Propaganda

Propaganda is the Network’s central instrument for controlling how violence is understood. It does not merely report events involving Ben Richards; it produces the public identity through which those events will be judged. The Running Man broadcast recasts a poor, hunted man as an animalistic murderer, supplies spectators with monetary incentives to find or kill him, and erases competing explanations before they can become public knowledge. Its power rests on the coordination of images, scripted speech, police authority, technological editing, and the prejudices of ordinary viewers.

Manufactured Identity

Propaganda first operates by replacing Ben Richards with an image designed for public consumption. Before the broadcast, a hidden-camera portrait of him is retouched so that his eyes appear deeper, his forehead lower, his cheeks darker, and his mouth fixed in a jeering curl. The resulting figure is presented as terrifying and primitive: an urban death angel and the boogeyman of more comfortable apartment dwellers. The image does not reveal Ben Richards; it supplies viewers with a visual shorthand in which poverty, anger, and supposed criminality become indistinguishable.

The same process is applied to Sheila Richards. When Bobby Thompson announces that she will receive the contestant’s award if Ben Richards is brought down, the Network displays a manipulated still of her. Her ordinary face is transformed into that of a greedy, sexually degraded woman, with exaggerated lips, glittering eyes, and the suggestion of a bare chest. The distortion serves two purposes at once. It humiliates Sheila Richards, and it makes the reward appear to concern a morally disreputable household rather than a wife and mother whose family is being used as collateral. Propaganda therefore manufactures both the threat and the supposed beneficiaries of justice.

The broadcast’s language completes the visual construction. Bobby Thompson calls Ben Richards one of the wolves walking among the public and urges viewers to remember his face. The metaphor removes him from ordinary social relations: a worker, husband, and father becomes a predator hidden among innocent citizens. Later, Thompson describes him as a murderer who might mobilize malcontents to rape, burn, and overturn the streets. The accusation expands from an alleged individual crime into a collective threat, allowing almost any measure against him to appear defensive.

The Broadcast as Public Hunt

The Running Man television broadcast turns surveillance into entertainment and entertainment into enforcement. Thompson announces that a verified sighting will earn one hundred New Dollars, while a sighting resulting in a kill will earn one thousand. The distinction between seeing and killing gives the public a graduated role in the hunt, but both roles are presented as participation in a shared civic spectacle. The promised reward transforms neighbors, passengers, and strangers into potential informants and makes Ben Richards’s physical presence inseparable from the possibility of immediate profit.

The program also manufactures a national common scene. Thompson imagines Ben Richards appearing beside viewers on a pneumo bus, in a jet plane, at a three-dimensional rack, or in a local killball arena. The list makes the hunt intimate and omnipresent: the fugitive may be anywhere, and every ordinary location becomes an extension of the studio. When Thompson asks whether the audience will report him, the spectators answer with an emphatic affirmative. The response is not presented as a deliberated judgment but as a rehearsed communal reflex, reinforced by applause, shouting, and the threat of physical violence.

The studio audience is itself part of the propaganda apparatus. When Ben Richards protests that the displayed picture was not his wife but a cheap fake, the crowd drowns him out. Thompson waits for the noise to subside only long enough to repeat the question of how long Richards expects to survive. A tomato is thrown, fists are shaken, and the audience eventually surges toward the stage. Police intervention prevents the crowd from tearing him apart on camera, but even that removal serves the Network by preserving the spectacle while withholding its most uncontrolled consequence. The event is staged as spontaneous public hatred, although the response is visibly managed through timing, containment, and performance.

Editing, Censorship, and Counter-Speech

The Network’s most decisive technique is not simply fabrication but the selective arrangement of truth. Ben Richards records a message aimed at unemployed people, residents of developments and ghettos, cycle gangs, and young people arrested for crimes they did not commit. He speaks of a conspiracy by which the Network prevents excluded people from meeting and talking together. His message attempts to connect personal persecution with wider conditions of unemployment, policing, and social exclusion.

The broadcast initially appears to transmit that message, but the audio is suddenly reduced to squeaks, pops, and gargles before disappearing altogether. Ben Richards’s mouth continues moving on the screen while no intelligible sound reaches the viewers. Bobby Thompson then calmly declares that the audience need not hear any more of the murderer’s radical ravings. The interruption is presented as a technical failure, yet its timing removes the exact material that could have supplied an alternative explanation of the hunt. Censorship thus disguises itself as malfunction and makes the absence of testimony look like proof that the testimony was worthless.

A second clip is treated more aggressively. In it, Ben Richards urges viewers to storm libraries, demand library cards, and investigate books about air pollution and water pollution. The Network replaces his words with fabricated or spliced abuse in which he appears to threaten police officers and the Games Commission. The alteration changes a call for public inquiry into an apparent declaration of murderous intent. It also blocks the connection between environmental damage and political power: pollution becomes unmentionable as a structural issue, while violence is made legible only when attributed to the fugitive.

The contrast between Ben Richards’s actual recorded appeal and the edited version exposes the asymmetry of the media system. He tries to widen the field of attention by naming unemployed people, polluted environments, and suppressed information. The Network narrows it again around his face, his alleged bloodlust, and the dead police officers. In this structure, the public is encouraged to consume a personality rather than investigate a system.

Victims, Money, and Moral Reversal

Propaganda establishes its moral authority by arranging a hierarchy of visible victims. Thompson displays the faces of five young policemen and invokes their wives and nineteen children. He calculates the additional payment made to Ben Richards as roughly seventeen dollars and twenty-five cents for each dead or bereaved person, then compares Richards unfavorably with Judas. The arithmetic is rhetorically important: it converts grief into a ledger while claiming to condemn the fugitive for treating life as money. The Network’s own reward economy disappears behind the accusation that Ben Richards is the one who has commercialized death.

The broadcast also insists that Ben Richards has been paid a fixed amount for every hour he remains free, along with an additional sum for each dead policeman. This information is framed as evidence of his corruption rather than as part of a system that has made a human being into a purchasable program asset. The supposed blood money helps make his survival look like greed, even though the larger spectacle depends on the Network’s ownership of the broadcast and on the public’s invitation to profit from his capture.

The propaganda apparatus therefore performs a moral reversal. State and Network violence are rendered procedural, entertaining, or protective; resistance is rendered pathological and predatory. The language of wolves, blood money, and raised hands turns a political conflict into a struggle between innocent society and a singular monster. Yet the surrounding narrative repeatedly shows that social conditions are not incidental. Ben Richards is treated as dangerous because he is a throwback and an embarrassment to a system that has ruthlessly calculated the value of people, while Bradley Throckmorton recognizes that the Network’s account of the deaths of Sheila Richards and Catherine Sarah Richards may conceal the truth.

Prejudice and Institutional Authority

Propaganda does not function through television alone. It is reinforced by everyday institutions whose assumptions make official narratives seem natural. At a lodging desk, a clerk responds to a young Black boy’s complaint with openly racist language and says that Black people should be kept in cages if he ran the Network. The remark reveals a social environment in which racial contempt and Network power are imagined as compatible forms of authority. Propaganda can therefore rely on existing prejudice rather than manufacture every hostility from nothing.

Police procedure supplies the broadcast’s physical credibility. Ben Richards is escorted through the Network’s building by officers, moved through a bulletproof elevator, and ordered to stand at the rear while the security arrangement keeps him isolated from ordinary contact. The institutional setting makes coercion appear routine. By the time he is placed before the cameras, the public spectacle has already been prepared by confinement, surveillance, identification, and controlled movement.

Even escape requires counter-propaganda through identity management. After leaving the Boston Y.M.C.A., Ben Richards pays a pawnbroker twelve hundred New Dollars for a disguise consisting of gray hair, spectacles, mouth wadding, plastic buck teeth, and a carefully prescribed limp. His wallet identifies him as John Griffen Springer, a forty-three-year-old widower and text-tape salesman from Harding; later he signs in under another identity. These transformations demonstrate that the Network’s image of the fugitive depends on recognizability. To evade propaganda, Ben Richards must interrupt the connection between body and official name, turning his appearance and papers into contested media.

The same logic operates at the highest level of the hunt. Evan McCone, the Chief Hunter, is introduced as a name intended to frighten children and adults, a personification of the Network’s hard interior. His authority is partly operational and partly mythical: the institution makes a man into a boogeyman just as it makes Ben Richards into a wolf. Both identities are products of a political culture that governs through fear, though one is authorized by the state and the other marked for destruction.

Narrative Significance

Propaganda is significant because it determines which facts can count as facts. The Network’s broadcast does not need to disprove Ben Richards’s account in detail; it only needs to place his face inside an established frame of murderer, wolf, radical, and enemy of the public. Once that frame is accepted, his interruptions become evidence of insolence, his anger becomes proof of guilt, and his survival becomes proof of greed. The public is not merely told what happened. It is taught how to interpret every subsequent action.

The most revealing counterpoint is the possibility that the Network has fabricated or concealed the circumstances of Sheila Richards’s and Catherine Sarah Richards’s deaths. Dan Killian assures Ben Richards that their deaths were an accident unrelated to the Network, but Ben Richards suspects the explanation precisely because it is too neatly shaped as a denial. The fact that an agreement to work for the Network would take him directly to Co-Op City gives the claim a testable but terrifying consequence. Propaganda survives by making the official version plausible enough to enter the mind before doubt has the opportunity to organize.

The result is a system in which publicity and repression are inseparable. Television supplies the image, the host supplies the vocabulary, the audience supplies the noise, the police supply the threat, and the Network supplies the reward structure. Against that apparatus, Ben Richards’s recorded speech is fragile, but its very suppression reveals what the dominant story cannot tolerate: the possibility that the hunted individual is not an isolated criminal but a witness to unemployment, pollution, class exclusion, and institutional violence.