Lee W. Huebner is the former publisher and CEO of the International Herald Tribune newspaper and former special assistant to the President of the United States during the Nixon administration. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in history from Harvard University. Huebner is the Airlie Professor of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, where he teaches courses on journalism ethics, media and globalization, political speechwriting, and presidential communication. He is the author of “The Fake News Panic of a Century Ago: The Discovery of Propaganda and the Coercion of Consent.”
A talk with Lee W. Huebner, former publisher of the International Herald Tribune newspaper, on his book “The Fake News Panic of a Century Ago: The Discovery of Propaganda and the Coercion of Consent.”
A Paris Writers News Interview
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Paris Writers News (PWN): Why go back 100 years? What’s the significance of propaganda, fake news today and what happened a century ago?
Lee W. Huebner (LWH)
The concept of fake news goes back to the beginnings of time, and the fact that people have always lied to one another, starting with Adam and Eve. The book traces some of this history.
At first, the word propaganda didn't have a pejorative sense. The word propaganda was after all, the name of the College of Propaganda for the Roman Catholic Church. Its mission was to propagate the faith, much as the ancient Roman farmers used to “propagate” their crops. So, it's a Latin word that suddenly took on a new meaning in the early 20th century.
The word propaganda was eventually used to describe how people can be misled in a massive way through purposeful misinformation. But that didn’t really happen in a decisive way until the early 1900’s—and especially at the time of the First World War.
In the early 20th century, Susan Langer, a very thoughtful philosopher, said that you only really see things once you have words for them. So once people started to notice what seemed to be propaganda, and had a name for it, they seemed to find it almost everywhere, heightening their suspicions and their distrust in public information.
The book explores the reasons why this distrust suddenly exploded, and how “propaganda” became a popular catchword. If you didn’t like some information you encountered, you could simply say “Oh, that's just propaganda.” (Much as people today can say, “Oh, that's fake news!”) And it really became an obsession, and even a panic, in some ways.
Because of course, what it meant was that democracy wouldn't function the way people normally expected it to. The public was not the wise source of steady, wisdom. The voice of the people was not the voice of God, and suddenly people had to cope with that realization. And what I found particularly interesting were some of the parallels with what's been happening recently.
Lee Huebner in front of the International Herald Tribune headquarters in Paris (courtesy of Lee Huebner)
PWN Did education and literacy have something to do with it? Because around a century ago, as more and more people could read, there was a big boom in publishing from books to newspapers to magazines.
LWH It was a big factor. Print suddenly exploded everywhere. High speed printing presses were modernized, paper was available much more cheaply, and the railroads and motor vehicles were there to send newspapers and magazines to readers all across the country, and to do so very quickly.
And all of that had its impact. Two other factors contributed significantly to the new apprehensions. One was social, and one was psychological. The nature of social life was transformed. Woodrow Wilson called it “the de-localization” of American life. The fact that the intimate community, where people knew whom to trust, how to verify things, how to put their hands on the things that counted, all of this began to fade, and more and more it seemed as though more distant places were calling the shots. And that sense of fading local and community control was pretty profound. And with it, of course, came a lessened sense of personal identification with a strong and supportive community.
One of my former professors, Robert Wiebe at Northwestern University, used to call this the “distension” of American life, mixing the word extension with the word distortion. And then at the same time, people became more and more concerned about the inherently irrational nature of human psychology. Sigmund Freud was among the many serious thinkers who plunged into deep explorations on this subject. People became more and more concerned about neuroses and complexes, and irrational desires, and with all of that came a huge flood of writing about the mob mentality, about the mind of the crowd, and about the so-called “herd instinct.” And suddenly, human nature didn't seem quite so enlightened or stable or rational, as many had hoped. So, I think those are all factors that contributed to the explosion early in the 20th century of new fears concerning the power of propaganda and its impact on democratic government.
PWN What are some of historical parallels between the idea of propaganda and publicity, particularly before WWII, and the fake news of today?
LWH There are many similarities. WWI helped to produce a cult of propaganda similar to the current obsession with fake news. But the implications concerning this new power of mass public information were not always negative, especially at first. Those who saw it in a more favorable light tended to talk about the new power of “publicity”— and its great potential for reforming society. President Theodore Roosevelt fell in love with the potential of good “publicity” over a century ago. He said that publicity “is the great cure, the great antiseptic. If you shine the light of publicity on public affairs, then things will start to go well.” And his enthusiasm was widely shared during the Progressive Era, by reformers of all sorts and especially by newly empowered investigative journalists, who came to be described as “muckrakers.”
Yet not everyone shared Roosevelt’s admiration of publicity A popular reaction of big business was to see publicity as a way to serve its interests—and so—at this time—both the public relations industry and the advertising industry got their big starts. And whatever you called it, publicity or public relations, or advertising, or government information, if you didn’t like it you began to call it “propaganda.” And the term came to be used in much in the same way that the term “fake news” is being used now.
PWN One of the chapters mentions a correlation with a fascination of hypnotism during the late 19th century. Tell us more.
LWH In the late 19th century there was an obsession with hypnotism that is featured in a novel, Trilby, which was one of the most popular novels of its time. The public was captivated with the sinister story of the character Svengali, who hypnotizes a young woman who lacked musical talent and transforms her into a world-class opera singer. Some people thought that perhaps there was a similar method behind mass media and that led to a public fear that maybe these masters of the media could play a Svengali-like trick on you.
That, combined with people's interest in human mesmerism in the 1900s, and how it could be used to manipulate or heal the unconscious mind, led to even more fears about how mass information might be able to manipulate public opinion.
The concern then and now is that it became increasingly difficult to check out the accuracy of the messages that people are receiving. Society was too distended and the human mind too undependable to sort it all out.
What democracy traditionally has meant over the centuries is that power to govern in a society depends, in the end, not on the coercive power of its leaders, but on the consent of the governed. But what the discovery of propaganda meant, for many, was that the consent of the governed could itself actually be coerced.
PWN Looking back, fast forwarding to today where fake news has become a huge concern with this disinformation delivery via technology such as social media…Are there lessons in the past, as to how to deal with this now?
LWH Going back in history, new technologies have often been welcomed as having wonderful new potentials. And then there's a second wave, where people are scared to death, and that's happened recently with the Internet and social media. How wonderful, people initially said, that the Internet can allow anyone to say anything to anyone else--or to everyone--until people began to see the downside of that potential. And, strikingly, the same pattern can be seen in shifting human reactions to the advent of television, and the radio, and, indeed to the invention of the printing press, back in the 15th century. And one lesson we can learn from this history is that technologies of all sorts are really just tools. They will neither save us nor need they condemn us. It all depends on who is using them and how—for better or for worse.
And even going back further, I always love to cite the fact that Socrates himself worried a lot about the new technology of his age, which was called writing! Writing! And he said, “No it's going to wipe out the oral culture of ancient Greece, and we won't know anymore where this written information comes from, or how it originated, or even when it was written. We won’t know just whom it is that we can trust anymore. Current concerns about the potential misuses of social media have their parallels going back over time.
So, one of the themes of this book, in a way, is that there's nothing new under the sun. And maybe we can even take some comfort from the lessons of history and the fact that humankind, more often than not, has been able to cope successfully with these recurring challenges.
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Biography
Lee W. Huebner is the former publisher and CEO of the International Herald Tribune newspaper and former special assistant to the President of the United States during the Nixon administration. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in history from Harvard University. Huebner is the Airlie Professor of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, where he teaches courses on journalism ethics, media and globalization, political speechwriting, and presidential communication. He is the author of “The Fake News Panic of a Century Ago: The Discovery of Propaganda and the Coercion of Consent.”
