonna work together and how you're gonna 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 wanna 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'd have to test it out whether it could still be entertaining. I think that people do have a desire to watch low level 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, civil rights movement obviously comes 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. 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.
- [16:34]
Megan Garber
And in your observations, whether in a global context or in the US have you seen things that have worked? When it comes to fighting back against propaganda, have there been strategies that have proven successful?
- [16:47]
Peter Pomerantsev
So I teach a course about propaganda at Johns Hopkins, and one of the early 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. But you do do that through culture. You do that through films, through movies, through photography. We talk about identity a lot and 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 can have a much more open ended identity where you realize that actually 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 a society managing to live together, it starts with overcoming that dehumanization. That's step number one.
- [18:33]
Megan Garber
And then what's step number two?
- [18:35]
Peter 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 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 all about people debating, gathering evidence.
- [19:21]
Unnamed Expert
Swapping stories, and then coming to decisions which become policy. So you need to think through all those stages. And I think today we really need to think how we're gonna get there.
- [19:32]
Peter Pomerantsev
You know, what's the role of movies, what's the role of online platforms and.
- [19:37]
Unnamed Expert
How we design the online space, and then what's the conn of all those discussions to political change.
- [19:44]
Peter Pomerantsev
Look, if you don't have the photograph to the start, if you don't have the humanization process, nothing else, nothing else is possible.
- [19:54]
Megan 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?
- [20:11]
Peter 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. Clearly, online technologies have produced both incredible excitement, but they've also produced huge opportunities for those who wish to unleash destruction of violence. So I am not alarmed when a politician is lying. That is fairly, 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.
- [21:07]
Andrea 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.
- [21:49]
Megan Garber
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.
- [22:26]
Andrea Valdez
Megan Our season of how to know what's real is over. But Peter, along with staff writer Ann Applebaum, they'll be the new hosts of a podcast coming from the Atlantic called Autocracy in America.
- [22:39]
Megan Garber
I am so 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 also about how America is already transforming in part due to the types of psychological manipulation we've been talking about.
- [22:57]
Andrea 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.
- [23:11]
Megan 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. How to Know what's Real was hosted by Andrea Valdez and me, Megan Garber. Our producer is Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudina Baid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact Checked by Enna Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smirciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of Audio is Claudina Baid and the managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.
- [23:54]
Narrator
St. John's College is for students who seek meaning in their lives, who ask hard questions of themselves and their world, and who dare to free their minds. In vigorous discussion based classes, students grapple with fundamental ideas by engaging with works by some of the world's greatest writers and thinkers, from Homer, Plato, Seneca, and Euclid to Nietzsche, Einstein, Wolff, and Baldwin. St. John's program of study includes over 200 great books from across 3,000 years of history, including philosophy, literature, politics, math, science and music. At St. John's faculty are known as tutors and not professors. This is because they will never profess to know anything. Rather than telling you what to think, they will help you ask great questions. Questions like how can human flourishing be maximized? What kinds of leaders do we want and need? Can personal peace exist when social chaos reigns? At St. John's you will learn to listen deeply and across perspectives, to speak and reason with precision, and to honor the value that each student brings to the conversation. St. John's graduates who are systems thinkers and a world of specialists go on to become writers, judges, diplomats, lawyers, school leaders, ethicists, linguists, scientists, researchers and more. Explore 3,000 years of human thought in just four years or two for graduate students on St. John's two campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Annapolis, Maryland. Learn about our robust financial aid and our academic programs at sjc. Edu. That's sjc. Edu.