In Why I Write, a column in yesterday’s New York Sun, Harvard economist and “exiled New Yorker” Edward Glaeser disputes another writer’s assertion that Glaeser could be blogging instead of writing for a newspaper. In the process of explaining why this isn’t so, Glaeser glosses the op-ed column as “a somewhat formal 750 word art form that usually contains some sort of clear policy punch line.”

His acknowledgment of the fundamentally persuasive intent of the op-ed column dovetails with the time I’ve been spending recently learning about and thinking about media, propaganda and democracy. These are definitely recurring themes for me, but they seem to be in ascendency of late. Most immediately, I’ve been following the establishment of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, one of the several winners of funding from the Knight News Challenge 2006. Coincidentally, I discovered Adam Curtis’ 2002 documentary “The Century of the Self,” or more specifically, one of its four segments, Propaganda in America: the History of Public Relations. Perhaps Curtis’ documentary itself was applying propagandistic techniques, but I was left with substantial astonishment that more people are not aware of the influence of Edward Bernays on 20th Century America.

While writing this post, I also noticed an unfinished fragment I began a while ago in response to my friend Patrick’s blog post highlighting the YouTube clip promoting Naomi Klein’s new meme. It’s a very stirring clip (directed by Alfonso Cuarón) delineating how governments in the past have abused public crises to achieve totalitarian control and asking citizens to consider whether the same process might be in motion around us now. And it too is propaganda.

Then my friend Becky sent me this description of an upcoming course at NYU, “Democratic Persuasion” (K20.1489 SOC, 4 CR TR 3:30-4:45), taught by Stephen Duncombe:

This course begins with the controversial premise that persuasion and propaganda are a necessary part of modern politics. With this approach we reject the simple project of critique and condemnation of propaganda and set for ourselves the far more difficult task of rethinking how one might create methods of mass persuasion that build democracy instead of undermining it and facilitate political discussion instead of closing it down. We begin by exploring the history of rhetoric and persuasion, and defining what we mean by propaganda. Next, we will study classic examples of propaganda produced by advertising agencies and totalitarian states. Then, as an extended case study, we will explore how photographs, speeches, architecture, murals, guidebooks and even material projects of the New Deal might suggest an alternative model of propaganda. Finally, we will use what we have learned to sketch out a set of principles for democratic mass persuasion. Authors, artists and sites we will look at include Plato, Aristotle, Edward Bernays, Leni Riefenstahl, Joseph Goebbels, Stuart Ewen, Walter Lippmann, Lizabeth Cohen, Dorothea Lange, Timberline Lodge, The Bonneville Dam, Woody Guthrie, Clifford Odets, Coit Tower and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Controversial or not, Duncombe’s premise seems defensible. While many people take propaganda to be the enemy of reason, one must still admit that even a well-informed citizen will not form his or her own opinion about every issue of importance in civic culture. Furthermore, the 20th Century was in some sense one long challenge to the concept of “objectivity.” If objectivity is scarce or non-existent, then persuasion is an inevitability.

I borrowed the title for this blog post from Glaeser’s column, but it would be a cop-out to preserve its first person slant and not provide some kind of first-person answer. I don’t have Glaeser’s “19th Century Soul,” but as I read his column, I recognized that I enjoy the formal discipline that is part of the op-ed style. I like the way in which it imagines a rational, interested but not necessarily dispassionate reader and engages with that mind. I try to write to a similar reader, but I rarely have a punch line in mind. Or if I do, that punch line is less likely to be an answer and more likely to be a question. (Is there a word for that?)