entertainment as propaganda

As part of a typical drama aired some years ago in Africa, a family engages in a familiar debate over scare household money. Eventually, it is decided that the couple will approach a neighbor and ask for a loan. The father knocks at the door of the neighbor and begins to explain why he so desperately needs a little cash. The kindly neighbor volunteers not just a loan but a gift, telling him cheerfully that the only reason he is poor is because he has many children. 'We use family planning,' adds the heroic benefactor. 'Family planning means we have money to do the things we want to do.'

In Nigeria and in Cameroun, music appears on radios, seemingly out of nowhere, in which the lyrics stress themes dramatically at odds with local culture and custom. Have fewer children . . . Use contraceptives . . . Overpopulation . . . And in Cote d'Ivoire, there is actually a music video that has been circulated to television stations and music stores depicting veiled women bowed before condoms -- and in a mosque, no less!

In each case, the audience believes it is watching regular, commercial entertainment -- music and stories that reflect the people they know in their own lives. The faces are familiar, the language is their own. The visual images and themes bear some resemblance to reality. Psychologically speaking, they let down their guard. Though the messages may seem odd or even offensive, members of the audience are not aware that what they see and hear is part of a massive, systematic, carefully-planned propaganda offensive carried out by foreign government agencies.

This is an old trick. Behavioral scientists know that people will be far more vulnerable to messages that are casually introduced to the intended audience than they would be to the more crude forms of psychological warfare of the battlefield such as warnings blared out of loudspeakers and leaflets falling from helicopters. They know, too, that if a message is repeated constantly over a long period of time, intermingled with other images and themes that are culturally familiar and reassuring to the targets, it will be gradually come to seem less alien and more a "legitimate" concept within their cultural and/or political surroundings.

Above all, those who specialize in propaganda and the manipulation of public opinion know that foreign propaganda must always conceal its origin and objectives. Secretly-sponsored entertainment as propaganda fits all these requirements. Because it comes across as an "indegenous" art form, whether music or drama, suspicions are not raised as to its origin or intent. It provides both the casual exposure and the opportunity for repetition that is critical to a major propaganda undertaking. Welcome to the world of "Enter-Educate."

Meet 'Enter-Educate'

"Enter-Educate" is a term coined by a lavishly-funded "population communication" campaign, sponsored by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and designed to bring down birthrates in developing nations by desensitizing mass audiences to the concept of birth-prevention and creating the false perception of "peer pressure" to use contraceptives. In the words of the USAID population communication contractor, the Johns Hopkins University Population Center for Communication Programs,

The term "Enter-Educate," coined by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programs, is a contraction of the words "entertainment" and "education." It describes any communication presentation that delivers a pro-social educational message in an entertainment format.

Every Enter-Educate product consists of two equally important parts: the format (entertainment) and the message (education). The purpose of entertainment is to attract and hold the attention of the audience by engaging their emotions. The purpose of education is to enhance the knowledge and skills of the learners so that they can reach their potential . . .

Today Enter-Educate is widely accepted as an effective communication tool and is used almost everywhere. The popular approach has proven itself a persuasive and profitable means of communicating a pro-social message. The passion that emotional performances convey can make many Enter-Educate messages resonate at a personal level, and often elicit a passionate participation from the receivers of the messages. As Enter-Educate products and performances become more profitable and more capable of influencing people's attitudes, intentions, and behavior, practitioners and would-be practitioners will increasingly pay attention to how one develops the best products and performances.

In other words, not only does the concept of secretly-sponsored or falsely-attributed "entertainment" exploit the vulnerabilities of the target group, it also can be a way of persuading them -- at the emotional, rather than the rational, level -- to adopt whatever ideology it is that is (often very subtly) disseminated in their midst.

In the case of the Johns Hopkins University Population Communication Services Project (JHU-PCS), as the USAID program is known, the "pro-social" message is more appropriately called an "anti-social" message because it's explicitly-stated goal is to erode social norms and cultural influences in targeted nations and to reduce the future population of the recipient societies. Moreover, because it is masked as pure "entertainment," listeners and viewers are far more likely to willingly expose themselves to the messages or even to seek them out. This further lowers the resistance of the group to the propaganda aspect of the communication because, unlike messages that take the form of argument, the audience tends not react critically to the content.  

According to Phyllis Tilson Piotrow, under January of 2002 the head of the university's population communication campaign, the "enter-educate" approach can be summed up in a set of principles called the "Nine Ps." These principles, some essentially self-serving, are as follows:

pervasive: It reaches everyone, everywhere, via media, local events, music, or drama.

popular: People like and enjoy entertainment.

persuasive: People are persuaded because they can see and copy role models.

profitable: It generates revenue and helps pay for itself.

passionate: evoking emotions that help to stir recall and action.

personal: enabling individuals to identify strongly with the depicted characters.

participatory: in providing opportunities for many people to join in simple entertainment.

It prompts to action through a variety of specific reminders and cues.

It is also proven effective in a number of different evaluations throughout the world which show that Enter-Educate appraoches really do influence people's attitudes, intentions and behavior.

One can question whether the planting propaganda in the media is ever "profitable" in the sense that the project can ever recover in sales anything close to the costs involved in the research, testing, and strategic planning phases of an operation. Likewise, it is rarely "participatory" except to the extent that people are induced to participate as hirelings.

But other points are more important. The first factor in the list in the element of "pervasiveness." That is the very foundation of a serious and intensive propaganda effort. It spans virtually every form of media, from the cinema and recorded music and even comic books to radio and television talk shows and dramas, even documentaries. The message of the "entertainment" is supplemented (or "reinforced") by non-entertainment media, including commercials and service announcements on the airwaves, spot endorsements (often using quotes taken out of context), and visual images ranging from billboards and posters to logos on clothing, gadgets, and trinkets (keychains and tote bags, mostly given away free as part of the propaganda program.

The latter is briefly discussed in connection with the "enter-educate" strategy:

Examples of product images that resulted from a series of workshops with adolescents who conceptualized messages were presented. The T-shirt modeled below [not shown] was developed with a young person's perspective in post-revolution South Africa. Viva condoms used the South African flag on a condom to convey protection from HIV as a national issue. The Love Tunnel condom promotion pamphlets below [also not shown on the JHU web page]

That a campaign is intended to be "pervasive" is, by itself, important. By monopolizing the communications media, the contractor is able to convey the sense that a debate about something as controversial as population control/family planning is over when, in reality, there never was a debate at all. Moreover, by sheer volume of messages and variety of venues, a campaign of this magnitude can only be one-sided, as no adversary in any of the poor nations targeted for this kind of offensive could ever hope to counter it. It quite consciously demoralizes and intimidates the opposition. And by dominating the airwaves and news media with its own agenda, the project contractor is able to literally "squeeze out" alternative points of view.

Another goal, not always fully realized, is to make the entertainment "popular." In other words, a radio soap opera with a "small families are better" theme should, at least in theory, incprporate the birth control messssage as a sub-theme to a larger, interesting plot, thereby makingn the production appearn not only to be legitimate entertainment, but holding the interest and loyalty of viewers. In most cases, music has not lived up to its promise. Almost universally, music produced as part of the JHU-PCS project has never reached any level of popularity -- despite the fact that in some countries major artists with a substantial base of listeners (i.e., Nigeria) have been recruited for the effort, and enormous sums have been spent to promote or advertise the recordings (something not normally done at all in Africa).

The idea that a propaganda campaign should be "passionate" is a reference to emotional appeal, something that is easier to introduce into entertainment than other media. A sophisticated campaign of falsely-attributed ("covert") propaganda can, of course, "prompt" a change in attitudes and beliefs, as well as intentions and behavior, over time.

But the "personal" aspect is central to the process of propaganda-initiated cultural change. As the web page of the population communication project reveals advises, this involves the "internalization" of the message and the behavior it seeks to create, among members of the group to whom the entertainment-propaganda is disseminated. Says a report from the same source,

The Enter-Educate approach relies heavily on the social learning theory advocated by Dr. Albert Bandura. This theory states that most behavior is learned through modeling - a person observes other people and uses their behavior as a model for future behavior. People do not learn a new behavior unless they see it demonstrated. Entertainment both attracts attention and provides a format for demonstrating new, desired behavior . . . Entertainment works by creating an emotional arousal in the viewer - a reaction necessary for behavior change to occur.

In other words, by using characters that evoke a positive response among audiences, a media campaign such as this will induce viewers of, say, a television drama, to identify with those characters and give approval to their behavior. In other words, the idea is to provide an example to the viewer, so that if pressed to adopt the behavior advocated in the propaganda (in this case, birth control), the same viewer will be more likely receptive to the suggestion.

The preparation of the campaign can be extraordinarily complicated. Audiences must be sampled -- in other words, investigated to determine what characterists would be taken as positive or negative, the prevalent concerns among potential targets and much more. All of this requires careful study.

A comprehensive theory of human behavior must explain how people acquire attitudes, values, and the competencies needed to manage their lives, and how they motivate and regulate their own behavior. There are two basic modes of learning: learning through direct experience, which is a rather tough teacher, and through the power of example. The special advantage of social modeling is that it can serve as an effective instructor and motivate vast numbers of people simultaneously.

In prestige modeling, for example, culturally admired television models exhibit the beneficial styles of behavior, and their social attraction increases the impact of their influence. In similarity modeling, characters representing different segments of the viewing population are shown adopting the beneficial attitudes and behavioral patterns, and seeing people similar to oneself succeed enhances the power of modeling. In transitional modeling, positive models exhibit beneficial life styles, negative models exhibiting detrimental life styles, and transitional models change from detrimental to beneficial styles of behavior. Contrasting models highlight the personal and the social facts. Different life styles and viewers draw inspiration from seeing others change their lives for the better. The other factors are vicarious, they motivate. The benefits of the favorable practices and the costs of the detrimental ones are vividly depicted. Depicted benefits provide the incentives for change.

The above identifies two closely-related theories. First, of course, is the peer pressure strategy -- making it appear that the expectations of one's peers and of the larger society are consistent with the actions proposed by the propaganda. And second, there is the idea that "incentives" are the factor that motivate a person to take a particular action that they never contemplated before. This does not always mean direct monetary incentives -- as in the case of money paid to sharecroppers to be sterilized -- but can also mean something positive in terms of status, lifestyle, or self-esteem. By incorporating the concept of "incentive" into a mass media "outreach" campaign, the propagandist is attempting not merely to change beliefs and preferences, but to stimulate a particular action that is recommended by the message. As the same document continues,

Another factor that adds to the audience's acceptance is "attentional" involvement. Melodramatic and other emotional devices are used to sustain high involvement in dramatic productions. "Symbolic coding aids" such as epilogues and summarization of the model messages are used to underscore the importance of the social practices that are enacted and to enhance their "recallability." And the final factor is the provision of environmental supports. It is of limited value to motivate people for change if they do not have the needed resources and the environmental supports to realize those changes. Environmental guides and supports are provided to expand and sustain the changes that are produced by the media.

In other words, the communications project must go beyond attitude change change to actual "motivation." And this is done, at least in some cases, by creating the perception in individuals that the action called for in the propaganda film will be supported by those whose approval is important to them. In other words, the propaganda-education must convey the belief that the societal norms have changes and that the action it inspires will be accepted by one's peers. This is sometimes called "social persuasion."

Social persuasion is another way of reinforcing people's beliefs that they have what it takes to succeed. Good social persuaders do more than just express faith in others, they also structure activities for them in ways that bring success and do not place people prematurely in situations where they are likely to fail.

As the above suggests, it is not merely enough to urge people to change their behavior with respect to family planning, but also to change the climate in which this behavior will take place. Social persuasion, to put it another way, creates an illusion of acceptability or respectability where the use of birth control is concerned. As other JHU-PCS literature states, the idea is to erode custom and culture by falsely portraying the image of the society as changing in ways conducing to greater acceptance of birth control. Thus, because human actions are largely determined by their cultural surroundings, the propagandist will present a deviant image of that culture in the mass media. And as time passes, people will tend to react to that image as if it were real.

People [tend to] motivate and regulate their behavior by the outcomes they expect their actions to produce. Your beliefs of efficacy determine the kind of outcomes you expect. These take three forms: 1) the physical costs and benefits, 2) the social costs and benefits, and 3) the self-evaluative costs and benefits. After people adopt personal standards, they do things that give them a sense of self-worth and pride, and refrain from behaving in ways that bring self-censure. "Evaluative self-incentives" operate as strong guides and motivators of behavior. Unless people see that their personal interests are served by adopting new patterns of behavior, they have little incentive to mount the effort needed to change their ways. Media production should highlight the personal and societal benefits of the promoted forms of behavior. Media production should be devised to encourage people to believe that they can do what is necessary to succeed.

Again, the stimulus to change is created through a system of psychological incentives -- costs and benefits as measured by the anticipated physical, social, and personal outcomes to target group members. Physically, they may fear the consequences of certain contraceptives and find large families helpful. Social esteem or status may be enhanced by having many children, and personal satisfaction maybe gained in the same way. The objective of the anti-natalist propaganda, then, is to reverse all of those ideas by signaling to the audience, in a variety of ways, that the opposite -- a clearly defined "new" ideology -- is becoming true. This is implied in the following, a continuation of the previous text:

The other motivator is aspirations. Once people commit themselves to valued goals, they enlist the effort needed to fulfill them. Goals alone have little motivating value unless they are translated into concrete steps that give substance to the vision. Some goals provide direction for one's efforts, and some goal attainments build a sense of efficacy and self-satisfaction . . .Media productions should model how to translate a vision in a desired future into a series of achievable steps.

A specific population communication project in Peru, a television "mini-series" called "Time For Love," attempted to promote "safe sex" (condoms and contraceptives to prevent pregnancy). The official web page commentary stresses on the Peru activity includes the same idea:

Time for Love is a five-episode TV mini-series on unplanned parenthood targeted at teens and their parents... We used Albert Bandura's social modeling theory to develop the characters of the TV mini-series . . . It reinforces the practice of safe sex as a smart thing to do, showing that protecting oneself and one's partner is also an emotional response, and not just something rational that has to be done. The series demonstrates that safe sex, and the consequences of unprotected sex, are the responsibilities of both men and women. The intention is to subvert the status quo that assigns women control over men's sexual drive and responsibility for liberating men from any of its unwanted consequences.

But even under the weight of a massive propaganda onslaught, change does not come quickly or easily, and if it is occurs in response to false cultural signals, it may not be permanent, either. Thus, says another JHU-PCS document, the messages must be constantly reinforced.

What I always like to remind people is that you can't do a single message and expect change. Coca-Cola, for the past hundred years, approximately, has been advertising to its clients; they have lots of clients but they don't stop advertising. They keep reinforcing the message. That is an issue, I think, that Enter-Educate needs to face.

And even as this propaganda bombardment continues, it is crucial to test the reaction of target group members to the messages to which they are exposed. Only by doing this can propaganda projects like that of Johns Hopkins University be certain that audiences remain sufficiently interested to absorb propaganda themes and ideas. Says another part of the JHU-PCS web page,

In Mexico, new research methods are now being incorporated that augment older research and validation methods. The purpose is to provide the producers and writers with ongoing information about how characters and story lines can be tweaked on a weekly basis to improve audience interest and recall. Focus-group families are visited twice weekly by an observer who remains with the family during the major viewing hours. Nearly 100 observations and interviews a week about how the family members relate to the soap opera story and characters are combined with a continuous survey to create an average for the items being followed. These averages are used to define weekly trends that the producers can use as guidelines to write and produce current episodes. Recently, information gathered in this way served to redefine the major character in the current series, with much success. Audience recall and positive evaluation of the character were measurably improved following changes initiated by such audience surveys.

Another section of the "enter-educate" explains the importance of audience research to the creation of effective propaganda entertainment. Ironically, this appears in the context of a short-lived radio project in Afghanistan.

A monthly consultative committee meeting is at the center of a whole cycle of stages of designing soap opera messages. First of all, in the script development meeting, the writers get together in a brainstorming session and decide the key issues and the main storylines. They come out with script development notes. Then there is the consultative meeting. This is where the organizations that specialize in particular fields brainstorm on the basis of script development notes with the scriptwriters. The synopses, on the basis of that meeting, are prepared in English and Persian. The synopses are revised by the script editor and the project manager. Detailed scenes are then written in Persian and Pashtu. Script revision follows that; then there is the recording, the editing, the broadcasting, and, after that, the monitoring and evaluation.

The use of doing opinion sampling after a propaganda campaign is illustrated by Hopkins project literature regarding a series of radio dramas and talk programs, combined with jingles aired as commercials. According to the text, studies were able to demonstrate the effectiveness of a campaign targeted at Nepal in producing ideological shifts in attitudes and perceptions about birth control.

With measures at two points in time, we were able to classify survey respondents as continual non-users, adopters, discontinuers, and continual users, and then compare campaign exposure and attitude change across those groups. The panel data reveal significant differences between those who were exposed and unexposed to the RCP [Radio Communications Project in Nepal] interventions. Adopters of family planning were more likely than continual non-users to be exposed to the RCP interventions.

The mechanism of behavior change was clearly ideational change. Analysis of attitude change scores showed that people who listened to the radio dramas were significantly less likely to express a preference for sons over daughters, more likely to have discussed the number of children they wanted with their spouse, more likely to believe that the majority of couples in their community were using family planning, and more likely to advocate the use of family planning to others.

Indeed, pre- and post-campaign perceptions management is a doctrine that dates back to the psychological operations of the Central Intelligence Agency and the US military of the early cold war years. Military and "special operations" teams likewise were careful in testing the response of small test groups (now called "focus groups") to propaganda themes prior to their dissemination as a means of identifying any "distortions that might be operating" (to use language borrowed from the old records of the Psychological Strategy Board that coordinated the psy-war tactics and procedures of a variety of US government agencies. Likewise, after a campaign is underway, it is again neceesary to do sample group studies to measure the outcome of the campaign.

PROPAGEDUCATE?

Another "enter-educate" issue involves getting the cooperation of the media which are to be used for the propaganda offensive. In most developing countries, this is largely a function of "population policy development" schemes by which governments, as a condition for aid and credit, are comelled to accept policy decisions that are literally made by foreign or multilateral lenders and donors. In this situation, the use of government-owned broadcast facilities simply becomes part of the "deal." But there remain in most countries a sufficient number of independent media -- newspapers and journals, the music and entertainment industry, and the like -- that must either be persuaded or bought out. The process of selecting, approaching, and penetrating these outlets is also dealt with by the "enter-educate" concept of family planning propaganda. JHU-PCS literature calls it a process of recruiting "partners." Often done through the use of front groups that conceal the foreign sponsorship of the campaign, the bargaining system requires selectivity, described on the JHU-PCS "Enter-Educate" page as consisting of several attributes and goals:

"Social Capital" (good name and fame)

Cultural differences or different fields and contexts of expertise;

Personality traits of the parties involved;

Selection criteria" (which to choose);

Professional standards; and

"Backing," or knowing the right people to play up to.

Put in simple terms, this means that the mass media project seeks out reputable sources to convey its ideologies, that it needs to have a variety of collaborators able to reach culturally-distinct audiences, and that they must carefully chose each medium developing and evaluating the contacts that they have at all. According to the Hopkins communications team, it is essential, first of all, that project staff be able to trust their connections and that they provide in return a propaganda product that is viable as education.

The critical factor in forging partnerships with the private sector is a deep understanding of the media environment and the industry's "modus operandi." For any television partnership to be successful you need a vibrant local programming industry; a popular and receptive "prime-time;" and access to the industry decision-makers.

And that's only half of the story. The other half is the "competition" that comes from already-existing programming -- the truly indigenous variety -- that sends exactly the opposite signals as the population communication campaign.

. . . [W]e need to increase the extent to which we develop partnerships . . . and decrease the extent to which we attempt to do it by ourselves . . . What's the point of making another sexual-health-related soap opera in a country that's already got ten such soap operas on the air that are carrying the wrong information? . . . Why not just work with their script writers and producers?

to put it another way, a major element in the "enter-educate" strategy is to attain media saturation by co-opting as much of the local media as possible, thereby eliminating ideological competition between the "common sense" of the recipient country people and replacing it with a westernized ideology that serves a larger geopolitical objective (population control).

The "enter-educate" plan is a means to breach "taboos" in non-western societies. And even before it can undertake the task of "persuasion" and "cultural change," it can serve as the proverbial "ice breaker," creating controversy in a controlled environment in which that controvery can be managed. The use of "street theater" in India, the "Nalamdana Shows," illustrates the point:

The characters are played by young actors who present their roles in ways that encourage young people to identify with and emulate the characters' behavior. Youths think the characters are cool enough to be like them. And, after the play, when programmers talk to some of these young people, they find that it's much easier for the young people to ask questions freely about HIV, about sexuality, about any of the issues that are otherwise fairly taboo.

The "Nalamdana" shows, says the Hopkins Enter-Educate page, involved about one thousand people for each of an unspecified number of performances. Of those, ten were evaluated. "The study design used for this evaluation used one group both pre/post-test." Strangely, the text admits that the propaganda planners took extra steps to endure the outcome of the plays. "Cast members themselves debriefed audience members after the show," it advises. "Doing the qualitative interviews made them [performers] realize exactly what the audience members had learned and picked up from the drama.

Those who actually participated in the "street theatre" presentations (undoubtedly paid for their participation) were, in other words, encouraged to become agents not only at the message dissemination phase but for post-testing (impact evaluation), as well.

NEVER TAKE 'NO' FOR AN ANSWER

In the early 1980s, a survey was taken of Senegalese women taking their children to a well baby clinic. The environment itself -- one in which the women were dependent on administrators and clinic personnel to see to the health of their infants -- is one that might be expected to have a strongly persuasive impact on the response to suggestions made under the circumstances. Moreover, it can be safely assumed that the women had to wait for a considerable time at the clinic in order to have their children seen. Nearly 600 women who visited the clinic were asked, not if they wanted to use birth control, but if they would like some "information" about family planning and could easily have spent that time listening to a lecture on contraceptives. But, to a woman, they all declined. In other words, out of all the mothers bringing babies to this health center, not a single one could be convinced even to be "taught" about western birth-prevention methods.

The behavioral experts at the population communication project understood well that this was more than mere disinterest. They knew that the very idea of birth control was extremely and universally unpopular in Senegal. And they knew that people simply didn't want to hear lectures or statements about the "benefits" of birth control. Hence, the dependence on entertainment as a propaganda ploy. Says the Johns Hopkins literature:

People come to see a play first and foremost because they want to be entertained; if they want to be educated, they'll buy a book or take a class.

They knew also that each one of those 500-plus Senegalese women who declined the invitation to "learn" about birth control almost certainly knew that each of the other women given the same opportunity would respond in the same way. The outcome of the baby clinic survey was as much a group response as it was a reflection of individual attitudes. Thus, the image of the group had to be changed. Again, the "deviant" view of social behavior becomes a model for breaking down resistance to western-imposed family planning schemes. If virtually all Senegalese women objected to birth control -- with the knowledge that this was also the custom and preference of their peers -- the first step toward undermining Senegalese self-determination would be to present, as entertainment, a drama or songs that exposing the audience to an image of Senegalese women behaving in the exact opposite way.

But there are other factors besides culture and social or religious norms that can inhibit the use of contraceptive drugs and devices. Often, women will give their reason for refusing them as concern over after-effects that are far more prevalent (and less likely to be adequately treated) in developing countries than in the west. Such objections, predictably, are dismissed as "rumor" by the communication project at Johns Hopkins. So rumor, as an entity, is taken on as a means of ridiculing such suspicions.

The rumor situation was the subject of a "reproductive health communication campaign" run by a local (foreign-supported) family planning group, with funds from USAID, which was intended, in the words of the Johns Hopkins "Enter-Educate" web site, to "correct" people's impressions about birth control and to "refer potential clients to the Ministry of Health's Department of Reproductive Health and Family Planning." This, it continues, "was to be accomplished through the use of mass media, street theater, print, and interpersonal communications." And the villain of the theatrical presentations was one "Ms. Rumors." Says the text:

Between mass communication and interpersonal communication, lies a medium that has aspects of both, and it was represented by the innovative enter-educate 20-minute street theater play Ms. Rumors. The play presents a young couple who wants to wait to have children, surrounded by rumors and misconceptions on family planning and encourages people to seek professional information from health providers. Through this enter-educate approach, messages were delivered that were both entertaining and educational. The theater scripts were researched with the target audience using focus groups and in-depth interviews. The plays were written by an experienced writer, and a well-known director produced the play making decisions about sets, costumes, and music. Face-to-face counseling was also available at the performances . . . Evaluation of the project was ongoing, and lead to changes in the location of the plays: they went from performances in the markets and plazas to waiting rooms in the Ministry of Health hospitals and pediatric clinics in order to get closer to the intended audience. Another shift was toward younger people, between fifteen and eighteen . . .

The "enter-educate" strategy is an important part of a larger campaign that involves the use of virtually every form of direct and subliminal (to reach audiences at the subconscious level) communications available within a given society. Outreach to young people has been attempted through school presentations, as well. In the Philippines, for example, the population communication project . . .

. . . embarked on the development of a popular, user-friendly educational tool for adolescents in the form of thirty-minute Enter-Educate video modules with accompanying discussion guides. The guides were intended to deepen the learning experience through group discussions.

The JHU-PCS web page adds, "Copies of the Enter-Educate video modules and discussion guides were distributed to pilot regional schools as part of the Department's Population-Education Program." Another tactic used in the Philippines was to extend the use of the videos to television and radio and even newspapers.

[T]he latest partnership is a historic tri-media collaboration with a popular television station, a youth-oriented FM station, and a widely-circulated daily newspaper. This alliance will enable the videos to be shown on television.

The expanded effort was made more effective with the recruitment of popular performer, actress-singer Lea Salonga, whose collaboration in the video-making gave the propaganda the appearance of a major, "star-studded" production. A similar incident took place in Nigeria, where a popular musician, King Sunny Ade, was paired with a less-known singer with ties to the Hopkins propaganda team. Ade and the second vocalists, Onyeka Onwenu, teamed up for a recording that received extravagant funding from the JHU-PCS operation, including the production and distribution of videos, advertising and a special public relations effort, as well as a variety of other promotions. According to the Johns Hopkins web page . . .

The approach of the Population Communication Services project, which is part of Johns Hopkins' Center for Communication Programs, is that the Enter-Educate approach has to be part of the national communication strategy... In the Nigeria strategy of 1988 - 93 we integrated Entertainment-Education from the beginning. The first phase of our campaign included the commercial launch of the music project with King Sunny Ade and Onyeka Onwenu. The second phase focused on the messages in the two songs Choices and Wait for Me. The campaign's key messages would be carried in the mass media, through the songs and the power of celebrity. At the same time that the entertainment component was going on, the national family planning logo was being launched. The third phase was a public service announcement, which incorporated the Entertainment-Education music elements as sound beds and repeated the national family planning logo and slogan at the end of the spot. So we had the songs accompany many aspects of the overall communication strategy . . . The celebrities started going through the news media loop. They visited the Nigerian television authorities and newspaper offices and became spokespersons for the campaign.

What the JHU-PCS project page fails to note, however, is that despite approximately $350,000 spent to produce and promote the recording (something that would ordinarily have cost less than $15,000 in Nigeria), the project produced more scandal than success when objections to the message aroused suspicions and it was later revealed that the music campaign had been part of a huge covert propaganda operation. The scandal irreparably damaged the long and, until then, honorable career of Ade. And it became a focal point for those who claimed that the population control offensive in Nigeria had more to do with weakening a rising African power and maintaining easy access to petroleum at low prices.

Another requirement of the "propaganda-as-entertainment" approach is research into what kind of media reach which audiences. In South Africa, for example, it was found by a member of the JHU-PCS project staff that . . .

In South Africa, radio reaches the vast majority of people. I've seen figures from 92 to 99 percent...there are more radios than mattresses in the area of Zulu. For the poorest of the poor it is the sole source of information and entertainment.

Such findings virtually determine that the most efficient way to disseminate pro-birth control messages would be the radio. Moreover, according to Johns Hopkins, there is "a strong oral tradition in South Africa - meaning African people like to listen to stories." Further research found that "[a]mong black South Africans there is a decades-old habit of listening to radio 'soap operas' on the African language radio stations." Therefore, the choice of making a radio drama for broadcast in local languages was basically a "no brainer."

Since a system already existed for making and broadcasting radio drama in South Africa, the creation of "entertainment" with anti-natalist themes could be done using the existing structure. However, as the writer contributing to the Hopkins web page notes, the contractor rejected any notion of trying to use the screenwriters already working on the dramas.

As [we] moved into the field of developing radio drama for education and entertainment, we felt it would not be wise to reinvent the wheel, so we thought we should develop dramas that would fit into the existing system. This is also what the audience is used to, so it would ultimately prove easier to reach that audience with the same formula. There was no chance, unfortunately, of using the existing scriptwriters, as scripts in this drama tradition are written purely as entertainment - and not very great entertainment, at that. Few scripts demonstrate any social responsibility . . . clinics and hospitals are [portrayed as] places where people go only to die. Mostly the plots revolve around gangsters and girlfriends.

Clearly, the USAID population contractor found it especially useful to use dramatic communications, messages that appeal to emotions such as fear, financial need, or insecurity, rather than reason. But another approach is humor -- which can be a devastating way to ridicule one's opponents or, in the case of video presentations, to stigmatize people with large families and those who openly criticize the idea of family planning (these being the vast majority of the populations in many developing nations). Says the "enter-educate" literature . . .

The power of humor is greater than we imagine. Cleverly used, humor can be a very effective means of communication . . . [H]umor can get people's attention (priming the audience) so the message can then be presented without trivializing it. Humor needs to approach an audience at its own level, in its own context. Humor can deal with difficult, taboo subjects in a way that formal presentations like speeches cannot.

Humor is one of the most powerful means of communication in the world and one of the most frightening to many people. Humor does three things for the person using it. It gets respect and attention, it makes words and ideas memorable, and it is rewarding because humor involves the audience . . .

To succeed at eroding traditional beliefs about contraception, humor, drama, visual communications, news, annoucements, and special promotional events all have to be coordinated into a much larger campaign that uses a variety of non-entertainment propaganda techniques. The campaign is defined in the Johns Hopkins "enter-educate" texts as follows:

It is extremely rare for large numbers of people to adopt or stop a behavior based on one intervention or one exposure to a message. In order to reach people and get them to do something, social and commercial communicators use campaigns. A "campaign" may be defined as an organized set of communication activities aimed at generating specific outcomes or effects in a relatively large number of individuals over time, but usually within a specified period.

Ironically (but not surprisingly), the US military has a very similar definition for a "psychological warfare" operation. The following definition is provided by a former Director of Psychological Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense:

Psychological operations may be defined broadly as the planned use of communications to influence human attitudes and behaviour ...[being] conducted to create in target groups behaviour, emotions, and attitudes that support the attainment of national objectives.

Psychological operations are merely one part of a larger strategy, known as "political warfare." This was defined as follows by the head of the US National Defense University:

Warfare is often defined as the employment of military means to advance political ends... Another, more subtle, means - political warfare - uses images, ideas, speeches, slogans, propaganda, economic pressures, even advertising techniques to influence the political will of an adversary...

Still broader is the description of political warfare used by the a former National Security Council communications specialist which appears in a text published by the National Defense University Press:

Political warfare is a general category of activities encompassing political action, coercive diplomacy, and covert political warfare . . . Political action means a range of activities including certain kinds of multilateral diplomacy, support for foreign political parties or forces, and support for or work with international associations of various kinds. Covert political warfare [includes] operations against enemy alliances, influence operations, and black [clandestine] propaganda . . . [A] psychological-political component is inherent in every use of the diplomatic, economic, and military instruments of national power . . . A nation's economic and military strength of necessity creates political weight that can be exploited in a variety of ways to advance the national interest.

As the military experts note, economic pressures, diplomacy, and the military threat are all part of a larger strategy of control over hostile, neutral, sometimes even friendly nations around the world. Indeed, the use of economic leverage -- in the form of conditions placed on loans, aid, and debt-relief packages -- is the means by which countries can be forced to adopt the "population policies" that open up the doors to mass communications campaigns like the USAID-Johns Hopkins University population communication program.

This was clearly the case in much of sub-Saharan Africa where, for years, governments had rejected the idea of embracing population control policies, publicly or in secret. But as pressures increased from donors and international lending institutions (under US control), they gradually were forced to give in. Some, like Kenya and Nigeria, were also made to establish special ministries or powerful committees within ministries devoted solely to population control (usually staffed by donor country hirelings). These became the jump-off point for "aid" programs funded overseas. Even so, western donors continued to work primarily through NGO's or "non governmental organizations" (a misnomer since aid-funded NGOs actually function as wholly-owned subsidiaries of the sponsor government. And NGO operations are often not known to developing country leaders, with the possible exception of the "advisors" placed in the affected ministries under aid and credit arrangements. Curiously, the Johns Hopkins University pioneered much of the psychological warfare research done in the early days of the cold war, conducting its studies under the umbrella of an army-financed "Operations Research Office" or "ORO." As one of its major activities, the ORO prepared textbooks for use in training army "psy-op" personnel. Even today, Johns Hopkins is the leading US university in terms of Pentagon contracts.

The imposition of population policies on less-developed countries did more than merely usher in a vast amount of birth control activity. The fact that the countries had no choice but to agree to the policies dictated to them in Washington made it possible for agencies like USAID to insist that their programs had been in response to "requests for assistance" from host-country leaders. Indeed, the main purpose of a "population policy" is to put the affected government officially on record as favoring this kind of intervention -- even though the policy may have resulted from one of the usual "give in or face financial ruin" ultimatum.