A widely held belief claims that propaganda is a process that camouflages its origin, its motive, or both, and that it is conducted for the purpose of obtaining a specific objective by manipulating its audience. Propaganda, however, may also be open and aboveboard. For example, when the Nazis came to power in 1933, one of the first government departments to be established was the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. The National Socialists made no secret of the name or, indeed, the task that this ministry was to perform. Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), the minister for propaganda, openly declared in one of his first speeches that the new ministry would be responsible for “the mobilization of mind and spirit in Germany.” The source here is known, aims and intentions are identified, and the public knows that an attempt is being made to influence it.
The distinction between “white” and “black” propaganda was well understood. By the 1930s there was a growing recognition that it was important to distinguish between overt or information-based propaganda— output that represents the official policy of the government and therefore needs to be “truthful” (in the sense of being factually accurate) to maintain credibility—and covert propaganda—which seeks to achieve immediate results by any and all means and whose essential requirement (apart from effectiveness) is that it must not be traceable back to its source.
White propaganda is largely conducted by an identifiable government agency. The information in the message tends to be accurate (although not necessarily verifiable) since any suggestion that the message might be false would undermine the credibility of the source. The message is intended to convince an audience of the superiority and justness of a particular regime or ideology. Thus, while the message disseminated is largely truthful, it is slanted to favor the value system of the propagandist. During the Cold War the Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Moscow employed this type of white propaganda in order to establish credibility with an audience that might prove useful at some point in the future.
