Recognising Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda. [Wikipedia]
You might be forgiven for thinking that there is no place for propaganda in our modern democratic society, this, however, couldn’t be further from the truth.
A particularly prevalent source of social / political propaganda is BBC News, particularly stories relating to key government policy…
In 2008 BBC News reported on the Governments proposal to revisit the question of building new nuclear power stations. The reports consisted of several brief voice clips of ‘respectable’ looking ‘experts’ and interested parties all speaking in favour of new nuclear power stations, followed by one heavily pierced dreadlock sporting ’activist’ who spoke against.
The problem with this report was not the issue of weather we should build more nuclear power stations, but the BBC’s deliberate and blatant bias in it’s obviously pro-government reporting.
Sometimes the propaganda is not so obvious; yesterday there were multiple reports on the break-down of power sharing in Northern Ireland and along side these stories was a report stating that young paramilitary sympathisers are using Facebook and other social media to promote their causes, including pictures of themselves posing with knives and guns…
It would appear in this case the other ‘related’ story has been deliberately released alongside this news to influence and colour public opinion in relation to the ‘militants’, promoting fear and anger, and garnering sympathy for the government if / when it has to suspend the devolved assembly at Stormont.
It’s important when taking in information from the news and other media to take a step back and examine what is being presented objectively; bias reporting can usually be identified quite easily if the bias goes against our own personal bias (and we all have one) and somewhat harder when it agrees with our position.
Peripheral stories, related and apparently un-related, are also often important – there is no such thing as a coincidence in news reporting – the Facebook Militants story is not a ‘new’ issue which just happens to coincide with the Stormont crisis, and who can forget the “good day to bury bad news” scandal…
fLaMePr0oF <><
Hi Steve!How do we know now what is propaganda because you in the net have a thousand post (scientific,cultural,ordinary people…) for Yes regarding some idea and you have thousand for against like this Zeitgeist movement and Venus project,I dont know what is true or not (Im coming from small ex Jugoslav state Croatia and I m not in the center of … See morething,ideas any more,Yugoslavia was in past time belive or not)) and this make chaos,you dont know what to think.
I want to exist some kind critycal mass of people who think and have needs and desire to change like ordinary people,small people,I dont know if that what I said have any sence but I want do you know anything about that?
Hi Neven =O) I believe all information is valid and we shouldn’t dismiss or ignore anything, the important thing is to be aware of the context in which the information is being presented, and the context in which we are interpreting it…
Objectivity is the key, I always try to step back, even from my own world view, and examine everything I read / hear / see as forensically as I possibly can, taking in as much additional / relevant information as I can find. This helps me to uncover hidden agendas and identify assumptions / omissions etc. Only then should I apply my own world view and interpretation to the facts I have found.
Most people, most of the time, don’t process information in this way, they simply take it in and interpret it at face value, I’m really just trying to encourage people to widen their perspective and think much more carefully about what they see on TV or read in the media.
By the way, with regard to Zeitgeist I wouldn’t even do it the dubious ‘honour’ of calling it propaganda; it’s just a collection of plain lies and twisted facts put together to suite the makers’ wide ranging fantasies.
There is far too much crap in the Zeitgeist movie to go into it here, but even the simplest of academic investigations (30 minutes on Google) into the claims made about the origins of religion will reveal that it is all agenda and no truth.