Statement on the Use of Funds for Privacy, Information and Security

David Greenberg

Department of Journalism & Media Studies

SCILS, Rutgers University

November 8, 2004

I am working on a book-length history of how American presidents have managed the news in the 20^th Century. The book traces the development of a vast apparatus in the White House devoted to what is now commonly referred to as “spin.” Central to my study are issues of war and national security. During the last century, no condition has done more than war to increase the power of the state to manage the flow of public information. The book will examine how presidents and other leaders have used war as both a legitimate reason and a cynical pretext to restrict information and, more important, to institutionalize new tools for information management. Sections of the book will focus on the Committee on Public Information that President Woodrow Wilson put into effect during World War I; anxieties about propaganda that arose in the aftermath of the war; Franklin Roosevelt and how his use of radio and polling during World War II; the Vietnam War and the invocations of national security by Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon; the Reagan administration’s “small wars” in Central America; and the two Gulf Wars. The purpose is not simply argue that presidents have been wrong or cynical to use war and security as an excuse for limiting the flow of public information; rather, it is show how, historically, wartime invocations of security have served to augment, often permanently, the tools at the president’s disposal for such news management.