The "Anti-Propaganda" Firewall That Never Was (Plus Overdue Updates and Reader Stats)

First off, a huge thank you to everyone still sticking around, and a special welcome to the new subscribers who have received absolutely nothing since hitting subscribe. I promise I’ve been busy trying to wear out my keyboard lately, but none of those words were for this newsletter. So, to break the silence and keep the connection alive, I’ve put together this grab-bag post.

Next up: the update. For way too long, my status has been “working on a PhD.” Well, the dissertation is done; I defended it; and the examiners asked for some revisions. I completely agreed, as my thesis really needed another round of copy-editing (embarrassingly so). So, as it stands, the examiners have that revised—and I think very solid—thesis in hand, and I’m simply waiting for an email confirming it satisfies their checklist. That email could arrive as I type this, as you read this, or… much later. (Here is hoping I am not jinxing the entire process by typing this.) Once it’s official, my ultimate plan is to turn the dissertation into a few journal articles and a book.

Another major update is that the Smith-Mundt book I’ve been working on for so long (way too long) is getting a major overhaul. I’m incorporating lessons and text directly from the dissertation, as there is a surprising amount of overlap between the two. Even though the dissertation’s topic stemmed from my research for the book, I truly didn’t expect the core issue areas to align quite as substantially as they eventually did. The book will be far better because of the wait.

I’m also putting the finishing touches on a paper drawn from this book project. Clocking in at close to 10,000 words, it’s probably more accurate to call it a monograph. I am about to send it out to a few (hopefully willing) subject matter experts for their feedback and suggestions on where it should ultimately live. My goal is to find a proper peer-reviewed journal to take it or have it published as a formal monograph somewhere, though I’m perfectly fine putting it up on SSRN as a preprint.

In The Evolution and Subversion of the Smith-Mundt Act, I dismantle the historiographical illusion that the original 1948 legislation was a prophylactic “anti-propaganda” measure, explicitly designed by Congress to erect a firewall protecting the American public from domestic manipulation by the executive branch. By tracking the actual legislative crucible of the 1940s and contrasting it with the political vendettas of the 1970s and 1980s, the paper exposes how the United States legally and conceptually crippled its own diplomatic arsenal.

This paper serves as a far more comprehensive and academic exploration of the same themes found in my earlier posts “The Fulbright Paradox” (November 10, 2023) and “Fulbright’s Knee-Capping of US Global Engagement” (December 13, 2023).

For decades, a myth has dominated American political, legal, and academic scholarship and practitioners of U.S. international engagement. Prominent legal reviews—epitomized by Weston R. Sager’s widely cited but fundamentally flawed 2015 article, “Apple Pie Propaganda?”—routinely asserted this prophylactic argument. However, placing Sager’s and other similar foundational arguments side-by-side with the historical record, I explore where their logic frays. The paper demonstrates how the actual archival evidence fundamentally contradicts the baseline assumptions these scholars have relied upon. A deep dive into the primary sources tells a very different story than what has become accepted wisdom. A few key points from the paper:

The 1948 Congress Demanded Transparency for Enhanced Oversight, Not Secrecy: “The original Smith-Mundt Act was not constructed to isolate the American public from its government’s international broadcasting and information programs. Rather, the Act’s framers... actively built oversight mechanisms intended to ensure transparency and domestic awareness.”

The Original “Restriction” Was Just to Save Paper: The requirement that materials only be made available “on request” was not a gag order—it was to avoid the cost of automatically translating, printing, and distributing transcripts to the entire press corps and 435 members of Congress. As the transcripts prove, “the ‘on request’ clause was a mutually agreed upon administrative and budgetary choice to manage mimeographing costs, not a legislative firewall designed to protect American minds.” At the same time, Congress removed a requirement to make the materials available within 15 days. The original idea was that all materials sent abroad were to be immediately available in English. As for “disseminate abroad,” no one considered that as a restriction. The State Department opposed Congress’s attempt to remove that text from the bill in the pursuit of brevity because the text provided the blanket authority the department required.

The True Origins of the Ban: The Vendettas of Fulbright and Zorinsky: The severe domestic restrictions we associate with the Smith-Mundt Act were not present in 1948. Nor were they present in the 1960s. The legislative action to release the USIA movie Years of Lightning, Days of Drums in 1965, for example, wasn’t required because of the Smith-Mundt Act, but to bypass constraints in appropriations legislation. Senator J. William Fulbright—infuriated by the executive branch’s deceptive messaging during the Vietnam War, viewing Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty as damaging U.S. relations with the Soviet Union (and calling for VOA, RFE, and RL to “take their place in the graveyard of cold war relics”), and triggered by an ideological rival (the conservative Senator James L. Buckley) broadcasting a USIA film—transformed the original cost-saving measure into a punitive statutory gag order. In 1985, Senator Edward Zorinsky escalated the embargo to legally seal USIA materials from FOIA requests, a move motivated by his outrage over 1980s USIA management scandals involving secret wiretaps telephone recordings, political blacklists, nepotism, radio frequency interference, and the Iran-Contra affair. Neither amendment was a sweeping philosophical defense of the American mind; they were administrative punishments. This raises a profound question: as an unquestionably powerful Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, if Fulbright truly believed these materials were so corrupt and injurious, why did he not use his authority to reform the actual programs? Instead, he opted simply to legally blindfold the American public to their existence.

The “Whole of Government” Fallacy: Scholars, like Sager, routinely stretch the Act’s logic in two absurd directions. First, they commit a “whole of government” fallacy, treating the Act as a universal firewall against all government messaging. This is patently and demonstrably false; the supposed ban completely ignored massive information efforts at the time, and soon after, by the Department of Defense and foreign aid agencies, including the Mutual Security Agency and the Technical Cooperation Administration. Senator Fulbright knew this: when battling an actual domestic influence campaign waged by military officers promoting the John Birch Society in 1961, he never cited Smith-Mundt as a precedent. Second, these legal reviews exhibit a laser-like focus on radio broadcasting, treating Voice of America as a proxy for the whole agency, while ignoring the libraries, books, magazines, films, bureaucratic and technical support efforts, and speaker tours authorized by the Act that inherently defied domestic quarantine. Furthermore, they fail to consider the actual content being exported. By their logic, transcripts of presidential speeches, agricultural manuals, and Willis Conover’s jazz broadcasts were properly, if bizarrely, classified as nefarious psychological warfare unfit for American ears.

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Generational Amnesia and Structural Sabotage: By legally blinding the domestic press and public, the Fulbright and Zorinsky amendments caused catastrophic damage to our understanding of foreign affairs. This legal and constitutional transformation directly infected broader historical analyses. Public diplomacy historian Nicholas J. Cull relied on the Palmer and Carter paper when discussing domestic access, noting that the statutory lockdown “seriously hampered private academic study of the USIA.” Nancy Snow recognized that USIA “had no domestic constituency to lobby on behalf of the Agency’s interests, due in part to antiquated Smith-Mundt legislative prohibitions from the 1940s banning the distribution of overseas propaganda... to the American people.” Snow further observed, “While the Smith-Mundt Act prohibits foreign psyops from being operated on the American people, this prohibition on paper has led to a puzzling paradox in reality.” Both Snow and Cull accurately identified the consequences of the restrictions—a lack of a domestic constituency, hampered academic study, and absence from the historical record—but they fundamentally misattributed the source. The “puzzling paradox” of “foreign psyops” and the restriction on self-publicity were not the intent of the original 1948 legislation. As the record demonstrates, this crippling outcome was entirely intentional. I label this Fulbright’s Paradox, a direct, calculated result of his 1972 intervention.

And, finally, some reader statistics. A quick caveat: each emailed newsletter is shared across other networks (some more than others), and that readership is not captured.

There are over 5,200 followers (reading my also infrequent Substack notes), and nearly 1,500 subscribers (receiving the newsletter). The audience is spread across 43 states, with the most (14%) in California, followed by Virginia (11%), New York (8%), Texas and Florida (each at 5%). The audience spans 71 countries internationally. The majority is in the US (71%), followed by the UK (5%), Canada and Australia (both at 3%) and France. There are subscribers in Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, South Africa, and elsewhere. I don’t know if these readers are locals or foreigners.

Thanks for reading. For the new readers wondering who I am, a brief bio:

Since 2004, I have been writing, working, and lecturing on public diplomacy, strategic communication, and political warfare. From 2013 to 2017, I served as a Presidentially nominated and Senate-confirmed Governor on the Broadcasting Board of Governors (now the U.S. Agency for Global Media), a role that followed my tenure as Executive Director of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

For two decades, I have advised the Departments of Defense and State, as well as Congress. I have frequently testified before congressional committees, helped launch a related House caucus, and helped draft key legislation, including the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act.

As an educator, I taught graduate courses as an adjunct lecturer at the USC Annenberg School and was an adjunct lecturer with the Joint Special Operations University. I was also a guest lecture at institutions including the National War College, Army War College, National Intelligence University, the NATO School at Oberammergau, and various universities across the U.S. and Europe.

In 2016, I was honored to be inducted into the Psychological Operations Regiment as an Honorary Member. I’m also honored to say that in May 2022—five years after leaving government service—I was officially sanctioned by Russia.