Too often, the government uses its information machinery to try to persuade | Hacker News Reader

Too often, the government uses its information machinery to try to persuade

washingtonpost.com

55 pointsspking22 comments

They left out the practice of newspapers using terms like 'unnamed official close to':

> An official close to Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said .... "This is not an easy report" for the Clinton administration, said another senior U.S. official last night. - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/eafricab...

> A law enforcement official close to the case said prosecutors considered charging several Fokker employees but decided against it. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/dutch...

> The decision -- which was also met with wariness on Capitol Hill -- reflects a desire to change the intelligence power structure, officials close to the selection said yesterday. -- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01...

These are often cases where the government is trying to control what you think; perhaps because the unnamed official will be retaliated against for not toeing the government line, but also because it's exchanging anonymous influence for access.

A newspaper could decline these unnamed sources a platform for their anonymous influence, but then the reporters will find they don't get the juicy interviews.

Here in the UK, an example is the Snowden 'blood on his hands' story in the Sunday Times: https://theintercept.com/2015/06/14/sunday-times-report-snow...

A masterful essay. Thanks for the pointer.

Seconded. Fantastic piece.

> But this reform would be even more helpful if it required agencies to cite and share the sources for their “facts.” Where, for example, are the Department of Labor data that prove hot dog venders [sic] earn less than $9 an hour?

This smells funny. Why are there scare quotes around "facts"? Why is there a demand to prove that we're not getting duped by the revolving door between the government and Big Hot Dog?

One of the authors is a "senior fellow at the R Street Institute," a conservative think tank in DC. So naturally, it's in the author's interest to write a propaganda essay discrediting the liberal executive branch and poisoning the well, and publish it in the expanded op-ed section of a DC newspaper.

This is just recursive politics, trying to pretend it's not.

> These are just some recent examples of the executive branch using our tax dollars to shape our opinions.

Yes, and where will they be when the "executive branch" is their side, doing the same thing?

Presumably in the same place. You'll note the reference to the Bush administration touting its Medicare law.

Just an FYI, but vender is a valid alternative spelling for vendor. It's 'the new yorker's' preferred spelling, and may bleed to other writers.

"Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 report on manufacturing promoted policies to grow the nation into a commercial republic. President Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information recruited 75,000 members of the public to give speeches in favor of such World War I measures as Liberty Bonds and the draft, blanketed the nation with pamphlets and posters, and generally set in motion the modern publicity apparatus that exists today

A decade ago, the Government Accountability Office faulted the second Bush administration’s Department of Health and Human Services for overselling the benefits of the new Medicare law."

Hardly a propaganda essay discrediting the liberal executive branch.

Well, if you want to draw partisan lines on content, all of those are seemingly big-government actions (which is natural, for things that government would want to propagandize): governmental policies to influence the market to behave in certain ways, intervention in foreign wars, and centralized, taxpayer-funded healthcare that was controversial within the Republican ranks.

This is metapolitics, designed to poison the well about all government actions and support conservative/libertarian positions in general. It's fine and useful to appear to be independent of partisan politics.

Is an opinion still valid if Republicans happen to share it?

Absolutely. But a think tank is an opinions-for-hire racket, whether conservative or liberal. So it's useful to note the source.

During the Scottish independence referendum last year, both the UK Government and the Scottish Government produced materials trying to persuade voters, BuzzFeed articles and pamphlets; and a white paper, respectively.

I probably don't need to tell you which sides the respective governments were taking.

> In 2014, the government spent $760 million to hire private advertising firms, according to USASpending.gov...That figure does not include the salaries of the innumerable federal employees who promote their agencies’ work in print, on air and online. It does not include the anti-drug media campaigns, or the cost of printing and publishing reports and government journals, such as the Federal Highway Administration’s Public Roads magazine.

For comparison, each of the presidential candidate spent a much more widely discussed ~$2 billion together on the 2012 campaign.

https://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/#out

I think there's a difference between, say, NASA tweeting about its mission and other examples the article uses.

If NASA isn't promoting the mission it's been tasked to do, telling us about their progress and their challenges, then who will? NASA telling the public this stuff is part of their job, so the public knows. Also, it's not hard to deduce what NASA's slant on going to space is: of course they're for it. It's easy for us to interpret the message in light of the messenger.

Core problem:

> Unfortunately, it otherwise has proven all but impossible to write a law that absolutely differentiates information from advocacy.

Are they really different things? I inform, you advocate, he spews lies and deception.

Just sounds like different perspectives on the same action.

Several years before, in 1997, the GAO caught the State Department paying a consultant to write op-ed pieces in support of the Clinton administration’s policy on Central America.

This is terrible. What will all the Washington Post journalists do for work if some sleazy internet spam company gets all the juicy government contracts?

If the government didn't spread its propaganda, then private institutions and individuals would be free to disseminate their own. It's not about controlling or avoiding the conversation, just being part of it. The administration in any government - democracy or otherwise - has a reasonable self-interest in persuading the public to support its goals. As long as claims can be verified as such, I don't see why it's a problem.

Exception: someone could make a bold-faced lie to a large audience for sensation and later make their honest correction in a place nobody would look.

I think that there's a un-elected bureaucracy and then there're elected officials. I don't really have a problem with the elected officials trying to persuade. I don't have a huge problem with them trying to persuade using the bureaucracy as a tool.

Sometimes though it seems like the tool has a mind of it's own. That it either has it's own agenda or doesn't heel to the agenda of the elected officials. All policies aside this seems like a terrible thing - it's a direct path back to having all bureaucrats be political appointees.

"Too often, corporations use information machinery to try to persuade"

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