Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1 The Great Truth

2 The Myth of the Leader

3 Themes Not Policies

4 Dealing with the Enemy

5 Getting on the News

6 Interviews and Debates

7 The Way Ahead

8 Conclusion

Picture Section

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Copyright

 

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those who worked with me on the television series We Have Ways of Making You Think on which Selling Politics is based: the Assistant Producers, Edi Smockum and Karen Liebreich; for research in Romania, Simona Toncea, and for research in India, Frenez Khodaiji; all the various camera teams, particularly Jeremy Pollard, John Keeping, Morton Hardacre and Jerry Stein; and the Film Editors, Alan Lygo, Jim Latham and Graham Dean. I am grateful also for the advice of my Executive Producer, Jeremy Bennett, and for the exceptional help and support of our Production Secretary, Harriet Rowe. I thank my wife Helena, Michael Dean, Professor Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gili (to whom this book is dedicated) for their comments on the first draft of the book, and Jackie Walsh for keeping our year-old son Oliver away from the word processor.

Above all, I am grateful to Alan Yentob, Controller of BBC2. It was his idea to make a television series on this theme and his enthusiasm made the project possible.

In the course of research and production of the television series we talked to more than a hundred people in Britain, America, Germany, India, Romania and South America. I hope they will forgive me if I do not list them all here – our thanks are no less sincere for being expressed collectively.

None of the above are, of course, responsible for any errors or omissions in this book. Nor should the views and opinions expressed within it be taken as anyone else’s but my own.

Selling Politics

Laurence Rees

 

 

To Jonathan Gili

Chapter One

The Great Truth

IN THE SPRING of 1940 Josef Goebbels ordered a special bus to transport the cast of the recently completed film The Queen’s Heart (a sympathetic portrayal of Mary Queen of Scots) to his country estate in the woods of Lanke, north of Berlin. Amongst the cast was a beautiful dark-haired young actress called Margot Hielscher, whom the Reichsminister had taken a particular fancy to. On her arrival she was entranced by Goebbels. ‘He was very charming,’ she says. ‘I never would have thought that a politician would have such a routine in handling the females.’

After a traditional Rhineland meal of sausages and mash (the Reichsminister apparently mashed the potatoes himself), Goebbels announced that he had prepared a wonderful ‘treat’ for the cast.

That night they watched one of Goebbels’s favourite movies, a film banned to ordinary Germans because of the profound harm he thought it could do. The film was Gone with the Wind.

Goebbels adored Gone with the Wind: he was almost obsessed with the story of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara. ‘He saw Gone with the Wind at least twenty or thirty times,’ says Fritz Hippler, one of Goebbels’s most trusted film directors, ‘and every new crowd of guests was shown this film as an example.’

Goebbels’s love of Gone with the Wind is the key to understanding the power of his own propaganda methods. He was not only the first man to realize the true persuasive potential of the medium of film, he was the first to develop the ‘Great Truth’ about the propaganda use of the medium – an insight that can be summarized thus: in order to be effective, film propaganda must first be entertaining. As Fritz Hippler puts it, ‘Each film, including the ones demanded by the state, was meant to be entertaining, not boring, because it makes no sense to make propaganda when the one who had to be captured by the propaganda goes to sleep.’ It was no use making films which simply trumpeted the glories of Nazism. The people might be made to watch such crude propaganda, but they could never be made to like it.

Goebbels cared deeply about whether the audience enjoyed the films he made, often poring over box office returns to see what the customer reaction was to a particular favourite. Other totalitarian propagandists like Saddam Hussein or President Kim have mostly ignored what their captive audience actually thought of their work. This has been their single biggest communications mistake. A captive audience is not necessarily a receptive one.

It was an insight that seems to have come to Goebbels during a viewing of the earlier film classic Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein’s masterpiece. ‘This is a marvellous film without equal in the cinema,’ he wrote. ‘Anyone with no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing this film. It shows very clearly that a work of art can be tendentious, and even the worst kind of ideals can be propagated if it is done through the medium of an outstanding work of art.’

The ‘Great Truth’ recognized by Goebbels, that all film (and by extension television) propaganda must first be entertaining, has been concealed behind the common historical perception of Goebbels as the ‘evil genius’ responsible for such works of horror as Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew – the notorious film which showed rats intercut with pictures of Jews). The truth is that Goebbels disliked most of the crude anti-Jewish films. His ambition was to make a film as artistically fine as Battleship Potemkin or as emotionally powerful as Gone with the Wind. ‘Goebbels was movie-crazy,’ says Arthur Rabenalt, a successful film director of the period. ‘He liked to watch pretty women and so he liked exactly the same thing as the audience wanted.’ He was the least didactic of men. Other cinema favourites included Garbo in Ninotchka, Mrs Miniver and Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Goebbels was master of the paradox that propaganda must first be entertaining, but pure entertainment can also be propaganda. Arthur Rabenalt puts it this way: ‘The political intention of the unpolitical film was that each unpolitical film had a political purpose – to get the audience off the streets, away from the worries of the household and the family and to entertain them.’

The Reichsminister knew that by providing films that were purely entertaining he was providing propaganda – propaganda which showed how much the Reich cared for its people, how much the Nazis were concerned that the people would find some escape from the rigours of war. The need of the masses for escape became especially marked after the German defeat at Stalingrad. In 1943 Goebbels watched long queues form outside cinemas immediately after a series of heavy air raids, and wrote: ‘People crave recreation after the gruelling days and nights of the past week. They want solace for their souls.’

Goebbels believed so profoundly in the influence of entertainment-based films that when all else failed, when there was no other way of countering the enemy, after he had tried propagating fear, enmity and hate, he turned once more to entertainment. In 1943 he released one of the most charming and colourful entertainment films of the period – The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. And in early 1945, when he must have known defeat was inevitable, he ordered troops diverted from the front line to act as extras in a historical drama, Kolberg. Entertainment was the ultimate propaganda panacea.

Not surprisingly, Goebbels was under pressure from other senior members of the Nazy party to deliver more conventional ‘propaganda’. ‘They said: “Where is the film about the Labour Service?”’ says Rabenalt. ‘“Where is the film about the Hitler Youth? Where is the film about the German woman? Where are all these films?” And none of them materialized.’

The Reichsminister was so confident in his vision of the purpose of film that he resisted such pressure. Fritz Hippler, who knew him well, believes that Goebbels recognized the power of film in a profound way, that Goebbels knew that ‘the articles in the papers or what was said on the radio influenced the brain, the consciousness, the intelligence, the imagination, while the real primary forces of men are moved by the unconscious, that which he doesn’t raise into his consciousness, but which drives him on from beyond his consciousness. On these primary sources, the moving picture works in a particularly intensive manner, and this medium he therefore wanted to use in a particularly pointed way.’

Because Goebbels realized that film was working on the ‘real primary forces of man’ and not on the intellect, he knew that a number of important and far-reaching consequences followed. The first was that a propagandist who strives first to entertain should never try to tell anyone anything. Information is rarely entertaining, for it appeals to the intellect. Entertainment, on the other hand, is, because it appeals to the emotions. If a propagandist can find a route through to his audience’s emotions, can change how they collectively feel, then he can have a profound influence. Emotions cannot easily be challenged intellectually, so once a ‘feeling’ is created it is harder to dislodge than an opinion formed by mere reason. This was a profound insight into the propaganda power of film, an insight that was later to be fundamental to the success of the television propagandists who followed Goebbels.

Even when he found it necessary to insert more conventional propaganda content into his entertainment films, he always felt that if the audience registered the propaganda consciously then he had failed. He never wanted viewers to be conscious of watching a work designed to influence them politically. This is one of the main reasons why Goebbels loved film. No other medium before the invention of television could have had such a wide appeal – an appeal based upon an unintellectual approach. Goebbels’s diaries are full of despair at the ‘intellectual’ attempts of directors to influence film propaganda (and bear in mind that Goebbels was himself the most intellectually gifted of the Nazi elite). On 12 January 1940 he writes of Arthur Rabenalt: ‘Check the film White Lilacs. Unfortunately a failure from Rabenalt. I am a little depressed by the way our directors start with a success and then always go off the rails and become intellectual.’ In December 1940 he writes (and one can almost hear the irritation): ‘Intellectualism is the worst enemy of propaganda. I am constantly affirming this.’

From the first day Goebbels took office as Reichsminister of Propaganda in 1933, at thirty-five the youngest minister in any government in the world at the time, he made film propaganda his most important priority. In the early years of his control, film-makers often made the misjudgement of Goebbels that much of popular history has made since. They imagined Goebbels to be a charmless, humourless Nazi hard-liner. It is not difficult to see how they might have reasoned: ‘He’s a Nazi, and Nazis like marching. So we’ll give him what he wants – plenty of parades.’ They realized their mistake when they saw Goebbels’s reaction to early films like Hitlerjunge Quex, the story of a heroic boy in the Hitler Youth who, during the film’s climax, ascends to a Nazi heaven and finds it peopled by symmetrically marching stormtroopers. The Reichsminister hated such heavy-handed work. ‘If I see a film made with conviction,’ said Goebbels, ‘then I will reward its maker. What I do not want to see are films that begin and end with National Socialist Parades. Leave them to us, we understand them.’

Goebbels exercised ruthless control over the German film industry, especially over the content of the newsreels. Every Sunday evening Fritz Hippler, head of newsreel production, would drive out to Goebbels’s house with the rough cut of the proposed films for the following week’s cinema newsreel. Then he would take Notes of the changes in picture and script demanded by Goebbels. There would be another viewing with Goebbels late on Monday, for him to give his final approval to the film before it was released to the cinemas.

The Reichsminister would also interfere in every detail of the making of German feature films: scriptwriting, directing and casting – particularly casting. At times his conduct mirrored the excesses of the Hollywood ‘casting couch’ producers. Goebbels was not simply concerned with which actress was best for a particular film; he was also influenced by which actresses would go to bed with him. As the price of being cast he often insisted that the leading lady slept with him. Many did so willingly. Rabenalt recalls asking one leading actress why she had succumbed, and she replied, ‘He just interested me. I wanted to know a man of world history. You don’t miss out on that kind of thing.’ Goebbels slept with hundreds of young starlets, but without any emotional intimacy – he even insisted that they still call him Herr Reichsminister during sex.

Hitler shared neither Goebbels’s love of actresses nor his love of Hollywood entertainment films. He wanted propaganda that spoke in obvious terms to the masses. In Mein Kampf he wrote: ‘The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulae.’ Hitler never said it was a precondition of effective propaganda that it should first be entertaining. Despite Goebbels’s professed hero-worship of Hitler, a disagreement on this point between the Führer and his Reichsminister for Propaganda always seemed possible. Just such a disagreement eventually occurred over propaganda against the Jews, a subject always dear to Hitler’s heart.

During 1939 Goebbels told Fritz Hippler that newsreel cameramen in Poland should take film of the Jews of Warsaw. He told Hippler he needed these pictures for the German archive because ‘at some foreseeable time’ all these Jews were going to be ‘transported to the East’. Goebbels wished to have a record of Jewish customs made, just as an anthropologist might make a film of a jungle tribe before their way of life becomes extinct. On 17 October Goebbels records in his diary: ‘Hippler back from Poland with a lot of material for the Ghetto film. . . . Never seen anything like it. Scenes so horrific and brutal in their explicitness that one’s blood runs cold. One shudders at such barbarism. This Jewry must be eliminated.’

He then realized he could create propaganda from this ‘horrific’ material. On 28 October he wrote: ‘In the evening look at films. Rushes for our Jew-film. Shocking. This film will be our biggest hit.’

Hippler recalls how Goebbels saw the rough cut of the ‘Jew-film’ (which came to be known as Der Ewiger Jude – The Eternal Jew) and said he ‘liked it very much’. But shortly afterwards he ordered the film to be recut. Alterations were constantly demanded, each new version becoming more bloody and aggressive.

On 3 November Goebbels had written, ‘The Jew-film is very good’, but by the 11th he was writing, ‘I work on the Jew-film, the script still needs considerable revision. Discussion with Hippler on the film’s future form.’ On 10 December he wrote, ‘The Poland film (i.e. the Jew-film). Turned out quite excellent. A bull’s eye! I am very happy with it.’ Yet on the 13th he records: ‘Work long hours on films and the newsreel. The Poland film too had to be re-edited yet again at the Führer’s wish.’ So we now suspect that it was Hitler who wanted the changes. It was Hitler who wanted the film to be so horrific. Fritz Hippler says: ‘Hitler wanted to bring the “evidence” so to speak with this film that the Jews are a parasitic race within men, who had to be separated from the rest of men.’ As a result of Hitler’s personal interest in the film, Hippler says, ‘Goebbels demanded rat scenes because rats were portrayed as a symbol for Jews.’

More months passed, and still the ‘Jew-film’ had not been completed to the Führer’s satisfaction. The constant cutting and recutting seems to have wearied even Goebbels. On 12 January he wrote: ‘I shall have to rework the Jew-film again.’ Eventually, in late spring 1940, the film was released. It was a flop. Some scenes depicting the slaughter of animals according to Jewish rites were so disgusting that women fainted. As Hippler now puts it laconically, ‘The demand of the audience was not there. While other films were sold out, the demand for this film at the ticket office was lacking.’

There is no direct criticism of Hitler’s judgement over the ‘Jew-film’ in Goebbels’s diaries – he was, after all, intending them as a posthumous documentary record of the greatness of the Third Reich, the Führer and his own role in it all. But there is an entry in his diary on 5 July 1941 which illustrates their diverging approach to propaganda. Goebbels wrote: ‘A few disagreements over the newsreel. The Führer wants more polemical material in the script. I would rather have the pictures speak for themselves and confine the script to explaining what the audience would not otherwise understand. I consider this to be more effective, because then the viewer does not see the art in it.’

So the reputation Goebbels received after his death as the master of crude, vicious and evil propaganda is misplaced. On the contrary, he tried his best to provide the German people with entertaining propaganda. In November 1942 he wrote, ‘It really seems to me that we should be producing more films, but above all, lighter and more entertaining films which the people are continually requesting.’

Goebbels must have been overburdened with regrets as the war neared its end: regret that the Reich was over, regret that he felt compelled to take his own life, regret that he had never succeeded in making a film as good as Battleship Potemkin or Gone with the Wind. But had he known the future he would have had yet one more regret: that he did not live to master the medium that would have been even more to his taste than film, a medium born for the intellectual who realizes that the key to its propaganda mastery is its lack of intellectuality. Even more than with film, Goebbels would have exercised mastery over the propaganda power of television. The irony is that many of the propaganda truths he discovered about film were laboriously reinvented by television propagandists a generation later. That rebirth occurred appropriately enough in the New World – specifically in Manhattan in the early sixties.

A new world of propaganda

In 1980 I was lucky enough to meet the grand-daddy of American commercial TV, the man whom David Halberstam in The Powers That Be described as ‘the greatest huckster of them all’, the founder and chairman of the board of CBS, William S. Paley. In an interview for the BBC, conducted in his penthouse suite at CBS headquarters on West 56th Street in Manhattan, he sat surrounded by items from his exquisite art collection and expressed polite incomprehension at the notion that there was any criterion for providing an honourable TV service other than simple viewer demand. ‘We give them what they want,’ he told us. ‘It’s called democracy.’ The idea of ‘public service’ broadcasting, of providing programmes which are uneconomic to make but which the broadcasters on behalf of society feel ought to be made, was wholly alien to him. ‘The ordinary guy gets home at night,’ he said. ‘He sits down in front of the TV, he’s had a hard day at work. He opens a can of beer. He doesn’t want to see opera, he wants to see I Love Lucy.’

It was under the pressure of the unbridled commercialism created by men like Paley that American politicians lurched into television. The medium as it developed in America was wholly commercial, wholly audience-driven. And what do the audience crave? They crave just what Mr Paley so successfully and profitably gave them for all those years – they crave entertainment. From the first, the American politician would have to compete on TV not just with entertainment-based programmes, but with entertainment-based adverts. It was inevitable that this simple fact would mean politics would have to change – with some politicians facing up to the new reality more quickly than others.

It was poor Adlai Stevenson whom history cast as the dinosaur of the television age, the man who tried to press on as if nothing had happened. Stevenson, a literate and highly intelligent man, challenged Dwight D. Eisenhower for the Presidency of the United States in 1952 and 1956, and lost both times. He belonged squarely to the age of the ‘stump’ speaker, an age that it’s hard for those of us born into the television age to imagine. Professor Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death paints a romantic picture: ‘. . . the tradition of the “stump” speaker was widely practised, especially in the Western States. By the stump of the felled tree or some equivalent open space, a speaker would gather an audience, and, as the saying had it, “take the stump for two or three hours”.’ Such politics are still practised in the few remaining countries that television has not yet quite colonized. In India, for example, politicians who visit villages are still sometimes expected to speak for several hours as a test of their erudition. They are still expected to convey a message of information rather than entertainment.

Stevenson clearly reasoned that the simple purpose of television was to convey his ‘stump’ speech. One sympathizes with him. On first acquaintance it must have been hard for an intellectual to understand that television was not merely a conveyor of political messages but a changer of messages. Stevenson thought of himself as a ‘writer’. He would be seen constantly altering his speech right up to the moment of the ‘live’ television broadcast. For him the most important aspect of his television performance was the fluency of his words. So spare a thought for his poor producer, who realized that a single, endless shot of Stevenson – not a particularly attractive man – reading his speech to camera was going to have to compete for viewer attention with professional products like I Love Lucy and the ads for Ford automobiles.

Stevenson’s TV campaign was doomed to failure, especially since it was pitted against that of General Eisenhower, whose team of TV experts coached him in a format entitled Eisenhower Answers the Nation in which the candidate gave short, snappy answers to short, snappy questions posed by various stooges. ‘That an old soldier should come to this,’ Eisenhower is reputed to have murmured in the studio during the recording. But this particular old soldier knew enough to realize that he had to learn new tricks if he wanted to become President. In particular, he knew that he must listen to and trust his television consultant.

Stevenson’s conception of the role of his TV consultant is recorded by Professor Jamieson in Packaging the Presidency: ‘One morning at 1 a.m. during the Democratic convention in 1956, Stevenson summoned William Watson, who had produced his live political broadcasts in the primaries. “I’m having terrible trouble with my television set,” said Stevenson, “the reception is very bad, and I wonder if you could drop down and fix it?”’

Why didn’t men like Stevenson recognize at once that television was a medium of political persuasion like no other? Perhaps it was because they feared the truth – that television would change political life. In one telling TV advert in 1956 Stevenson announced that TV ‘isn’t going to stop me campaigning, I’m still going to go out and meet people’. But TV was to change almost everything, campaigning included.

One of the first Presidential candidates to spot the growing influence of television was John F. Kennedy in 1960. Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy’s speechwriter, recalls that on a trip through West Virginia Kennedy spotted the ‘tiny ramshackle shacks with no plumbing and no newspapers or magazines, but with large television aerials. He had seen surveys showing twice as many Americans citing television as their primary source of campaign information as those citing press and periodicals.’

Just what were the propaganda rules of this powerful new medium? In the fifties and early sixties politicians and their advisers stumbled around searching for the answer. But Dr Goebbels could have told politicians the truth at once. After all, he had already discovered it. Since television, like film, is a medium of entertainment, it follows that politicians must produce entertaining propaganda. One man, more than any other, began to exploit this truth in work which followed, however unconsciously, in the footsteps of Goebbels. His name is Tony Schwartz.

The ‘Great Truth’ – rediscovered

Tony Schwartz has lived and worked in the same brownstone building on West 56th Street in Manhattan for thirty years. He began his advertising career by making radio commercials, and came to believe that the ideal commercial should tell the viewer or listener nothing new. Radio and television were mediums of emotion and feeling. (Bear in mind that an entertainer does not try to inform his audience, but to touch their emotions and influence their feelings.)

Schwartz maintains that television propaganda (or ‘persuasion’ as most Democratic political consultants politely term it) should key into information already in the viewer’s mind. ‘With electronic media we’re dealing with evoked recall,’ Schwartz told me. ‘You have to relate what you want to tell me to my interest.’ Schwartz’s key insight was that television propaganda had to be a partnership between the propagandist and his audience. This partnership enables the TV propagandist to cut through the ‘clutter’ of ordinary advertising. ‘The answer to clutter,’ says Schwartz, ‘is to talk to people’s interest. They will hear you if you’re talking about something they’re concerned with.’ So successful television propaganda demands the reverse of the traditional technique of the ‘stump’ speaker. Instead of the politician speaking on the issues he feels should be of concern to the voters, in today’s television age the politician should research the voters (something Schwartz calls ‘pre-search’) to discover their issues of concern. Then the politician should address only these specific issues. In a profound way this renders redundant the traditional concept of politicians as people who are in the business of trying to persuade voters to convert to their own point of view. What Schwartz discovered was that television was peculiarly bad at persuasion, but peculiarly good at reinforcing previously held views. A politician in a television-led culture, therefore, should be not a leader but a follower of public opinion.

Schwartz denies that this is a form of cynical manipulation. ‘I use another word,’ he said. ‘I’m not manipulating people, they’re involved in what I would call “partipulation”. That is they have to participate in their manipulation. If they don’t participate in it, if they want to turn it off or turn to something else, then they can. But if they are bringing things to it then they are participating in their own manipulation.’

The advert that most perfectly demonstrates Schwartz’s theory of propaganda (and one that Goebbels himself would have been proud of) was transmitted during a break in CBS’s Monday Night at the Movies on 7 September 1964. It was an ad paid for by the Democratic supporters of President Lyndon Johnson, and it was so powerful, had such a cataclysmic effect, that it was never shown again during the Presidential campaign. It has become famous under the name The Little Girl and the Daisy. In essence the ad is simple: a little girl is picking the petals off a daisy and counting ‘One, two, three . . .’ As she reaches the number ten the picture freezes and then zooms in to her eye as we hear a missile countdown: ‘Ten, nine, eight . . .’ down to one. There follows a picture of a nuclear explosion over which we hear President Johnson’s voice intone: ‘This then is the choice, whether to love each other or to go into the dark. We must love each other or die.’

The Little Girl and the Daisy is a seminal work in the history of television propaganda. There are several lessons to be learnt from its success. First, the advert, true to Schwartz’s theory, tells the viewer nothing new. In fact it’s hard to work out quite what it tells the viewer in any intellectual sense. A little girl is pulling the petals off a daisy and then suddenly there is a nuclear explosion – what policy is this addressing? What information is it passing on?

Second, the advert fulfils the most important criterion of Schwartz’s theory of ‘partipulation’ and locks into an issue that the voter is concerned with: the safety of the human race, individually personified by a pretty little girl playing in a field. Who would wish to disturb such a child? Implicit answer: Johnson’s opponent in the Presidential election, the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who was alleged to have made intemperate statements about the possibility of fighting a limited nuclear war. ‘Aha!’ the viewer is supposed to feel, and thus contribute to the advert, ‘this is my greatest fear realized. Barry Goldwater might start a nuclear war.’ But the cleverness of Schwartz’s work is that nowhere is the real message of the ad actually stated in propositional terms: don’t vote for Goldwater – he’ll cause a nuclear war. The viewer makes an emotional judgement about what he is seeing: he feels that a nuclear war is possible if he votes for Goldwater. And feelings and impressions are almost impossible to dislodge. How can Goldwater refute the ad? No formal charges are laid against him, yet a series of devastating but unanswerable impressions are left in the voter’s mind.

Third, the advert is presented as a piece of drama. Here is a pretty little girl in a field who is blown up by a nuclear explosion caused by a trigger-happy President. It’s a terrible fairy story in which Goldwater is the hidden figure of evil, a kind of Republican wicked witch. Only this is a futuristic drama with a difference – it is interactive. The voter can stop the fairy story becoming reality by withholding his vote from Goldwater.

Imagine this kind of propaganda conveyed by the written word – for example, an article in campaign literature about a little girl in a field who is plucking the petals off a daisy and is subsequently blown up by a nuclear explosion implicitly caused by Barry Goldwater. It simply isn’t credible. But television or film are best suited to this kind of emotional, informationless propaganda, because these are media of entertainment and the key to successful entertainment is a dramatic appeal to feelings rather than to the intellect. Whilst the written word can, of course, be a vehicle for entertainment, words are always more susceptible to challenge and question than images.

Schwartz is proud of his work. He thinks of himself as an ‘artist’ and a ‘designer with sound’, a pioneer in a ‘post-literate society’. The voters in this society are not informed by the work of people like Tony Schwartz, but he does not think this is a problem. The idea of voters listening to the policies of individual politicians and then coming to a rational decision based on their own interests is alien to Schwartz. He believes that voters now make decisions based on feelings rather than intellect. ‘You see, people have no experience with the answers to their problems,’ he told me. ‘If you had ten politicians in here telling you what to do with the economy, you couldn’t know who was right. But if you had ten people here telling you how they feel the economy is affecting people, and if they were all qualified for the office, you could say, “You know, he feels exactly the way I do about this. He’ll do the right thing.” It’s based on your feelings towards him from what he evokes within you.’

Towards a new definition of Politics

The work of men like Tony Schwartz in the sixties established a new definition of politics. As Professor Postman says, ‘One doesn’t have to be an academic to have thought of politics as posing for people alternative choices in the way they’re going to live. And this implies people having information, having some level of awareness of the issues so that they would know what choices they have.’ Television and the work of the new political consultants has changed all that.

Just how much it has changed can be gathered from a tale told by Roger Ailes, President Bush’s 1988 media adviser and the current guru of Republican political consultants. In his book You Are the Message Ailes discloses the method he devised to assess the talent of TV presenters who fronted local chat shows. He would travel to the various cities, check into a motel room and watch the presenter’s performance. Nothing wrong with that, you might say. But the revealing fact is that Ailes would watch the presenter in action with the sound turned down. Ailes writes: ‘There may be some ex-television hosts somewhere in America who are gagging while reading this because they now know that they lost their jobs because some guy was sitting in a hotel room watching the television set with the sound turned off. However, this is a technique that I still use today with clients in our training course.’ This is an extraordinarily significant admission by the master of today’s American TV propaganda. Here is a man who believes so strongly that TV is an emotional medium that he forms a value judgement about a TV presenter’s (or politician’s) ability without having to listen to what the man or woman is actually saying. Ailes seems to suggest that the viewer or voter makes a judgement based entirely on visual clues and doesn’t absorb the content of the message at all.

Ailes states that whenever he is unsure about his reaction to a particular person he always asks, ‘What am I feeling?’ Emotional judgement is raised above intellectual assessment. In fact it is not taking the logic of Mr Ailes’s technique too far to suggest that intellectual judgements of themselves are in some way suspect. Suppose intellectually you like what a candidate is saying, but emotionally, and for some inexplicable reason, you feel uneasy about him – on this logic that’s a good enough reason not to vote for him. Such a rejection need never be rationally explained.

That such views can actually be treated seriously, let alone publicly voiced by the leading Republican political consultant, shows just how far television has pushed the boundaries of politics towards emotional criteria of judgement. Pause a second, and think how it would be if your own career was conducted along these lines. Your boss could call you in and say: ‘I know you’ve worked hard and you do your job well, but I just feel that I don’t like you and I feel you ought to go. So I’m sacking you.’

It follows that the axiom of today’s consultants is: ‘Forget intellectual content, think of ways of affecting the voter’s emotions.’ (As Goebbels knew, intellectualism is the worst enemy of propaganda.) So the TV propagandist concentrates on ways of reaching the voter on an emotional level. Which is where the work of a consultant operating out of a converted mill house near Baltimore in Maryland is so significant; for Robert Goodman managed to get a man elected to the Senate on the basis of a song.

The Irving Berlin of politics

Goodman, a veteran Republican consultant whose client list has included such luminaries as George Bush and Spiro Agnew, personifies Goebbels’s ‘Great Truth’. Goodman’s over-riding original ambition was not to be a politician, not to be in government, not to ally himself with any great issue. He wanted to work in the entertainment business. ‘I thought I was going to be the next Irving Berlin of this country,’ he told me. Goodman’s dream was to be a songwriter, and yet he has made a good living as a political consultant. He sees no contradiction in this. ‘Music is an emotional element,’ he says, ‘and we believe, and I think most of our competitors believe, that voting is an emotional act.’

Goodman has always thought of political campaigns as dramas. ‘I saw that they were no different from a play,’ he says, ‘except that these were real actors and actresses on the stage, and I tried to create emotion about my candidates by putting them in environments and writing rousing music to support them so that there would be hope out there.’ Through a toothy smile Goodman confesses that, ‘Love and hope is what I was selling.’ So a political campaign on television is not about defence policy or economic plans or the reorganization of the National Debt; it is, in Goodman’s words, ‘a classic drama of the man in the white hat and the man in the black hat’. Words are essentially superfluous since in a political campaign, just as in a movie, at a critical moment it is not words but the ‘music’ which ‘swells up’.

Goodman’s campaign for a rich Wyoming man named Malcolm Wallop, who ran for a Senate seat in 1976, perfectly illustrates the truth that effective television propaganda should be entertainment-based. Wallop was running against an incumbent senator named Gale McGee. In common with every other modern political consultant, Goodman’s first act was to consult the electorate: he polled the voters of Wyoming to establish the issues on which McGee was vulnerable. (It is never done for a consultant to approach a campaign with firm preconceived ideas on policy. Men like Tony Schwartz have proved that TV propaganda must be ‘plugged into’ the voter’s own feelings, not geared to the individual politician’s particular beliefs.)

Goodman examined the results and discovered that he and his candidate had a problem. The polls showed that Gale McGee was ‘correct on every issue’. The incumbent Democratic senator had no policy weak spot; the voters were very happy with him. But this depressing news only represented a greater challenge to Robert Goodman. He told me that he then sat in a dark room and ‘dreamed of Wyoming’. His intuition told him that he should try and connect his candidate to the notion of ‘state pride’. ‘If you can connect people with pride in a state,’ he says, ‘you’re doing something wonderful because you’re taking your candidate and you’re saying, “Ah! This is the symbol of Oklahoma or Texas or whatever state.”’

Goodman sat in his dark room and dreamed of Wyoming, and as he dreamed he dreamed of – the horse. ‘Horses are symbols,’ says Goodman, ‘they’re not just animals. It’s not like an automobile. It’s not just a conveyance. It’s a whole way of life and speaks of independence and self-reliance.’ The answer was clear – put the candidate on a horse. But this was only part of the solution. After all, any political consultant might have thought of putting his candidate on a horse. Robert Goodman put Malcolm Wallop on a horse and wrote a song about it.

The advert which Robert Goodman created for Malcolm Wallop is extraordinary. It opens on pictures of cowboys riding at round-up time, and then cuts to a shot of Malcolm Wallop wearing a cowboy hat and riding a horse. He is surrounded by his supporters (who are also, of course, on horses). Goodman had developed the idea of a ‘Wallop Senate Ride’: his candidate was going ‘to ride the state’. As it turned out Wallop only rode his horse about fifteen miles, but then a television camera hardly needs to see a rider for more than a few seconds to make its point. Goodman confesses that his candidate needed ‘something outrageous to win this thing’, because ‘we weren’t going to win this thing on the merits of the issues’.

In his dark room Goodman eventually came up with the lyrics for the campaign song to capture the ‘feel’ of Wyoming:

Goodman freely admits that he had trouble selling Wallop’s campaign managers the line ‘Wyoming to the spur’, but he ‘really put [his] foot down’ and said, ‘Now listen, I do the music – let me alone.’ The advert neatly sidestepped the problem that Wallop’s opponent was ‘correct on every issue’ by not mentioning any issues at all. Wallop won the campaign, and (at the time of writing) is still in the US Senate.

The Wallop Senate Ride repays as much study as The Little Girl and the Daisy, and is probably even more revealing about the truths of TV propaganda. What, for instance, does the voter actually learn about Malcolm Wallop’s fitness for high political office from Goodman’s advert? That he can ride a horse, true. That he is riding the state, possibly. That Wallop is a cowboy, perhaps. But here the voter is misled. Wallop is not a cowboy. As Goodman admits, ‘there was a little stretch there’. Wallop is actually a rich man, educated at Yale University in the East, and his nearest connection with the