Alvin Snyder


Alvin Snyder was an American journalist, author, and former :Category:United States Information Agency directors|Director of the United States Information Agency during the Nixon administration.

Early life

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

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

USIA and KAL 007 role

Later he became a Director of TV and Film 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.
Snyder is also well-known for writing the book Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War. 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 more than 70 languages, to the tune of over $2 billion per year", and "the biggest branch of this propaganda machine" was the USIA.

Later life

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

Publications