monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

I'd feel safer in Berlin than I would in a biker neighborhood in any US town.

It’s lovely.

Thumbing down is free speech,

livinglava wrote:

You implied saving lives should be government's top priority,

I made a bad typo, but I didn't say that nor did I imply such.

I [typo corrected] wrote:

Saving lives is not a crime, and most people think stopping the virus should be a government's top priority.

Quite honestly, Germany does a good job of keeping the lid on extremists. Unlike the US who had more more Christians gunned down in Churches by other, extremist Christians in a hand full of incidents over a couple of years than Germany has had by Moslem and Neo-Nazi over the last couple of decades. I'd feel safer in Berlin than I would in a biker neighborhood in any US town.

The White House propaganda has risen to new highs in recent days, as President Trump has turned the coronavirus daily briefing into a prime time opportunity to sell himself, replete with videos that double as campaign ads. For critics, this is the ultimate display of him as a carnival barker, touting himself blatantly at the expense of taxpayers. “I have gotten to like this room,” Trump said this week, as if he discovered a new form of communication. Soon afterward, he came up with the idea of stamping his name on the stimulus checks going out to millions of Americans in distress.

The significance of these moments go beyond the man himself. The word “propaganda” has held a dirty connotation since it became a pervasive systematic government activity, both here and abroad, in World War One. But the word should not be considered strictly pejorative. The control of propaganda is one of the thorniest problems of democracy, in part because it is needed. Like the deadly nightshade plant, which can promote sanity or bewitch, depending on how the potion is administered, government information can sustain democracy or undermine it.

In the Great War, Woodrow Wilson established the Committee on Public Information, the first and only propaganda ministry in the country. Because of this creation and his commanding speaking ability, Wilson was called the “the greatest propagandist the modern world has known.” The Committee on Public Information made prepackaged news a quotidian aspect of governing. It spread Wilson’s messages through articles, cartoons, and advertisements in newspapers and magazines; through textbooks and Sunday church sermons; through talks during movie theater intermission and anywhere else its 75,000 Four Minute Men found an audience; through feature films and through the ads it put on theater curtains; through posters plastered on buildings and displayed in storefront windows; through pamphlets distributed by the millions.

This propaganda led people on a mass scale to take on the equivalent of social distancing and hand washing. They enlisted, conserved fruit, bought war bonds, and donated thousands of binoculars to the Navy. The Committee on Public Information pioneered the idea of public diplomacy abroad. Its daily newspaper paved the way for the Federal Register, which makes government actions more transparent.

The Committee on Public Information had another legacy, too. It is often blamed for harmfully suppressing information about the Spanish Flu. In fact, it provided reports on the epidemic. But the Wilson administration did suppress political speech and criticism, both by laws that it had passed, through censorship, and by making unwanted comments seem traitorous.

Today Trump fences back inconvenient information by calling it fake news.”
The Wilson administration said people who questioned its policies were guilty of “enemy talk.” The Committee on Public Information also used front organizations to spread its messages, misrepresented facts, and played on emotions. It was always worth considering, a Committee on Public Information staffer said, “whether a brief scare-head item on the frontpage – which everybody reads – isn’t worth a whole inside page of detailed matter that very few arrive at.”

The Committee on Public Information’s misdeeds noted, there is nothing wrong with government officials using their high positions to inspire a nation. Simple acts like Governor Andrew Cuomo’s decision to lower flags to honor the dead bind us together in times of stress. We can take heart from people like Anthony Fauci who can be depended on to tell the truth. This is not simply important in a national emergency. False hopes and fake nostrums bred cynicism. As political scientist Harold Lasswell said after the Great War, “The mighty words which exploited the hopes of the mass in war had in many minds given way to cynicism and disenchantment.

Soon, we hope, our thoughts will turn from surviving the coronavirus to avoiding and managing outbreaks in the future. Part of this must be directed at government communication failings. The time has come for stronger protections from the politicization of executive branch public messaging. We should not, for example, have had a CDC postcard sent to millions of citizens that was branded as “President Trump’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America.” Nor should we have government websites where scientific studies are taken offline when there is a change in administration. How much propaganda power do we want to give to a president whose decision to put his name on stimulus checks will delay their delivery?

Our country needs new policies that will foster confidence in government information. Adopting federal quality standards for communicating with the public would be a good start. That can be achieved by expanding the Information Quality Act and strengthening the antiquated legal prohibitions against propaganda. The Government Accountability Office should annually survey, grade the quality of agencies’ public communications, and make the findings public. This watchdog has experience studying government communications, and has in the past deemed some of them propagandistic. A hundred years have passed since Wilson took his public persuasion operation too far. At long last we have to reel government propaganda back.

Tou only can do it once. If you get a lot of thumbs down, it means a lot of people thought you post dreck.

Now it would be very interesting if we had the ability to see everything that goes on below the radar and behind closed doors everywhere, but if we did, it wouldn't be going on covertly, would it?