from Titan Magazine (Summer 2003)
War and Words: Researcher
Looks at Free Speech and Information Control
“Just three days before the first
military attacks in Afghanistan, the London-based magazine The
Economist published an article that openly acknowledged an
American war that was already underway and laying the groundwork
for the shooting war: the propaganda war.”
And so begins Information War: American Propaganda,
Free Speech and Opinion Control Since 9/11, the latest book
authored by Nancy Snow, assistant professor of communications. Focusing
on public diplomacy, the role of free speech in time of war and
language manipulation, the book was published in April by Seven
Stories Press of New York.
“While we live in the information age, it also
is the age of information manipulation,” says Snow, a former
Fulbright Scholar who teaches global media systems and the history
and philosophy of American mass communications.
In the book she writes, “America is a nation
in an information war with itself. On the one hand, American journalists
and editors tout the virtues of a free and open media …. On
the other hand, these free media principles have been wanting throughout
the post-9/11 war on terrorism and incipient war with Iraq.”
Snow previously published Propaganda Inc.: Selling
America’s Culture to the World. She earned her doctorate
at American University in Washington, D.C., and worked at the United
States Information Agency and U.S. State Department in the early
’90s.
“In a democratic society we often have a false
sense of security,” she says, “because we hold to the
ideal that a free press will always protect us from propaganda,
defined as ‘the big lie often repeated.’ In reality,
modern propaganda is driven more by half-truths, one-sided or incomplete
information, so opinions are often easily managed and manipulated.
“Words and language can become vehicles of
control, even in open societies like our own.”
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