Foreword by Greg Palast
In Information War, former United States Information Agency employee Nancy Snow describes how U.S. propaganda efforts and covert operations are expanding more rapidly today than at any other time in U.S. history, as the Bush administration attempts to increase U.S. dominance by curbing dissent and controlling opinion. Consider that
• immediately after September 11, Bush administration officials met with Hollywood executives to coordinate efforts to bolster the U.S. military in films, public service announcements, and sponsored discussions on security
• John Poindexter, a convicted perjurer who supervised the illegal Iran-Contra deals, was appointed to lead the Department of Defense's new "Information Awareness Office," whose function was high-tech tapping of computer networks in the United States and abroad
• National Security Directives mandate the use of information warfare techniques to disrupt and sabotage critics of Bush's policies. This is a pattern of behavior, it is policy, and it is war—an information war over the control of images, information, and ideology that shape public opinion and behavior.
In Information War, Snow lays out the propaganda techniques that the government uses to control dissent in the twenty-first century; spotlights the key players and their spinmeistering abilities in the information war; and describes memorable "leaks" in the Administration's efforts to conduct stealth propaganda programs and control information at home. Ultimately she shows that dissent and true democracy are the early casualties of these policies.
Celebrating 40 Years of Project Censored
Did you know that the U.S. military is deployed in 70% of the world's nations? Or that leaked State Deptartment cables show that the U.S. planned to instigate civil strife in Syria as early in 2006? What about the chronic problem of medical neglect in private, for-profit, U.S. immigrant-only jails?
No? Neither did the rest of the world. That's because these and countless other news items are suppressed or ignored by our nation's "free press" every day. For the past forty years, Project Censored has been unearthing the buried stories that corporate media deem unfit to print. They also just hosted a jam-packed Media Freedom Summit and co-founded the Global Critical Media Literacy Project in partnership with the Action Coalition for Media Education and the graduate program in Media Literacy and Digital Culture at Sacred Heart University.
To celebrate, we're showcasing Censored 2017 at a 25% off online discount and offering 50% off Censored backlist titles (from Censored 1996 to Censored 2006), along with select Seven Stoires books on media literacy, including titles by Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky.
Check out our discounted Project Censored and media literacy collection!
Born in Los Angeles in 1952, Greg Palast worked as a government consultant and an investigator for labor unions before turning to journalism full time. A self described “reporting investigator” as opposed to an investigative journalist, he became a writer in order to alert a wider public to abuses he saw committed by governments, corporations, politicians, and lobbyists. For years Palast wrote a column for the Guardian called “Inside Corporate America,” and his articles have appeared in magazines and journals including the Nation, Harper’s, and In These Times. Palast’s 2002 bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which covered in detail the fiasco of President Bush’s victory in Florida in 2000, appeared in 2002 and served as the basis for his documentary film Bush Family Fortunes. Palast lives in Los Angeles.
Nancy Snow is Professor Emeritus of Communications at California State University, Fullerton and Pax Mundi (“Distinguished”) Professor of Public Diplomacy at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies in Japan. Snow is a world-renowned specialist in public diplomacy and propaganda studies. She received her Ph.D. in International Relations from the School of International Service at The American University in Washington, DC. Snow headed up Common Cause in New Hampshire while teaching politics at New England College. She worked as a cultural affairs specialist and Fulbright program desk officer at the United States Information Agency, and as intergovernmental liaison in the Bureau of Refugee Programs, U.S. State Department. She has been a Fulbright scholar to Germany and Japan, and a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Snow is the author, editor and co-editor of over 70 scholarly chapters and articles, hundreds of print and online pieces, and eleven books, including the Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, Propaganda and American Democracy, The Arrogance of American Power, and Japan’s Information War. Reach her at http://www.nancysnow.com.
