Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods

Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods. Paul Rutherford. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2000.275 pp. $65 hbk. $24.95 pbk. L42 hbk. L16 pbk. Democracy is more than a form of government; it is also a certain assumption about the power of rhetoric. Paul Rutherford, who teaches history at the University of Toronto, suggests that an idea's relationship to power and the method by which it is communicated is perhaps more significant than the idea itself, no matter how innocuous or full of good will the idea may seem. Since the rise of television, he argues, "civic advocacy"-a term encompassing PSAs, government ads, charity appeals, corporate image campaigns, cause-related publicity, social and political issue ads, etc.-has become a common symptom of (as well as a causal source of) decline in democracy. As a form of manipulative propaganda that is intentionally designed to bypass rational discussion, it is inimical to popular government. Rutherford defines civic advocacy as a managerial discourse. It has sometimes been produced by corporations and the "nanny state," but in recent decades it has increasingly been created by nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations. These associations, however, are run by "bourgeois professionals" who have a "will to power" and seek dominion (if only on a single issue) over ordinary people. Although they sometimes appear to have laudable goals (e.g., do not use drugs, do not drink and drive, etc.), their persuasive tactics are much less praiseworthy. By wielding the marketing strategies of advertising in short television spots, Rutherford tells us, civic advocates alternately generate feelings of fear, shame, guilt, and/or pride among the public in a way that controls thinking and behavior on issues ranging from crime to healthy living. The brevity of television spots, he argues, has required advocates to reach their audiences quickly. The result has been ads that morally ambush audiences with images of such things as starvation, devastation, or calamity. People are manipulated into emoting about the world's problems-often having been given misinformation-rather than debating the issues involved. The author's Marxist analysis occasionally overreaches, but Rutherford nevertheless raises significant issues. With differing levels of success, he draws on the ideas of five philosophers-- Habermas, Gramsci, Foucault, Ricoeur, and Baudrillard-correlating their theories with the growth and impact of cause-related advertising produced since the 1960s. By linking Habermas's ideas about democracy to his own argument that civic advocates have "colonized" political and social realms, for example, Rutherford effectively argues that manipulative advocacy propaganda diminishes rather than promotes rational discussion, ultimately leading to an undemocratic false consensus. …