by Richard M. Balzano
The United States frequently criticizes Cuba, Nicaragua, Russia, Iran, China, and other adversaries for press restrictions and censorship. We repeat this with confidence, moral clarity, and the cadence of people who have internalized a very specific geopolitical common sense. And yet we, the most propagandized population on earth, may well be the one most certain we aren’t: confidently parroting conventional wisdom built through generations of curated narrative management so normalized, institutionalized, and respectably packaged that it doesn’t even register as propaganda. The problem isn’t that propaganda exists “over there”—it’s that we’ve spent decades perfecting a version of it so subtle, so systemically embedded, and so aggressively invisible that it passes for reality.
The politics of information isn’t about censorship versus freedom—it’s about power: who has it, who launders it through respectable institutions, and who gets labeled authoritarian for noticing. The West has spent decades constructing a self-congratulatory mythology of free-flowing ideas and neutral knowledge production, but the historical record reads less like a marketplace of ideas and more like a carefully stage-managed, donor-sensitive, narrative-engineering apparatus with just enough plausible deniability to keep the whole thing humming.
During the Cold War, this machinery took on a particularly refined, gentlemanly form when the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom secretly bankrolled highbrow publications and academic journals. Titles like Encounter, China Quarterly, and Mundo Nuevo weren’t propaganda rags—they were classy propaganda with a PhD and footnotes, ideology in tweed. Editors operated with bounded independence—free to think, write, and publish, so long as the broader intellectual climate remained anti-communist, pro-Western, and uncritical of capitalism, politics of publication that largely still exist. Ramparts uncovered the operation in 1967; the intellectual well had been poisoned, and the foundations of conventional wisdom laid. Subtle propaganda methods didn’t disappear—they rebranded and evolved.
Fast forward to the Islamic world during the W. Bush years, where the same soft-touch, process-heavy, responsibility-diffusing influence reappears in bureaucratic drag. The Arab Human Development Reports produced under the UN Development Programme were supposed to be independent regional analysis. Instead, content on U.S. policy and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was rejected or reshaped; some authors claimed their work was modified beyond recognition by American and Israeli editors. U.S. officials signaled displeasure and threatened to withhold funding if they could not have the final say on reality. The result isn’t crude propaganda; it’s systemic, layers of institutional caution and career-preserving self-censorship, where the politics of information yield independent-looking documents landing exactly where power is comfortable.
After 9/11, this logic metastasized into a full-spectrum “war of ideas,” with think tanks, NGOs, and donor-funded media ecosystems promoting curated narratives about “moderate Islam,” women’s empowerment, and acceptable forms of dissent. American anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod noted this produced grant-dependent, donor-pleasing “NGO feminism”—liberation only in forms aligned with Western priorities. Islamic feminism was off the table; and occupation, economic dependency, and Western-backed repression were reframed, deprioritized, or tabled.
This selective-visibility game has deeper roots. Before the Iranian Revolution, the Shah was branded a modernizing, stabilizing force—slick, secular, development-friendly. Repression? A footnote. Dissent? Fringe detail. The revolution hit, and the narrative pivoted to full-blown Orientalism. Iran became irrational, barbaric, fanatical, incomprehensible. The Middle East narrative is frequently curated to serve the needs of the moment.
Meanwhile, the structural scaffolding of American media was quietly re-engineered. The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan removed the modest expectation that broadcasters present opposing viewpoints, clearing the runway for partisan, narrative-maximizing media ecosystems. We became infested with Rush Limbaughs. Reagan created the National Endowment for Democracy to sow subversion abroad, along with the Office of Public Diplomacy under Otto Reich, which was designed to produce domestic propaganda to win support for Reagan’s unpopular Latin American initiatives. Reporters lamented there was too much disinformation to debunk all of it. The result was an alternative reality-detached narrative used to justify policy. Clinton’s 1996 Telecommunications Act did greater damage to the American media sphere, liberalizing media ownership and enabling consolidation so that massive corporations—some with stakes in defense, pharmaceuticals, and finance—could acquire news outlets and vertically integrate reality production.
In the spirit of free-market competition, Washington has a history of outsourcing propaganda to the private sector. It was Reagan, master of the permanent campaign, who perfected the art, coordinating PR firms rebrand murderous Latin American pariahs and sell unpopular policy at home. The Rendon Group was the Pentagon’s go-to media outfit in the early 2000s, planting strategic media in and about war zones, organizing front groups, and shaping narratives for U.S. military and intelligence operations globally. British PR giant Bell Pottinger was reportedly paid hundreds of millions to produce content during the Iraq War—from locally styled TV segments to alleged “insurgent” videos—under U.S. oversight. Meanwhile, Benador Associates boosted hawkish analysts and commentators, placing them in media to champion hard-line foreign policy positions.
The Smith-Mundt Act (1948) prohibited the government from propagandizing its own, but Obama’s 2013 Smith-Mundt Modernization Act blurred the line, letting state-generated international content (read: propaganda) for Voice of America, Radio Free Europe to circulate domestically under the auspices of open access. Workarounds had always existed, nudging White House-friendly journalists to pick up state-fabricated stories running in foreign press. But Americans are now free to absorb state-funded propaganda.
Partisan Americans are often insistent they consume propaganda-free media, but that voters for the other party consume “fake news.” Most are often unable to decipher systemic influence or manufactured consent. Meanwhile, American journalists and media consumers that process information outside the acceptable paramters of mainstream discourse are accused of being foreign assets.
The National Endowment for Democracy survives as the polite, NGO-friendly face of modern influence abroad. NED funds U.S.-friendly media outlets and journalists, “civil society groups” that engage in subversion, color revolutions and protests that often turn violent, and political opposition candidates, all allegedly in the name of democracy promotion. Strip away the branding, and its institutionalized interference—subversion—which is both routine and illegal under international law.
Why must the world tolerate U.S.-funded dis- and mis-information campaigns? Western double standards abound. Washington panics over alleged foreign interference at home, yet exports influence ops abroad as standard practice. Many non-Western governments already on the receiving end of economic warfare invisible to the American media consumers’ eye must also endure a permanent informational siege, yet they are charged with repressing democratic institutions when they crack down on foreign-planted messaging. It is hard to argue that a free press is not a cornerstone of a healthy society, but there might be a tinge of Western privilege in the assertion that postcolonial states struggling to assert sovereignty while under neocolonial siege, and enduring some level of economic warfare, must nonetheless tolerate foreign-funded propaganda in the spirit of democracy. Conventional wisdom and media talking points about American adversaries’ alleged media intolerance should be decolonized and contextualized correctly—the first question to ask is whether they’re repressing organic or externally-fed information.
Call it what it is: a rules-based-order-adjacent fantasy where the West writes the script, breaks the script, and then grades everyone else on compliance. The politics of information isn’t about whether narratives are shaped—it’s about who gets to shape them, who gets to pretend they don’t, and who pays the price for noticing.
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Richard M. Balzano is an historian and political analyst peddling truths at several institutions of higher learning, quietly devoted to the art of sedition and comfortably resigned to the peripheral left.