Christopher Simpson,
Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1994.
This is the Simpson who wrote Blowback. This is hard to describe. From the cover blurb:
the author demonstrates how the government-funded psychological warfare programs of the Cold War years under-wrote the academic studies that formed the basis for much of modern communication research.’
I would say: after the war the spooks and the military paid the academics to develop the techniques of propaganda with which to influence the perceptions of the American tax-payer and the subject populations of the informal American empire. (Alternatively, this shows how loyal American academics helped the military and the intelligence services win the war with communism.) My problem with it is that I know nothing at all about ‘modern communication theory’ or its practitioners; and learning, for example, that the State Department paid for a famous study by Stanley Bigman and Paul Lazerfield in 1951 means nothing at all. I am thus unable to ‘review’ this in any sense. So here are a few of the comments which are printed on the cover:
Noam Chomsky: ‘it provides an intriguing picture of the relations between state power and the intellectual community’.
Dan Schiller, University of California: ‘a sobering account of institutional and intellectual complicity in Cold War counterinsurgency’.
William Solomon, Rutgers University: ‘a chilling history of federal influence on finances, research topics and academic careers from World War 1 to Vietnam’.
This is now out of print in the UK. I got my copy through Tom Davis Books in the US, whose address and e-mail number is given below in the section on sources.