What is Propaganda?

There are all kinds of Posters, and a poster inspired this blog.  No, not the Women's Suffrage Meeting poster from 1894, nor Movie posters or Art Reproduction posters that may have come to mind, nor the W.W. I posters many collectors seek.  The poster that inspired this blog came from worldpress.com/' titled The Nine Fundamental Principles of Propaganda, warning, "Propaganda is the backdoor hack into your mind."  

We are living in a time when we are bombarded by misleading information.  I have blogged before about using fact checking sources to attempt to avoid being misled.  I have blogged about the change in news casters, no longer adhering to the standards of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, by 'reporting' more like commentators rather than following a strict adherence to news. I posted a blog about the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and the failed attempt in 2007 to reinstate it.     In fact, if you scroll through my blogs you may find other examples of ways we are misled.

 Obviously, I find it very important that we have access to information that is the truth, whether it is truthfulness about medicine, news events, health supplements, politics, or many other things.  I have also blogged about the tendency to stretch the truth, whether just to make a better story, to avoid embarrassment, or to intentionally mislead.  The sad fact is that doing business on a handshake or believing everything you hear or read is no longer wise.  That is why I thought it was worth it to share the Principles of Propaganda posted by Word Press.  What follows are the Propaganda Techniques to guard against.  These are the 9 tricks to watch out for!

1.  BIG LIE - Always choose the big lie over the small; the masses will believe it more readily.

2.  FOCUS - Use only one or at most two selling points.

3.  REPEAT - Use them over and over until even your enemies know them by heart.

4.  BLAME - Never waver, acknowledge no doubt; always blame, never credit the other side.  Debase, defame, dehumanize.

5.  PROVOKE - First attract attention, then appeal to emotions.  

6.  CRISIS - Shades of gray don't work:  Issues must be life/death, good/evil, freedom/slavery, love/hate.

7.  EMOTHINAL SYMBOLS - Good slogans have no literal meaning, only a strong emotional appeal.

8.  PANDER - Ignore intellectuals and reasonable arguments; target the unthinking masses with powerful emotional pitches.

9.  NO LIMITS - Ignore all moral limits whenever you deem it useful.

Now that you have this list of propaganda techniques, it might be fun to pick a program and see how many of these techniques you can identify.  If your family is watching television together, perhaps you can turn it into a game, to see who can be the first one to identify a propaganda technique, and which technique was used.  

 With this explanation of the techniques used to mislead us, we are better prepared to avoid falling for those tricks!

    

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