Talk:Committee on Public Information

message: RE: recent edits.
Please do not remove cited information. Travb (talk) 21:47, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Removal of information

message: For the moment I have deleted this unsourced material:
:Hollywood movie makers joined in on the propaganda by making movies such as The Claws of the Hun, The Prussian Cur, To Hell With The Kaiser, and The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin. These titles illustrate the message the CPI tried to convey.
:This raw propaganda included complete fabrications, such as images and stories of German soldiers killing babies and hoisting them on bayonets. CPI pamphlets warned citizens to be on the lookout for German spies. Dozens of "patriotic organizations," with names like the American Protective League and the American Defense Society, sprang up. These groups spied, tapped telephones, and opened mail in an effort to ferret out "spies and traitors." The targets of these groups was anyone who called for peace, questioned the Allies' progress, or criticized the government's policies. They were particularly hard on German Americans, some of whom lost their jobs, and were publicly humiliated by being forced to kiss the American flag, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or buy war bonds.
It is not clear that the films referenced in the first paragraph were the work of the CPI. The first sentence of the 2nd paragraph expands on that film material. The next sentence (CPI pamphlets...) might be true, but is not sourced. The remainder of the paragraph is interesting material about the war years, not the CPI. Perhaps it could be added to an entry covering "World War I enforced patriotism in the U.S."
Bmclaughlin9 (talk) 03:35, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Questionable material 

message: We say this: "Among those who participated in it were Wilson advisers Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays, the latter of whom had remarked that "the essence of democratic society" was the "engineering of consent," by which propaganda was the necessary method for democracies to promote and garner support for policy.
Aside from the clunky explanatory phrase (by which...), I wonder if this is a proper way to explain who Bernays was. He wrote an article called "The Engineering of Consent" 30 years later in 1947. If he said the phrase circa WWI it might be OK here. I'm going to re-write the sentence to identify Lippmann and Bernays so the reader will have some idea who they are without stopping to follow their linked names. It seems most unlikely that Bernays would have written/spoken this way during the life of the Creel Committee.
Bmclaughlin9 (talk) 19:30, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bernays 

message: Article claims Commission used radio to broadcast their message. If I remember correctly, radio broadcasting did not begin until around 1921. Snezzy (talk) 11:23, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Radio 

message: There is currently a photo of 12 individuals in the article with the caption, "Committee on Public Information in 1916."  It seems like this is most likely a misleading caption.  The photo itself has a handwritten caption, "C.P.I. delegates to Europe."  Given the ultimate size of the organization described in the article, it doesn't seem likely that these twelve individuals also made up the entire CPI at some point in 1916, as the current caption seems to imply.  134.134.139.76 (talk) 00:07, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Photo caption