User:Mokusho/Propaganda

Internal Links

 * Propaganda
 * Institute for Propaganda Analysis

What is Propaganda?

 * Propaganda is a concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behaviors of large numbers of people.
 * Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis of information, or gives loaded messages in order to produce an emotional rather than rational response. The desired result is a change of the cognitive narrative (story) of the subject to further a political agenda.
 * Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist. —Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion
 * Propaganda is a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels." - Richard Alan Nelson, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States, 1996
 * Propaganda also has much in common with public information campaigns by governments and advertising campaigns by corporations.
 * Journalistic theory generally holds that news items should be objective, giving the reader an accurate background and analysis of the subject at hand. Advertisements have therefore evolved to articles or broadcasts disguised as news to make the viewer believes that a paid advertisement is in fact a news item.
 * Propaganda serves as a corollary to censorship in which the same purpose is achieved, not by filling people's minds with approved information, but by preventing people from being confronted with opposing points of view.

Use of Propaganda

 * Propaganda in war is used to dehumanize and create hatred toward an enemy by creating a false image in the mind. This can be done by using derogatory or racist terms, avoiding some words or by making allegations of enemy atrocities. Most propaganda wars require the home population to feel the enemy has inflicted an injustice and that the cause of their nation is just.
 * If propaganda is false or deceitful, it requires greater reinforcement because the story will conflict with observable facts or alternate views, and the audience will constantly be assailed by doubts. Since these doubts are unpleasant (see cognitive dissonance), people will be eager to have them extinguished, and are therefore receptive to reassurances. This process of reinforcement uses an individual's predisposition to self-select "agreeable" information sources as a mechanism for maintaining control.
 * A major application of grey propaganda is making enemies believe falsehoods using straw arguments: As phase one, to make someone believe "A", one releases as grey propaganda "B", the opposite of "A". In phase two, "B" is discredited using some strawman. The enemy will then assume "A" to be true.
 * Education is often a critical element in propaganda. Since few people actually check what they learn at school, disinformation will be repeated by journalists as well as parents, reinforcing the idea that something is a "well-known fact". The disinformation is then recycled in the media and in the educational system, without the need for direct governmental intervention on the media.

Techniques

 * Ad nauseam: This argument approach uses tireless repetition of an idea. An idea, especially a simple slogan, that is repeated enough times, may begin to be taken as the truth. This approach works best when media sources are limited and controlled by the propagator.
 * Appeal to fear: Appeals to fear seek to build support by instilling anxieties and panic in the general population, for example, Joseph Goebbels exploited Theodore Kaufman's Germany Must Perish! to claim that the Allies sought the extermination of the German people.
 * Euphoria: The use of an event that generates euphoria or happiness, or using an appealing event to boost morale. Euphoria can be created by declaring a holiday, making luxury items available, or mounting a military parade with marching bands and patriotic messages.
 * Disinformation: The creation or deletion of information from public records, in the purpose of making a false record of an event or the actions of a person or organization, including outright forgery of photographs, motion pictures, broadcasts, and sound recordings as well as printed documents.
 * Flag-waving: An attempt to justify an action on the grounds that doing so will make one more patriotic, or in some way benefit a group, country, or idea. The feeling of patriotism which this technique attempts to inspire may not necessarily diminish or entirely omit one's capability for rational examination of the matter in question.
 * Historical Revisionism: The political party in power rewrote the past in order to control the present. "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
 * Quotes out of Context: Selective editing of quotes which can change meanings. Political documentaries designed to discredit an opponent or an opposing political viewpoint often make use of this technique.
 * Scapegoating: Assigning blame to an individual or group, thus alleviating feelings of guilt from responsible parties and/or distracting attention from the need to fix the problem for which blame is being assigned.

Nazi Propaganda

 * A report prepared during the war by the United States Office of Strategic Services in described Hitler's psychological profile: His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
 * "All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be... Its [propaganda's] effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.  We must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public.  The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous."

Propaganda in the US

 * the Creel Commission was created by Woodrow Wilson to sway popular opinion in favor of entering the war, on the side of the United Kingdom. The Creel Commission provided themes for speeches by "four-minute men" at public functions, and also encouraged censorship of the American press. The Commission was so unpopular that after the war, Congress closed it down without providing funding to organize and archive its papers.
 * The World War II British Political Warfare Executive and the United States Office of War Information helped sway US audiences against Hitler.
 * In the early 2000s, the United States government developed and freely distributed a video game known as America's Army. The stated intention of the game is to encourage players to become interested in joining the U.S. Army. According to a poll by I for I Research, 30% of young people who had a positive view of the military said that they had developed that view by playing the game.
 * The Bush Administration has been criticized for allegedly producing and disseminating covert propaganda in the form of television programs, aired in the United States, which appeared to be legitimate news broadcasts. More than 20 different federal agencies used taxpayer funds to produce television news segments-- “video news releases,” or VNRs-- promoting Bush administration policies.  Pres. Bush said the government’s practice of sending “packaged news stories” to local television stations was legal and he has no plans to cease it. His defense of the packages, which are designed to look like television news segments, came after the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a Congressional watchdog agency, called them a form of covert propaganda.  The administration responded that, “Executive Branch agencies are not bound by GAO’s legal advice."

Reading List

 * Cole, Robert. The Encyclopedia of Propaganda. New York: M.E. Sharp, Inc., 1998.
 * Kushner, Barak: The Thought War
 * Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda. The Formation of Men's Attitudes. New York: A. Knoph, 1965.
 * Marlin, Randal. Propaganda & the Ethics of Persuasion. New York:  Broadview Press, 2002.
 * Pratkanis, Anthony and Aronson, Elliott. Age of Propaganda: The Everday Use and Abuse of Persuasion. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1991.