Propaganda case studies
Who ran it, which techniques carried the weight, what the artifacts show, and what happened. Each study links every technique it names and every poster it shows.
A diamond is forever
The diamond engagement ring is described as a tradition. It was invented by an advertising agency for a mining cartel, between 1938 and the 1950s, and exported to Japan in the 1960s. The campaign is the case for a technique that manufactures a custom and then sells the custom back as heritage.
Bacon and eggs
The American breakfast of bacon and eggs is often described as a tradition. It was a sales campaign. Edward Bernays, working for a bacon packer, asked thousands of doctors a leading question, published the answer as medical advice, and changed what a nation ate in the morning. The case is the model for the manufactured expert survey.
Doubt is our product
When the evidence that smoking caused lung cancer became public in the early 1950s, the tobacco industry did not deny it. It manufactured uncertainty about it, for forty years, with a research council, a public relations firm, and a strategy that has been copied by every industry with a dangerous product since.
Duck and Cover
A cartoon turtle, a jingle, and a generation of schoolchildren taught that an atomic bomb could be survived by getting under a desk. The American civil defense campaign of the early Cold War is the classic case of reassurance as propaganda: it did not lie about the bomb so much as make it manageable.
From Kitchener to Uncle Sam
Britain fought the first eighteen months of the First World War with volunteers, and the posters that raised them are the most reproduced propaganda ever made. The United States borrowed the best of them in 1917. This is what the posters did, and how.
Glittering generalities in orbit
Between Sputnik and the first spacewalk the Soviet Union produced the most successful propaganda of its existence: posters, stamps, and films that turned a secret military program into proof that socialism owned the future. The achievements were real. What the posters did with them is the case.
Loose lips
The Second World War's home-front security campaigns asked civilians to treat their own conversation as a weapon the enemy could use. The posters are among the best remembered of the war. The threat they described was mostly imaginary, and the fear they produced was the point.
The Creel Committee
In April 1917 the United States entered a war most of its citizens had voted to stay out of five months earlier. The Committee on Public Information was created a week later to change their minds, and in nineteen months it built the first full-scale propaganda apparatus of a modern democracy.
The Crying Indian
The most famous environmental advertisement ever made showed a Native American shedding a tear at a littered landscape. It was paid for by the companies that made the litter, and its message, that pollution was the fault of individuals, was designed to head off laws that would have made the companies responsible. The case is the model of the front group.
Torches of Freedom
On Easter Sunday 1929 a group of young women lit cigarettes during the New York parade and the newspapers reported a blow for equality. A tobacco company had hired Edward Bernays to arrange it. The episode is the founding case of public relations and the clearest example of a technique that sells a product as a cause.
Contested recent cases
Episodes of the last twenty-five years in which an official or institutional account outran its evidence and was later contradicted by inquiries, declassified records, or policy reversals. Each is written from the primary documents and carries the findings that cut the other way. They describe mechanisms, not verdicts, and are not part of the educator materials.
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
In the year before the invasion of Iraq, the American and British governments told their publics that Saddam Hussein held stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting a nuclear program. After the invasion, no stockpiles were found. Four official inquiries have since documented how thin intelligence became confident public claims.
Russia, collusion, and the Steele dossier
For three years the claim that a presidential campaign had conspired with the Russian government dominated American coverage, resting in part on a private dossier that no one had corroborated. Russian interference in the 2016 election was real and is documented. The conspiracy narrative was not established, and the inquiries into how it was built disagree on why.
The Afghanistan Papers
For nearly twenty years American officials told the public that the war in Afghanistan was making progress. Interviews conducted by the government's own inspector general, released in 2019 after a court fight, showed many of the same officials describing confusion, manipulated statistics, and a war they did not think could be won.
The laptop and the letter of the fifty-one
Three weeks before the 2020 election, a newspaper published material from a laptop said to belong to the Democratic nominee's son. Within days, fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a letter saying the story had the hallmarks of a Russian operation, and social platforms restricted it. The material was later authenticated and used in court. The letter's authors had no evidence of Russian involvement, and said so in the letter's own text.
The origin of SARS-CoV-2 and the word 'conspiracy theory'
In the first months of the pandemic the suggestion that the virus might have escaped from a laboratory was labeled a conspiracy theory by scientists, officials, and platforms. The question was open then and is open now; American agencies are divided on it. The case is about how an open question was presented as closed, and about related public-health claims that were stated with more confidence than the evidence allowed.
Youth gender medicine and the settled-science claim
For a decade, clinics, professional bodies, and advocacy groups in several countries presented puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for adolescents as settled, reversible, and life-saving care. Systematic reviews commissioned by health systems in England and the Nordic countries found the evidence weak, and those systems restricted the treatments. American medical bodies have largely held their position. The case is about how a contested treatment was presented as beyond question, and it remains contested.