According to Saunders' book, The Cultural Cold War, the CIA regularly influenced movies. The Caddy (1953) included well-dressed blacks to counter Soviet propaganda about segregation in America. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

The purpose of propaganda is to influence mass attitudes and opinions. Deliberately distorting information and lying are among the acceptable methods used by propagandists to make their points. Unlike other forms of communication, the objective of propaganda is to manipulate and persuade people to accept the information being presented to them.

Today, propaganda is used by world governments and corporations to promote their points of view. We have become used to the media talking about “spin doctors,” experts who sometimes try and neutralize or make positive public opinion about potentially devastating facts. Contemplate for a few seconds the millions still being spent each year by the tobacco industry to put a positive spin on their image. Until commercials advertising tobacco products in the U.S. was outlawed, many animators benefited from that industry’s annual propaganda (advertising) budgets.

The practice of secretly inserting government endorsed propaganda messages in TV shows is alive and well. For example the press disclosed in 2000 (Salon.com broke the story in “Prime-Time Propaganda,” January 14, 2000) that the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy was providing TV networks a financial incentive to have shows include anti-drug messages. Network censors (the Standards and Practices Department) review scripts before a show to avoid including anything that goes beyond their rules of acceptable content. The networks were (are? it isn’t clear the practice has stopped) submitting scripts that might fit the government’s needs. The government would suggest where a line or gesture could be inserted and what the actor might say or do. The anti-drug message could be as simple as a brief show of disgust at a drug related medical crisis. If things worked out, the network got credit that allowed it to run fewer Public Service Announcements (PSAs). Running a paid ad in place of giving a PSA free airtime is a worthwhile incentive. The shows tampered with included ER, Chicago Hope, Home Improvement, Beverly Hills 90210, Cosby, General Hospital and several others. The practice began in late 1997 when Congress passed a five-year, $1 billion project to put more anti-drug messages on television. Are the hidden anti-drug references in TV shows any more or less devious than advertisers paying movie producers to include their products on their sets? This sneaky practice is known as product placement.

For more information about Halas and Batchelor visit http://www.halasandbatchelor.com/. The Surrey Institute of Art and Design houses the Halas and Batchelor Collection in their Animation Research Center and can be found at http://www.surrart.ac.uk/arc.

The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters by Frances Stonor Saunders. New York, New York: The New Press, 2000. 528 pages with eight pages photographs. ISBN: 1-56584-664-8. (US$18.95)

Karl Cohen is a frequent contributor to Animation World Magazine and is the author of Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators (1997, McFarland). He teaches animation history at San Francisco State University and is president of ASIFA-SF.