War is peace!

Stauber: Right, and there was even a phrase, "You're blaming America," "You're saying we deserved it." If you began a rational discussion about why it is that people in other countries might have a hatred for America -- not a hatred to the point of flying jets into skyscrapers, but just a hatred -- you couldn't even discuss it. If you began to explore that, there's right-wing counterattacks, and you're just part of the "blame America" crowd.

Rampton: There are powerful taboos in place against listening to the reasons why people feel hostile toward the United States or discussing them in public. Until that happens [the taboos are removed], I don't think we'll be successful in changing anyone's mind abroad about us.

You see some of the roots of this coming from the advertising-based P.R.? That the U.S. communicates only through one-direction blasts of information, and not through a conversation?

Rampton: Right. Propaganda is the attempt to influence the thinking of a target population regardless of whether what you're saying is true or in their interests.

The message of the propaganda may be true or in their interest. For example, a very crude form of war propaganda is dropping leaflets to tell the enemy they'll be killed unless they surrender. That may be true. It may be in their interest to surrender.

But from the point of view of the person dropping the leaflets of propaganda, you don't care whether it's true -- you just want them to surrender. And often, propaganda, because of its nature, ends up producing messages that are not true and are not in the interest of that audience. That approach to communication is, in my opinion, fundamentally at odds with the very definition and concept of communication that is at the heart of democratic theories of how communication should take place.

In the democratic model of communication, every party is equal. You don't have a privileged communicator whose job is to indoctrinate a passive audience. Everyone gets to speak, and everyone's point of view has some validity. In the propaganda approach, the point of view of the people you're trying to indoctrinate is mostly an obstacle to overcome.

Why do you think, given the failure of U.S. propaganda abroad, that the Bush administration has been so successful selling the war in Iraq to Americans?

Stauber: These major deceptions, the propaganda campaign that was waged in the United States that succeeded in confusing and misleading and fooling the American people, convinced the majority of Americans that indeed attacking Iraq was somehow a proper response to the terror attacks of 9/11. That Saddam Hussein was somehow in cahoots with al-Qaida in some way. That Iraqis were involved in the attacks on 9/11. That as Condoleezza Rice and other members of the State Department put it, "The next 9/11 might be a mushroom cloud over America" if we don't do something about Saddam Hussein.

The question we asked at the end of the book is this: Was this the wrong war in the wrong place fought with the wrong weapons in the wrong time? Is this actually going to turn out to be something that will increase the terror threat against the United States?

And so far, it's looking bad and getting worse.

One of the ironies here is that a critical reader, a critical thinker, someone who really wants to see what's going on here -- reading mainstream sources like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Guardian, and listening to the BBC -- could come to the same conclusions that we did. But that's not where most Americans get their news. Most Americans get their news from television, which is probably the worst single source for providing factual information and analysis.

So you also hold TV news responsible, in some way, for the propaganda that surrounded this war?

Stauber: After 9/11, we saw how the Fox network exploited the terror attacks, wrapped itself in the flag and began beating this drumbeat for war. They exploited the fears that people felt and created what an executive from another network called "the Fox effect."

First of all, the war could have never taken place if the media had done its job of questioning the administration rather than becoming an echo chamber and propaganda arm.

But the very specific story is how Fox used this jingoistic, hyperpatriotic, rah-rah, let's-go-to-war coverage to gain a massive market share. Fox actually became the No. 1 source for most people in the United States to get their information about the war.

The reason we subtitled the book "The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War in Iraq" is because it wasn't just the administration or the right-wing think tanks, it was also opportunists and networks like Fox who exploited 9/11 and launched their own propaganda campaign for their own purpose. The U.S. would go to war because Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox, is of that ideological persuasion and thought it would be a good idea. And to gain market share. It's really frightening to see how in the 21st century, there's a huge economic benefit for a TV network for exploiting the fears of a nation to promote war.

Rampton: And the United States is not the only place that this has happened. In the last half of the book we talk about the comparison between the way the war was covered in the United States vs. in other parts of the world.

Just as there is the "Fox effect" in the Western world, there's an opposite sort of thing going on in Arab and Muslim countries. The way they compete for market share is by getting to see who can present the most outrage and direct that outrage toward the United States. The ironic thing is that if you watch Arab television, and you can actually get some of it on the Web now, it looks a lot like Fox news! [laughs]

So is the fact that the Bush administration successfully "launched" the war in Iraq proof of how powerful propaganda is inside the U.S., if not in the rest of the world?

Rampton: People on all sides of the political spectrum -- left, right and center -- ascribe enormous power to the media. And it does have a lot of power to influence the way people think. Brian Eno reviewed our book in England. In his review, he commented that the most important thing the media does is not that it tells us what to think, but it tells us what to think about.

For the last year, we've all been thinking and talking about Iraq. We weren't all thinking and talking about Iraq before the Bush administration put it on our agenda. Up until September of last year, the first year after Sept. 11, Iraq was a very minor part of the discussion about the war on terror until the Bush administration put it there.

But what that tells you about the limitations of propaganda is that as powerful as it can be at telling us what's on the agenda, people still exercise quite a bit of independence in their own opinions.

I think the fact that our book is bouncing around as much as it is by word of mouth reflects that there is a substantial body of opinion in the United States that was never swayed by all the red, white and blue propaganda that we write about.

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