Let’s talk for a moment about propaganda. Oxford defines the term as: “Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.” Seems like a pretty spot-on way of putting it. Throughout history, mankind has seen propaganda used for what would generally be agreed upon as both good and bad causes. At this moment, there is a significant amount of discussion about the role of propaganda in current and previous administrations at the federal level. Because the word “biased” is contained within the definition of propaganda, we’d suggest that your point of view about propaganda’s role in any administration is likely shaped, in no small part, by your personal bias. And yes, our position is that everyone has some bias in their personal life. Professionals work to leave that bias at home when they are on the job.

But we will leave the debate about how propaganda may have or is now shaping the news agenda for history to sort out at some point in the future.

For a real-world case study in propaganda, let’s go back to the 1940s, right in the midst of World War II. The United States, having entered the Second World War following the Japanese aerial bombing of Hawaii in December of 1941, had a problem on its hands. In the years leading up to the moment when President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that a state of war existed, the question of whether or not the U.S. should even be involved in the war had divided much of the country. Nationalists argued that the war was in Europe (and later in far Eastern Asia), so it should be fought only by the nations involved. We now know that Germany’s Third Reich spent significant sums of money backing anti-war voices here in America. (A great listen about this is Rachel Maddow’s podcast series for MSNBC titled “Ultra." )

Once the world’s war came to U.S. soil, the country had no choice but to fight.

President Roosevelt’s War Department decided to use the most popular visual medium of the time, the motion picture, to create a series of seven films to explain precisely why American boys were being asked to sacrifice for their country. (Yes, mostly males would be drafted to fight, though women would have essential roles in the war effort, both in and out of uniform.) The production of these films would be assigned by General George Marshall, then Chief of Staff of the United States Army, to a newly enlisted Major Frank Capra. Capra was by this point an established and Academy Award-winning filmmaker. The Wikipedia page on how the “Why We Fight” series came to be is an excellent read on how the series came to be made. It includes links to pages for each of the seven films in the series and the ability to watch them, courtesy of the National Archives. If you have never watched them, we’d recommend doing so, if only to understand how the nation was presented with “the case for going to war.”

Why we tell you about the history of the “Why We Fight” series is that we think it is vital for any working journalist to understand why propaganda works and how it can be used as a tool–not just by goverments and their various agencies, but how any entity may promote a particular position through techniques that can cross the ethical lines between conducting public relations and creating propaganda. To be clear, we are not equating PR work to propaganda, but the two disciplines share the goal of influencing public opinion, and both use mass media to shape public perception and behavior. It is the ethics of each that vastly differ in attaining their goals.

We aren’t aware of any cinematic effort to convince anyone of the ideals behind a series that might be called “Why We Are In The News Business.” There have been a handful of movies that have tried to tell the true stories of the power of the printed press over the years. 1976’s “All the President’s Men” dramatized the Watergate reporting of Woodward and Bernstein. Their paper, The Washington Post, would be given the big screen treatment again in the 2017 film, “The Post." In that movie, Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep would dramatize the struggle of editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katharine Graham’s decision to publish The Pentagon Papers. Actor Michael Keaton has been in two movies as a journalist, playing a fictional one in 1994’s “The Paper” and a real-life one for The Boston Globe, in 2015’s “Spotlight." This is by no means a complete cinematic recounting, because there are other movies with scripts that are at least adjacent to the fourth estate, ranging from 1941’s “Citizen Kane” to 2013’s “Philomena.”

Sol Taishoff, the longtime publisher of the once dominant industry trade publication “Broadcasting” magazine, would label the electronic media as the “The Fifth Estate.” The words would adorn the cover of his magazine, which ceased publication in 2001, after 70 years of chronicling the business of radio and television from their respective births into the nation’s mainstream media. Taishoff is said to have originally wanted to call the weekly magazine “The Fifth Estate” to separate it from the newspaper business industry journal “Editor and Publisher."

In whatever estate it may be known, the electronic press has far fewer titles gracing the silver screen. James L. Brooks’s 1987 “Broadcast News” is listed as a “romantic comedy-drama” that did for TV news what “The Paper” would later do for the newspaper business. Closer to reality, yet still a dramatic interpretation, was George Clooney’s 2005 “Good Night and Good Luck," documenting the battle between CBS News legend Edward R. Murrow and Wisconsin Senator Joseph P. McCarthy. The fictionalized account of the true story of the 60 Minutes story about a tobaccor industry whistleblower is the 1999 drama “The Insider” In 2019, the story of the women who set out to expose Fox News founder and CEO Roger Ailes became the film “Bombshell," so that counts at least tangentially. And the farcical portrayal of a television news anchor by SNL alum Will Farrell became 2004’s comedy hit “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” which would spawn a sequel in 2013, “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues."

It is improbable that these movies motivated anyone to become a journalist, at least in the same way that “Why We Fight” encouraged Americans to understand and support the nation’s war effort. America would send 16 million of its sons and daughters off to serve in either Europe or the Pacific. Many of them would never return. The author Studs Terkel would publish a brilliant oral history of World War II in 1984, carrying the title, “The Good War.” One might suggest that title summarizes the enduring sentiments about the war.

That sentiment was influenced in no small part by the propaganda of the time. These days, the national sentiment about the press, be it either the fourth or fifth estate, is far less generous than it has been in decades past. From the overwrought labels of “mainstream media” to “fake news,” the campaign to cast doubt and aspersion on journalism has been far too effective in sowing distrust about the very people who make it their work to present facts that are obvious and provable.

Understanding why we are in this critical moment is a great reason to watch and study the power of propaganda that is on display in the films of “Why We Fight."