War Propaganda and the Patriotic Model of the News in the 21st Century

Abstract

Wars end, but propaganda survives and evolves. This is the primary message of Fondren’s analysis of the challenges faced by German officials more than a century ago as they struggled to garner domestic and international support for the First World War. The Germans were prescient: a “patriotic” model for military news would emerge and solidify over the coming century. This demonstrates that the keys to success for wartime propaganda identified by Germans during World War I—the necessity of coopting journalists, using new communication technologies, and finding attractive national narratives to obscure the harsh realities of war—are now deployed to great effect by authoritarian and democratic nations alike. According to the patriotic model of news, the norms of objectivity and service to the citizenry are overwritten by the notion that news must serve national interests and help propagandize the national war effort. In fact, politicians in democratic countries have adopted that same model of the news for internal use. By the same token, as the Germans came to acknowledge, the impossibility of being able to completely gloss over atrocities or turn them into positive messaging remains true today. Countries now have much more effective patriotic models of the news, in which both free and authoritarian media systems preference emotion over facts to promote military actions. The efficacy of military propaganda reminds us that stories of strength, power, and dominance tend to travel farther and faster than calls for equity and unity. With the advent of the internet and the collapse of national media boundaries, the subversion of free media into propaganda outlets eventually moved from international conflict to domestic politics, notably in the United States under Donald Trump. Nations have discovered that authoritarian messages that rely more on emotions than facts wield significant political power.