Propaganda

“Propaganda brought us into power. Propaganda enabled us to remain in power.  Propaganda will enable us to conquer the world.”

—Adolf Hitler

            Early yesterday I posted a blog critical of the “I am Mormon” advertisement blitz throughout New York City.  Last evening the LDS-owned Desert News posted a piece by Joe Walker addressing the same topic: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700147893/LDS-advertising-campaign-elicits-significant-increase-in-website-visitors.html   The article implies that an increase in website traffic to www.mormon.org means that the ad campaign has been received favorably by its target audience.  As usual, the Deseret News is acting as the propaganda arm of the LDS Church, spinning random, scattered facts and feeding misinformation to the locals.   

In recent years, the Mormon Utah paper’s outright attempts at censorship have been outrageous. In 2010, a piece in their ‘Church section,’ (no specific author was credited) advised LDS Church members to refrain from searching outside sources for their Sunday school lesson materials. “Use proper sources,” depicted a mother-daughter scene where mother is struggling to prepare a Church lesson, books strewn across her table.[1] Daughter asks her mother why she doesn’t just teach from the LDS Church manual.  "Why," she asks, "are you trying to boil down information?  An inspired Church-writing committee has already done that for you." Mom, apparently a little dense in this scenario, looks confused.  Daughter goes on to explain that all she needs to teach is in the approved manual which has been ‘correlated’ by the Brethren “…to ensure purity of doctrine, simplicity of materials, and control by the priesthood.”  Mother’s concern disappears from her brow.   She is relieved that the work has been done for her and she closes her books, shuts down her internet browser and returns from her brief, thinking escape, to the land of the unquestioning.[2]

            This newspaper has been the media organ for the mainstream Mormon Church in the State of Utah for more than a century and a half.  In the early Twentieth Century, one-time U.S. senator Frank Jenne Cannon, son of late 19^th century LDS leader George Q., acknowledged its perverse power when he wrote that [the Deseret Evening News is] “…one of the most dishonest, unjust and mendacious organs that ever poisoned the public mind.”[3]  Additionally, the authors of The Mormon Corporate Empire noted:  “The Deseret News is not held in high esteem by its counterparts.”  During the investigation for their book, they “…encountered some very unflattering descriptions of it by other newspaper publishers in Utah and surrounding states.” [4] 

Almost a century ago, the father of public relations, Edward Bernays, put it aptly when he wrote:  “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.”[5] Mormonism, from its very inception, is a good example of propaganda in practice.  As economist Frank Knight acknowledged, a theocracy is more effective than a purely secular autocracy because in the former style of government, “the victims may not feel coerced at all.” [6]  Propaganda is alive and well in Utah. 

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[1] “Use Proper Sources,” Deseret News, January 9, 2010 http://www.ldschurchnews.com/articles/58411/Use-proper-sources.html

[2] Ibid. 

[3] Cannon, Frank Jenne & O’Higgins, Harvey J.  (1911) Under the Prophet in Utah, the National Menace of a Political Priestcraft.  (Reprint, Lexington: Forgotten Books, 2008) 201.

[4] John Heinerman and Anson Shupe, The Mormon Corporate Empire  (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985) 264, n. 33.

[5] Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Horace Liveright Publishing House, 1928) 71. 

[6] Frank H. Knight, “Professor Heimann on Religion and Economics,” Journal of Political Economy 56 (December 1948) 485.