Analog propaganda proves persuasive to some at 'Hanoi Hilton,' where exhibits selectively whitewash war

Hỏa Lò Prison, Hanoi
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Media illiteracy is not just an affliction of the aged.

In June, I visited Hỏa Lò Prison, also known as "the Hanoi Hilton," in Vietnam, where captured American soldiers, including the late U.S. Senator John McCain in 1967, were imprisoned during the Vietnam War.

Hỏa Lò was a prison well before the Vietnam War. The prison museum today mostly memorializes the brutal torture and execution of political prisoners at the hands of French colonial forces since the prison's 1896 construction.

Guillotine used by the French
in colonial Vietnam,
now at Hỏa Lò Prison
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The museum exhibits largely whitewash the imprisonment of Americans during the Vietnam War. Exhibits skip over the interrogation and torture of American prisoners, which conditions they were forced to deny in statements in the 1960s, but later reported (U.S. Navy, CBS News). Under international pressure, the Viet Cong improved conditions in the prison late in 1969. The museum focuses on that time and a prisoner exchange in 1973, in which McCain went home after more than five years.

Following the timeline of the prison's history through the many exhibit rooms, I came upon a group of British tourists, circa 20 years old. They were looking at an image of American soldiers playing volleyball in the prison yard. The photograph is a rather well known piece of propaganda, but it's represented in the museum as just a day in the life of "the American pilots" held at the prison.

One young woman in the group turned to her cohort. "See?" she said. "After the French treated them so horribly, this is how well they treated the Americans."

I guess history is written by the victors. 

Sometimes I lament that persons of my parents' generation, reared on Walter Cronkite, too readily believe anything they hear from a purported "news" anchor on cable TV or the internet. I wonder whether a screen-reared generation is too ready to believe anything they see on a museum wall.

I'll have a longer photo-essay on Vietnam, and the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, here at The Savory Tort on Friday, August 1.

CFP: Journal explores digital journalism, media literacy

My friend and colleague Dr. Manish Verma will be special editor of an upcoming edition of the Journal of Content, Community and Communication at Amity University at Madhya Pradesh, India.  Papers are invited from academics and industry experts on these themes:

• Digital media as public sphere
• Citizen and participatory journalism through digital Media
• Digital media economy
• Digital media and political communication
• Future of journalism in the digital age
• Social media as source of news
• Digital media laws and censorship
• Digital media literacy
• Journalistic ethics in digital media
• Data journalism
• Mobile and multimedia journalism
• Artificial intelligence in journalism 

Author guidelines and the official CFP are at the journal website.  Manuscripts, preferred length of 3,000 to 5,000 words, are sought no later than April 30, 2021, and will be peer reviewed.

Dr. Manish Verma

Dr. Verma recently published his own work in the journal, co-authored with Dr. Nithin Kalorth and Dr. Malvika Sagar: Information and User: Social Media Literacy in Digital Societies, 12 J. Content, Cmty. & Commc'n 263 (2020), doi:10.31620/JCCC.12.20/24.  Here is the abstract.

The information flow in digital societies has been discussed and analysed for more than a decade with close watch on social media networks. The shift from traditional forms of communication to social media enables users to gratify their daily needs of information digitally. The current paper builds on narrative analysis of selected social media active users and their digital social engagement to understand how a user and a network of users engage with information. To understand the role of social media literacy, the current paper interviews the users and correlates the findings with contemporary literature on social media. The results show that social media literacy becomes a pillar of information system, but it works in micro-level of societies at crossroads of online and offline spaces.

The authors survey digital media users to analyze the efficacy of efforts by social media platforms to enhance digital literacy to combat misinformation.  The paper concludes that the efforts are less than efficacious because they derive from a holistic vision of society and politics rather than an understanding of the literacy deficiencies of individual users.

Communication education makes people better

Preparing for my Trump Litigation Seminar next week, I just re-read the final chapter of James Zirin's Plaintiff in Chief.  Variously attributed, Zirin catalogs the vocabulary of our truth-challenged culture, discussing "post-truth" (Oxford Word of the Year 2016), "truth [that] isn't truth," (Rudy Giuliani), "truth decay" (RAND), and "alternative facts" (Kellyanne Conway).  And, of course, who could forget the great Stephen Colbert's groundbreaking "truthiness" (The Wørd, and a real word).  Along with Trevor Noah, I've wondered at the breakdown in distinction between fact and opinion.  More than once, my wife, in slack-jawed witness of the news on TV, has declared the need for media literacy education in our K12 schools (and perhaps, I add, in our senior centers). 

Dr. Sherry Morreale (UCCS)

It turns out that media literacy is just one piece in the puzzle of what might be missing in our society today. Communication Professor Sherwyn P. Morreale has co-authored a series of scholarly articles on Why Communication Education Is Important.  Her third installment, co-authored with Joseph M. Valenzano and Janessa A. Bauer, has just won the 2020 Distinguished Article Award in the Basic Course Division of the National Communication Association (NCA).  The abstract speaks to the range of life skills that are bolstered by communication education (my highlighting).

The results of this study argue that communication, and specifically oral communication education, is critical to students’ future personal and professional success. Similar to two earlier studies, thematic analysis of 679 documents in academic and popular press publications, published from 2008 to 2015, provide support for the centrality of the communication discipline’s content and pedagogy. These results reinforce the importance of communication to enhancing organizational processes and organizational life; promoting health communication; enriching the educational enterprise; understanding crisis, safety, risk, and security; improving interpersonal communication and relationships; influencing diplomacy and government relations; being a responsible participant in the world, socially and culturally; developing as a whole person; and succeeding as an individual in one’s career and in business. The kinds of communication addressed as important in each of these nine general themes are outlined, and the results are compared with those in the first two iterations of the study.

This conclusion might seem self-evident to the academic outsider (technical term, "real people") but it readily escapes the grasp of the bean counters who run today's STEM-obsessed universities, where faculty in the social sciences (law included) are tormented with demands that their departments generate revenue to justify their existence.  Because that's why we educate people, for the money.

The current study is titled, Why communication education is important: a third study on the centrality of the discipline’s content and pedagogy, and appears at 66:4 J. Communication Educ. 402 (2017).  Dr. Morreale previously published, with co-author Judy C. Pearson, Why Communication Education is Important: The Centrality of the Discipline in the 21st Century, 57:2 J. Communication Educ. 224 (2008); and, with co-authors Pearson and Michael M. Osborn, Why communication is important: A rationale for the centrality of the study of communication, 29:1 J. Ass'n Communication Admin. 1 (2000).

Full disclosure: Dr. Morreale is my aunt.  She always was the cool aunt.  So her parents are probably to blame for my academic nature, and she, in part, for the nurture.