From Linebarger,
Psychological Warfare (1954), on opinions vs information:
> The collected news of any modern country contains more truth each day than any one man can could read in a lifetime. The reporters, editors, writers, announcers who collect truth not only collect it; they select it. ... If they select it to "affect the minds and emotions of a given group for a specific purpose," it is propaganda. If they report that a little girl fell out of bed and broke her neck—with the intent of frightening parents among their listeners into following the Safe Homes Week Campaign—that is propaganda. But if they report it because it is the only death in the community, and because they might as well fill up the program, it is not propaganda. If you put the statement on the air, "An American negro workman in Greensboro, N. C., got eighty cents for a hard day's work last week," that can be presented and interpreted as:
> (a.) simple news, if there is something more to the story, about what the man said, or how he spent the eighty cents on corn meal to feed his pet tarantula;
> (b.) anti-capitalist propaganda, if you show that eighty cents is mighty little money for American business to pay its workers;
> (c.) pro-capitalist propaganda, if you show that the eighty cents will buy more than two weeks' wages of a worker in the city of Riga, when it comes to consumer goods;
> (d.) anti-White propaganda, if you show the man got only eighty cents because he was a Negro.
> And so on, through a further variety of interpretations. The facts—man, happening, amount, place, time—are true in each case. They could be sworn to by the whole membership of an interfaith conference. But the interpretation placed on them—who communicates these facts to whom? why? when?—makes them into propaganda.
> And interpretation can no more be true or untrue than a Ford car can be vanilla or strawberry in flavor. The questions of truth and of interpretation are unrelated categories. The essence of motive is that it is ultimately private and impenetrable, and interpretation commonly involves imputation of motive. You can dislike an interpretation; you can kill a man for believing it; you can propagandize him out of believing it; but you cannot sit down and prove that it is untrue. Facts and logic are useful in propaganda, but they cannot be elevated to the point where you can say, "Is it propaganda or is it true?" Almost all good propaganda—no matter what kind—is true. It uses truth selectively.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pa...
In the XXI we may no longer concern ourselves with truth, but it's useful seeing how Linebarger deals with the simpler world of 1954; he finds even such metadata as "source" to be worthy of analysis:
> There are several choices on [source attribution]: the true source (who really got it out?) and the ostensible source (whose name is signed to it?); also, the first-use source (who used it the first time?) and the second-use source (who claims merely to be using it as a quotation?). Take the statement: "Harry said to me, he said, 'I never told anybody that Al's wife was a retired strip-teaser.' Mind you, I don't pretend to believe Harry, but that's what he said, all right." What are the possible true sources for the statement of fact or libel concerning Al's unnamed wife? What are the alternatives on ostensible sources? First use? Second use? The common sense needed to analyze this statement is of the same order as the process involved in analyzing the statement: "Reliable sources in Paris state that the visit of the American labor delegation has produced sensational repercussions in Moscow, and that Moscow, upon the basis of the American attitude, is determined to press for unification of the entire German labor movement."
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pa...
[The following caption is particularly interesting, raising two questions: (a) given his en passant reference to the sauce, how much else did Linebarger sneak past the Army censors between the lines of his text, and (b) when Anaïs Nin was being paid a dollar per page for erotica, and modern furry artists also supposedly get well renumerated by anonymous "collectors", what proportion of that work is for private consumption, and what for State production of Oestrous Black Propaganda?]
Figure 31: Oestrous Black. Young human beings, especially young males, are apt to give considerable attention to sex. In areas of military operations, they are removed from the stimuli of secondary sex references which are (in America) an accepted part of everyone's daily life: bathing beauty photos, magazine covers, semi-nudes in advertisements, etc. Our enemies tried to use the resulting pin-up craze for propaganda purposes, hoping that a vain arousal of oestrum would diminish morale. This choice Japanese item is from the Philippines. (The best collection of these is kept in a locked file —for experts only— at the Library of Congress.)
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#fi...
EDIT: finally, I've lost the reference, but Linebarger's text just before that figure:
> The palatability of news is not concerned so much with its content as with its trustworthiness to the enemy, its seeming to deal with straight fact, its non-editorialized presentation. (One of the reasons why Soviet Communist propaganda, after all these years, is still relatively unsuccessful , lies in the incapacity of the Communists to get out a newspaper with news in it. They put their editorial slant in all their news articles. "Man bites dog" would not make the front page in Russia unless the dog were Stalinist and the man reactionary.)
was corroborated somewhere in internal NSA newsletters by a translator who had been working the US-Việt Nam peace talks; she mentioned how the principal, desirous of making progress, often dropped epithets from the VC canon and in vietnamese referred almost directly, if metonymously, to "Saigon", but his politically correct translator always dutifully inserted them all back in to her english version, resulting in phrases along the lines of "feudal throwback capitalist running-dog lackeys in Saigon" as a running leitmotif.