It is worth noting that media manipulation actually began in the United States in the second term of Woodrow Wilson, the closest to an absolute dictator this nation has ever experienced. His campaign manager, George Creel, himself a journalist, suggested to him (at least that was Wilson's
alleged story) that the United States should set up an information ministry such as those that existed in Imperial Britain and Imperial Germany. This was
before the United States entered the Great War. The Committee for Public Information, chaired by Creel and therefore informally known as the Creel Committee, controlled all access to information from the government. If you wanted the low-down skinny from the Wilson administration, you played ball and played ball by Creel's rules. I'll append an article from
The Smithsonian Magazine at the end of this post. I'll will also add my observation that, in my opinion, this lead to the birth of investigative journalism--if the only story you can get comes from an administration committee, you need to get out there and do your own digging. By mid-1918, the situation was such that Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. commented on this in an editorial published in
The Kansas City Star, May 7th, 1918. Within that editorial (what we would now call an "op-ed"), Roosevelt wrote: “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” While it is certainly true that Roosevelt was a Republican and Wilson was a Democrat, this was above the political fray, and I would say crucially important in the resistance to Wilson's almost overwhelming propaganda machine. I will also point out that party affiliation means nothing when the subject is the survival of democratic institutions and a free press.
How Woodrow Wilson’s Propaganda Machine Changed American Journalism
