Ministry of Enlightenment

The Ministry of Enlightenment was a ministry of the Galactic Empire responsible for managing and influencing galactic public opinion. They accomplished this through planting stories, disseminating propaganda, and releasing information in a strategic sequence so as to build a narrative favorable to Imperial interests.

In 4 BBY, two Ministry of Enlightenment officials, Dee Shambo and Nisus Osar, boasted that they had control of the public image of the planet Ghorman. The public perceived the Ghor as troublesome, arrogant, and selfish after an Imperial naval inspector was killed on the planet; Shambo and Osar took credit for that. As Director Orson Krennic prepared to greatly increase the Imperial presence on Ghorman in a risky project to gouge-mine the core for kalkite, the Empire was preparing to respond to even more intense local resistance. The Ministry of Enlightenment prepared an anti-Ghorman whispering campaign to link the Ghor to the unpleasant local spiders whose silk was a famous local export. Eventually, journalists, officials, and civilians were all repeating the Ministry-spun narrative that the aggressive Ghor were "resisting Imperial norms".

Text and facts from the “Ministry of Enlightenment” article on Wookieepedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Modified for this site.