How Propaganda Is Done

Trey Smith

The rightwing transparency group, Judicial Watch, released Tuesday a new batch of documents showing how eagerly the Obama administration shoveled information to Hollywood film-makers about the Bin Laden raid. Obama officials did so to enable the production of a politically beneficial pre-election film about that "heroic" killing, even as administration lawyers insisted to federal courts and media outlets that no disclosure was permissible because the raid was classified.

Thanks to prior disclosures from Judicial Watch of documents it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, this is old news. That's what the Obama administration chronically does: it manipulates secrecy powers to prevent accountability in a court of law, while leaking at will about the same programs in order to glorify the president.
~ from Correspondence and Collusion Between the New York Times and the CIA by Glenn Greenwald ~

In discussions around my community, people often ask me to provide an example of what propaganda entails. All one needs to do to understand it, I tell them, is to look at the way the Obama administration deals with the release of information.

If said information benefits or glorifies the president -- even if its release goes against protocol or the law -- nobody finds themselves in the least bit of trouble. If, on the other hand, said information exposes corruption and the president finds himself in a less than favorable light, heads will roll! This is the basic reason Bradley Manning finds himself in so much trouble -- he made the man of "hope" and "change we can all believe in" look bad.

In the case Greenwald cites above, the Obama administration consistently argues in court that it can't be held accountable for acts that are so sensitive and top secret that it can't even admit if they transpired or not while, at the same time, they freely share this very same "top secret" information with filmmakers. This scenario should boggle your mind!

This is the essence of propaganda: the control of information to further specific political ends.