Alvin Snyder

Alvin Snyder (March 31, 1936 – January 28, 2019[1]) was an American journalist, author, and former Director of the United States Information Agency during the Nixon administration.

Alvin Snyder
Born(1936-03-31)March 31, 1936
Trenton, New Jersey, U.S.
DiedJanuary 28, 2019(2019-01-28) (aged 82)
McLean, Virginia, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
OccupationJournalist, author
Notable work
Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War (1995)

Early life

Snyder was born on March 31, 1936 in Trenton, New Jersey.[1]

Career

Snyder started his career at CBS News in New York in 1959 as a news producer and was an editor on a documentary on Edward R. Murrow that won a Grammy award in 1967. He was later recruited by the Nixon White House and appointed Deputy Special Assistant by Richard Nixon to run TV operations in the newly established Office of Communications.[2][3][4]

Alvin Snyder was featured on David Frost's series by Playhouse Presents[5], WHICH contains the actual spoken words verbatim from the Nixon White House tapes[6] portrayed by actor Ryan McLuskey in the video reenactment of Richard Nixon's resignation speech.[7]

Alvin Snyder was the only White House staffer with Nixon during his resignation speech.

USIA and KAL 007 role

Later he became a Director of TV and Film[8] at the US Information Agency in Washington as an aide to Charles Z. Wick. A key contribution for Snyder at the USIA was documented after the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007. Snyder was credited with producing the video shown to the UN Security Council in 1983 that uncovered more evidence of Russia's role in the downing of the civilian aircraft.

Writing career

Later as a fellow at the Annenberg Foundation, he published a widely used text on the use of propaganda by the US Government. Snyder also served as a Senior Fellow for the University of Southern California Center for Public Diplomacy.[9]

Snyder is also well-known for writing the book Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War (1995). In his 1995 memoir, he wrote that "the U.S. government ran a full-service public relations organization, the largest in the world, about the size of the twenty biggest U.S. commercial PR firms combined. Its full-time professional staff of more than 10,000 spread out among some 150 countries, burnished America‘s image and trashed the Soviet Union 2,500 hours a week with a tower of babble comprised of more than 70 languages, to the tune of over $2 billion per year", and "the biggest branch of this propaganda machine" was the USIA.[10][11]

Later life

Snyder died at the age of 82 in McLean, Virginia.[1]

Publications
  • Snyder, Alvin (1995). Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War. ISBN 9781559703895.
gollark: PotatOS has a nice `fetch` function, you know.
gollark: `textutils.pagedPrint(fetch(read())` - PotatoWEB
gollark: I got a 240GB SSD back when they were £80...
gollark: Wow, better than it was when I bought...
gollark: Yes.

See also

References
  1. Community deaths. The Washington Post. March 18, 2019.
  2. The President and the Press. The Atlantic, April 1973 issue.
  3. White House Tapes. White House Archives.
  4. October 1-15, 1972. Nixon Library.
  5. Nixon’s The One film credits.
  6. Richard Nixon Presidential Library Snyder, Alvin
  7. Nixon's The One - "TV".
  8. WASHINGTON TALK: UNITED STATES INFORMATION AGENCY; AT $30 MILLION, IS ANYONE WATCHING?. The New York Times. July 14, 1987.
  9. Alvin Snyder, University of Southern California Center for Public Diplomacy
  10. Snyder, Alvin (1995). Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War: An Insider's Account. New York: Arcade Pub. p. xi. ISBN 1-55970-321-0. OCLC 32430655.
  11. August 8, 1977. Broadcasting Magazine.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.