Never before propaganda had been as important as in the 2nd World War. From now on education was one more field of propaganda: its purpose was to teach how to think, while pure propaganda was supposed to show what to think.
Every nation founded at least one ministry of propaganda - of course without calling it that way. For example the British called it the Ministry of Information (= MOI), the U.S. distinguished between the Office of Strategic Services (= OSS) and the Office of War Information (= OWI), the Germans created a Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment (= RMVP) and the Japanese called their disinformation and propaganda campaign the "Thought War".
British censorship was so strict that the text of an ordinary propaganda leaflet, that had been dropped from planes several million times, was not given to a journalist who asked for it.
Atrocity stories were no longer used the same way as in the 1st World War. Instead,
German war propaganda had started long before the war. In the middle of the 1930s
Some of the pictures of fear, hatred and intolerance still exist in people's heads. Considering this propaganda did a good job, unfortunately it was the anti-national-socialist propaganda that failed at that time.
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No mass-media is more efficient in disinformation and propaganda than TV. And no one seems to be better in influencing that which is considered the truth. e.g. around 67% of the Austrian population in 1999 believe that TV is the most reliable information-media.
Opinion polls show that it is said to be the most realistic media, the only one worth trusting. History tells us the contrary. The combination of words and moving pictures, together with the documentary style of the news, looks sincere, while it produces images in our heads which start working on their own. The Vietnam war was only the first war performed on television ...
But: also watching the news is part of the entertainment show of the media. And therefore they are presented in an entertaining form. Manipulation of the contents of the news is part of the show.
One factor is the issue that news must be reported in a very short period. Several seconds for each catastrophe. Scarcity implies disinformation.
Ted Koppel's movie Revolution in a box demonstrates this:
When the TV-news showed pictures of the nuclear plant accident in Chernobyl, they showed pictures of another - still working - plant. The thought behind was to demonstrate that in this world nothing can stay undetected by the media, to show that still everything is observed and under control - at least in the West.
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The ongoing World Wide Web History Project was established to record and publish the history of the World Wide Web and its roots in hypermedia and networking. As primary research methods are used archival research and the analysis of interviews and talks with pioneers of the
http://www.webhistory.org/home.html
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), probably was the most influential German dramatist and
theoretician of the theater in the 20th century. During the existence of the Third Reich he fled from Germany to Scandinavia and to the USA, where he tried to go on with his work. In the 1950s he became director of the newly founded Berliner Ensemble, in East Berlin.
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