It is a little surprising and disconcerting that the great preoccupation of 21^st century television—the fragmentation of the mass audience across multiple distribution platforms—has likewise afflicted government propagandists. In her new book, Propaganda and Counter-terrorism: Strategies for Global Change (Manchester University Press, 2015), Emma Louise Briant argues that the post-9/11 media landscape has turned propaganda campaigns into frustrating hunts for receptive audiences. In the Internet age, locating and convincing a sizeable group of people—potential combatants or consumers—to buy your content is a problem that unites all message makers.

Dramatic series have much to say about the power of messaging in international conflict. The fourth season of Showtime’s Homeland grapples with the inability of the U.S. to control its message when anyone with a mobile phone and an Internet connection can broadcast. Squeezing U.S. drone strikes, a stateless enemy, and a Benghazi-like attack into a single season, Homeland employs the art of serial narrative to craft an endlessly disastrous scenario predicated on the decentralization of enemy power and the debilitating struggles within the U.S. security apparatus. Briant offers a highly detailed primer on the degree of disarray that Homeland attempts to portray. Especially intriguing and maddening is the narrative of inter-agency rivalry that runs throughout the book. The overwhelming tension and lack of coordination between the CIA, Department of State, and Department of Defense are obvious fodder for an hour-long drama (or a sitcom, for that matter). The reality of this type of discord—explicated in great detail by Briant—might explain the allure of the covert, rigidly centralized, and flawlessly coherent espionage agency B613 in ABC’s Scandal. There can be no turf wars or chaos if, officially, there is neither turf nor uncertainty.

Chaos—or something approximating it—drives Homeland. FX’s The Americans, set in the 1980s, resonates in the post-9/11 world by offering a relative sense of order. The series, which follows married Soviet spies masquerading as inconspicuous travel agents Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, constructs a simpler time complete with fewer channels, coherent messaging, and an identifiable enemy. The characters, thankfully, undercut that simplicity and craft a layered sense of Reaganite politics and culture. The opening credit sequence, too, participates in a vital way, drawing stark parallels between U.S. and Soviet propaganda in order to position us uncomfortably within nostalgia and nationalism.

The Americans | Title Sequence from Wes | VoicesFILM.com on Vimeo.

Briant points to the Cold War as the point at which private forms of persuasion and meaning making—public relations, advertising, motion pictures—assumed greater roles in “constructing the American image at home and abroad.” Focused as it is on the Soviets’ infiltration of sedate middle-class life—a life that “doesn’t turn out socialists,” as Philip argues in the pilot—The Americans actively and ironically showcases consumer goods as markers of American freedom (Philip’s love affair with cowboy boots, daughter Paige’s red bra, a Soviet defector’s junk food fetish) and emphasizes Elizabeth’s clear disdain for them. The series is anchored in the tension between the American image that Briant discusses and the self-identification of our communist protagonists—a tension frequently funneled through the nuclear family and their bland, suburban neighborhood. Upon learning that his new neighbor, Stan Beeman, happens to be an FBI counterintelligence officer, Philip jokes that he will avoid spying around the neighborhood. Beeman warns, “Especially for the Russians,” to which Philip replies, “They’re the worst, right?” Propaganda’s domestic reach, enabled by commercial media as Briant argues, appears in that exchange and throughout the family’s daily life. In the Season 3 episode “Stingers,” the family breakfast nook transforms into a confessional that pits anti-communist messages against the spies’ commitment to their own set of values. Nurturing and non-threatening in this domestic environment, Elizabeth attempts to disentangle her fight from an entire cultural apparatus designed to discredit her: “Most of what you hear about the Soviet Union isn’t true…. We serve our country, but we also serve the cause of peace around the world. We fight for people who can’t fight for themselves.” How Elizabeth will disrupt the influence of the “American image” that Briant writes about is the question.

Understanding the role of entertainment—TV news included—in the construction of that image is key. As the most spectacular mouthpiece for U.S. values and military might, the entertainment industry showed up to the so-called War on Terror with both traditional and innovative techniques for defeating the enemy. But things have changed since 2001. Twenty-first century propaganda—corporate or governmental—is not as coherent as it wants to be. While trying to keep up with ISIS, a force fluent in the language of social media, U.S. intelligence agencies are manufacturing messages that can easily trample or contradict each other as they navigate multiple communication platforms. Briant’s work excels in pushing us to reflect on the reasons why agency cultures and propaganda planning are so fraught. But we do need to think about process and product. Briant argues that the chasm between U.S. propaganda and foreign policy—between message and reality—can contribute to the sort of instability that enables the rise of a group like ISIS. And how has ISIS managed its message? In addition to pioneering hashtag terrorism, ISIS has created an audio-visual rupture in the representation of war. Our understanding of what violence looks and sounds like is no longer mediated entirely by broadcast and cable news. Whether motivated by concerns about decency, national security, or advertising dollars, TV news has sheltered U.S. audiences from the human toll of military actions. Victims of our wars have been rendered invisible through government and corporate propaganda. The unbearable barrage of ISIS videos reverses that trend and makes explicit the relationship between violence and victims. So, the current propaganda crisis facing the U.S. does illuminate the incompatibility of old methods with new media, as Briant and others argue. But the crisis has also narrowed the gap between U.S. audiences and their awareness of the costs of war.

Following is the second installment in the series of fortnightly blogs “From Nottingham and Beyond,” featuring contributions from faculty in the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media and our alumni working in higher education or media industries in the U.K. and abroad. This week’s contributor, Debra Ramsey, completed her PhD in the department in 2012.

American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014) ends in silence.  No music plays over the last few moments of the film, or through the final credits.  When I saw the film in my local cinema just outside of London, the audience was also silent and remained in their seats for an unusually long time until slowly rising and filing for the exits.  There was remarkably little chatter as they did so.  I know that I didn’t speak until after we left the cinema, because I was trying to work out how I felt about the film.  I can’t be sure, of course, that others in the audience were similarly conflicted, but a brief survey of Twitter shows that the Staines Vue audience the night that I saw the film was not the only one to leave in silence:

Yet the film is the center of a noisy and impassioned public debate in the U.S., a debate shaking loose opinions not only on Chris Kyle, the American Navy Seal on whose real-life experiences in the second Gulf War the film is based, and the conflict itself, but on the nature of warfare in general, the U.S. military, and even more broadly, American national identity and foreign policy.  American Sniper, according to Iraq veteran Colby Buzzell, is even more divisive than the war itself was for Americans.

In Iraq, the film also provoked controversy.  Fares Hilal, owner of the only multi-screen cinema in Baghdad, reluctantly pulled American Sniper from his screens after only a week, following complaints from Iraq’s Ministry of Culture that the film “insults” Iraqis.  Yet in an interview cited in The Washington Post, Hilal notes that “a lot of people wanted to see this film.”  Descriptions of at least one screening in which Iraqi audience members screamed “Shoot him!  He has an IED, don’t wait for permission!” as Chris Kyle (played by Bradley Cooper) hesitates before shooting a child who presents a possible threat to a U.S. patrol, and accounts of others who protested so vehemently at the same scene that they were forcibly removed from the theater provide some indication of the film’s ability to provoke contradictory responses.  U.K. audiences are in general more restrained and in my experience do not shout things at the screen, but the film polarized opinions here too.  Some argue that American Sniper is an “even-handed and thoroughly absorbing look at a morally ambiguous modern conflict,” while others see it as “dull” and lacking complexity.

What interests me about the “noise” that surrounds American Sniper internationally is what it reveals about the role of films and filmmakers in general, and of war films in particular, in today’s mediascape.  Following Seth Rogen’s tweet that the film reminded him of Stolz der Nation (Pride of the Nation), the film-within-a-film of a German sniper in Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009), the idea of American Sniper as “propaganda” surfaces frequently in discussions of the film.

Similar to Rogen, war correspondent Chris Hedges compares American Sniper to the “big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era” and calls it “a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire.”[1]  Descriptions of the film as “dangerous propaganda,” “pro-war propaganda” responsible for “brainwashing” Americans into waging war, and “recruitment propaganda for culture-war extremists” circulate in tweets, blogs and forums, where the general consensus appears to be that the box-office figures and the film’s current status as the most-pirated film not only in the U.S. but in a hundred other countries provide evidence of the film’s effectiveness in disseminating its propaganda message.  Those who see the film in this way identify a hatred of Iraqis in particular, and of Muslims in general, as central to that message, and frequently offer up these four tweets, originally collected in a screenshot posted by Rania Khalek, as evidence:

References to Nazi propaganda are revealing, because implicit in such critiques of American Sniper is a perspective of film reminiscent of that during World War II, a time when mass media were emerging as powerful phenomena, accompanied by the belief in their persuasive power over a mass audience.  To use a metaphor from the film itself, critiques that view American Sniper as militaristic propaganda also view the audience of the film as sheep, easily swayed and led into war and hatred.  Examined carefully, these tweets do not provide compelling evidence of American Sniper’s ability to influence and shape individual opinion, but are more suggestive of how the film is appropriated by those who feel it represents their existing ideological and political perspectives.  Unlike in Nazi Germany, these audience members are free to choose from a range of ideologies and political parties represented in myriad ways across a spectrum of media, which, arguably, makes their choice of hatred and bigotry even more abhorrent.

In contrast to those who say the film is propagating a specific political perspective of the war, there are those who maintain that it is not political enough and that it creates a view of war as narrow as that seen through a sniper scope.   Eastwood’s decision to adopt Kyle’s “philosophy” and perspective on “defending the country and defending the guys who are defending the country” means that the film does not engage with the reasons for the U.S. military presence in Iraq.  For some commentators, the film avoids discussing the forces that “put Kyle and his high-powered rifle on rooftops in Iraq and asked him to shoot women and children” and instead presents an “unnecessary” distortion of the “truth.”  Whereas Eastwood and scriptwriter Jason Hall felt their responsibility lay with representing Kyle and telling his story “right,” implicit in the critiques that accuse the film of distorting history is the idea that filmmakers have a moral obligation to interrogate the causes of the Iraq war.  There is no doubt that the war in Iraq is contentious, but the issue here is whether filmmakers have a duty to engage with that controversy, and if by not doing so they somehow lead viewers (and the sheep metaphor is apt here too) astray.  Surely dictating what truths about the war should be represented is precisely what leads to propaganda in the first place?  Luckily for the sheep, the popular press around the world stepped in to deliver the “truth” in various forms: the “truth” behind whether Chris Kyle “really” was a hero or not, the things that the film gets “wrong,” and the “true story” of Kyle’s life.  No discussion has focused on the responsibilities of these outlets, or on the possibility that the truths presented here are as filtered via media as the version of the war represented in the film.

The only way to tell a “true” war story, according to Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien, is to keep telling it.[2]  Whether you feel that American Sniper is propaganda or that it fails to engage with ideological issues (and weeks after seeing the film, I still have not made my mind up about it), there can be no doubt that it reveals film’s power to catalyze debate.  Despite the recurrent theme in critiques of the film of the audience as sheep, because of American Sniper, many people through a range of different media across the world now analyze and discuss the Iraq war.  In other words, they are telling their own war stories.  And in that retelling, with all its ugliness, its fury, its passion and its spaces of silence, perhaps we can move closer to understanding the complexity of the “truths” of the conflict.

Notes

[1] Rogen has since denied comparing the film to Nazi propaganda, and maintains that he was simply comparing two films with similar plots, not making a political point.

[2] Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (London: Flamingo, 1991), p. 80.

Sociologist and public opinion researcher Hadley Cantril.

“One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention…” – H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds (1898)

Hadley Cantril, Educational Radio, and The Princeton Radio Research Project

What was the effect of The Mercury Theatre on the Air’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” (WOTW) broadcast on Communication and Media Studies? Besides being one of the seminal works of Mass Media history, WOTW turns out to be the subject of the first major commissioned analysis of audience reception that helped to legitimate the reliability of public policy research. The name of that influential study was The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, written by Hadley Cantril and first published by Princeton University Press in 1940. How Cantril’s book came to be commissioned is almost as central to the history of media research as the program itself.

The back story actually begins with the problems faced by educational broadcasters in the 1930s, the forerunner to public broadcasting in the U.S. Before 1934 there was a robust experiment in public pedagogy run out of universities and school districts, but the Communications Act of 1934 privatized the use of radio so extensively that only about two-dozen stations remained. One of the reasons this happened was because there was no evidence that educational radio was in fact educational. But after 1934, FCC commissioners E.O. Sykes and Anning Prall were interested in classroom extension services via radio, if research could show that educational technology was a viable use of frequency allocations.

In 1935 the FCC formed an exploratory commission with the Office of Education to examine this question, called the Federal Radio Education Committee (FREC). Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril was designated by the FREC to supervise a special study on audience reception. He obtained funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and received support from William Paley of CBS through the appointment of a young CBS researcher named Frank Stanton. Cantril also recruited a young Austrian immigrant named Paul Lazarsfeld, and his wife Herta Herzog, completing the core of what became known as the Princeton Radio Research Project (PRP).

Between 1936 and 1939 the trio of Cantril, Lazarsfeld, and Stanton streamlined the methods of “media effects” research, which notably became the primary approach taken by Mass Communication departments after WWII. Lazarsfeld has received many accolades for his methodological contributions, and deservedly so, but it seems to have been forgotten that it was Hadley Cantril who directed the project. And not only was he the director, but he innovated the first model of effects research as early as 1936 by combining the survey research methods of the commercial networks with social psychology. The synthesis of these two methods permitted researchers to account for trends in social opinion with a very high degree of accuracy. Further, results were reproducible even in disparate studies. The key to their success came from the capacity of the “technique,” as Cantril called it, to divide and subdivide demographic characteristics of listeners into specified social profiles.

Though first developed to evaluate the effectiveness of educational broadcasting, the PRP began to turn their attention to the question of how radio aesthetics influenced social opinion. They found that if slight adjustments were made to content, that patterns of reception would palpably change among different demographic groups. Further, listeners had developed tacit anticipation about how they should respond to the ordering of content in a broadcast.

Excerpt from Hadley Cantril’s personal letters.

October 31, 1938

The day after the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, a request came from Frank Stanton’s employer – the Columbia Broadcast System (CBS) – for an opportunity to test their new “technique.” Cantril wrote in one personal letter: “when the broadcast of October 30 occurred, with its responses in mass hysteria over a wide area, the Princeton researchers recognized that here was a perfect opportunity for their inquiry.” On the Wednesday following the broadcast two field workers began the first Mass Communications research canvass—in Orange, New Jersey. They visited the homes of 30 persons who were known to have listened to the broadcast, while other researchers began to tabulate statistics from other sites.

Interviewees reported that they had not been listening very closely, but disruptions to the familiarity of the broadcast in the form of news flashes made them so terrified that they forgot what they had heard just a few minutes before. The play purported to present an invasion by armed beings from Mars, but only four of 30 listeners actually had understood this storyline. Four thought the invasion was by animal monsters, another four thought it was a natural catastrophe, eight thought that it was an attack by the Germans, and one Jewish woman had interpreted the broadcast as an uprising against the Jews.

When asked what made it so realistic, the overwhelming response was that the program’s introduction of well-known government officials and prominent scientists was persuasive. And more so the technical features of the broadcast, its appearance as an interruption of a dance program, the shifting of the news flashes from place to place, the gasping voice of the announcer, his muffled scream when he was about to break down, all contributed powerfully to the illusion. One woman reported that she saw people literally running down the street screaming. Another reported that her town was immediately deserted. However, these instances were often exaggerated.

Title page from first printing of The Invasion from Mars.

The “Effects” of WOTW upon Presumptions and Practices of Media

As Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow have written, Cantril found that there were only a small percentage of “panic” responses to the program, significantly lower than popular folklore has led us to believe. So why is WOTW such a key text for Mass Media history?

The important outcome, as far as the researchers themselves were concerned, was that for the first time a statistically notable sampling of receptions to a media event had been measured. The PRP was able to paint a realistic and thorough picture of the types of responses that occurred, including sub-divided categories of which demographic groups responded in what way.

Among famous legacies of the study: WOTW accidentally indicated just how powerful Mass Media might be as a tool for propaganda. With the aid of Harold Lasswell and Gilbert Seldes, the PRP began to develop propaganda research by the early 1940s. Another less known outcome is that Frank Stanton realized that the demographic analysis he helped to invent could predict likely audience reception in advance, instead of measuring responses after broadcast. Whenever we talk about broad audience appeal or “niche audiences,” we are in part talking about Stanton’s post-PRP/WOTW research and development legacy.

This is the seventh post in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. A special thanks to everyone who participated in the #WOTW75 collective listening experiment on October 30th. Stay tuned for more blog posts in the From Mercury to Mars series during December and January.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.