Download 1 Feb. 4/05 Propaganda, Persuasion, and Democracy Critical

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Feb. 4/05
Propaganda, Persuasion, and Democracy
Critical Theories of the Press
Marx: in every epoch, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class (courseware,
Grossberg et al, p. 384)
Media are central to the operation of capitalism:
 they sell goods and services
 they carry economic news
 they are important for coordinating supply and demand
 they are so essential to the economic system, they are controlled by the economic
elite (bourgeoisie)
Neo-marxian views
 as in Herman and Chomsky, the argument is that oligopoly forecloses diversity
 AJ Liebling: Freedom of the press – for those who own one. (He meant this
ironically. Have the internet and blogging modified the “structure of ownership”
in the world of news?)
 Grossberg et al, 389: concentration of ownership carries the risk that the
gatekeepers may freeze out certain ideas in their desire to maximize profits
 The media become tools to maintain the dominant ideology of capitalist power
A Marxist View of the Press
 media should serve and be controlled by workers
 media should serve society by mobilization and through education
 media must respond to the people
 support progressive movements at home and abroad
Critical view of ideology
 ideologies are not only particular ways of seeing or systems of representation
(Grossberg et al, 393)
o they exclude, limit
o they set the boundaries on what we are able to understand and what we
accept as possible
o Question: How free are we to imagine our own future?
 they are always contested between elites and masses
o but a common strategy is to present dominant values as “normal”
 Ideologies may be seen as a particular operation of the power of propaganda
Propaganda: Definition
 the deliberate attempt to persuade people to think and behave in a desired way
consistent with benefiting those doing the persuading
o can include advertising, public relations, and other forms of
communication
o includes censorship
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 More formally: an organized program of publicity to propagate a doctrine or
practice
 Carries a negative connotation today
History
 its roots lie in the Catholic Church’s counter-Reformation in the early 1500’s
(sixteenth century), when it meant an organized effort to propagate the Catholic
faith
Ideological context of the term
 implies suppression of judgment
 a critical view of the capacity of the masses to reason soundly
 has been associated with war through its history
 What we do is “good”, what the enemy does is “bad”: this moral relativism
obscures propaganda’s operation in the service of ideology
Key distinctions
 from education
o humanist education teaches people how to think
o propaganda tells people what to think: in authoritarian regimes, education
is used for social and political engineering.
 from persuasion
o the key is intent: propaganda is designed to serve the interests of the
communicator
Central issues
 how freely does information flow?
 Who controls it, and why?
 Are we being told everything? Could we find out everything?
 Is what we get an “unfiltered representation of what is really happening”?
Precedents
 WW One: Kipling, H.G. Wells and others recruited to bring their considerable
writing skills to the one-sided presentation that propaganda demands in wartime
 “The first victim of war is truth”
 WW Two: Goebbels, Hitler’s information minister, a master of media use, from
film (“Triumph of the Will”) to radio (Hitler’s speeches) down to collectable
Hitler cards for schoolchildren
 Gulf War: Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Indiana
University Press, 1995): the explosion of media and information has voided our
representations of meaning.
Traditional theories of persuasion
 Rhetorical appeals based on ethos (character and credibility), pathos (emotion or
feeling), and logos (argument)
 Psychosocial dimension:
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o Totalitarian propaganda plays on fear of the other, will to security,
uncertainty, tendency to conformity
o Democratic propaganda plays on desire for well being, happiness, sense of
belongingness
Propaganda methods
Technique
Black art: plant an authority
Name calling, demonization
Glittering generality
Transference: guilt/halo by
association
Testimonials
Plain folks/populism
Card stacking: selective use
of information
Bandwagon effect
Illustration
Seek trusted third parties to support your view
Use epithets consistent with times (“terrorist”)
Words with virtuous connotation (“liberty”)
Portrayal of flag; photomontage; fakery
Respected person supports the view
“Aw shucks, this is what we all want”
lie by omission; preponderance of confirming
information
Create impression everyone is doing it; spiral of
silence.
Other techniques
Quoting out of context
Bold assertion
Twisting or distortion
Logical fallacies
 leaping to causal judgment
 hasty generalization
 false analogy
Manipulation of language
 delete the agent of a sentence – obscures responsibility. Instead of “US declared
war”, “War was declared”
 Delete experiencer – implies a harder fact. “Journalists estimated 10,000 at the
demonstration” is not as strong as “10,000 hit the streets”
 Control naming: Orwell’s Ministry of Truth; Operation Desert Storm
Constructing news images
 our representations are always framed
 camera angle and positioning, picture framing and lighting, image selection,
photographic retouching, digital image manipulation, editorial cropping, and final
juxtaposition can all radically change or even invert the meaning of depicted
scenes
Media as democratic propaganda
 coercion of citizens is not direct
 engagement with propaganda techniques is open
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o tends to be “enlightened” (voluntary, majoritarian) and systemic (not
individual)
mainstream media do not set out to control or persuade, but that is their
cumulative effect (Fleras, 55)
Expressions may be banal:
o Frame all news around conflict, negative framework
o Consumer fantasies
o Focus on possessions, appearance
o Male, ethnocentric values
no proof of conspiracy that owners collude
Fleras, 57, citing Monbiot (2002): “persuasion works best when worming its way
into our (un)consciousness yet leaving intact the perception that we have made
choices independently”
Sources:
Thanks to Dr. Catherine Murray for guidance with the foregoing.
Klaehn, Jeffery. (2001). “A Critical Review and Assessment of Herman and Chomsky’s
‘A Propaganda Model’, in European Journal of Communication 17(2), 147-182.
Marlin, Randal. (2002). Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion. Toronto: Broadview
Press.
Taylor, Philip M. (2003). Munitions of the mind: a history of propaganda from the
ancient world to the present day. Manchester: Manchester University Press.