Wider Propaganda
a principle familiar to propagandists is that the doctrine to be instilled in the target audience should not be articulated: that would only expose them to reflection, inquiry, and, very likely, ridicule. The proper procedure is to drill them home by constantly presupposing them, so that they become the very condition for discourse.
— Noam Chomsky
It is easier to dominate someone if they are unaware of being dominated. Colonised and colonisers both know that domination is not just based on physical supremacy. Control of hearts and minds follows military conquest. Which is why any empire that wants to last must capture the souls of its subjects.
— Ignacio Ramonet, The control of pleasure, Le Monde diplomatique, May 2000
But the issue of propaganda can go beyond just war, to many other areas of life such as the political, commercial and social aspects:
When there is little or no elite dissent from a government policy, there may still be some slippage in the mass media, and the facts can tend to undermine the government line. … We have long argued that the “naturalness” of [the] processes [of indirectly pressing the media to keep even more tenaciously to the propaganda assumptions of state policy], with inconvenient facts allowed sparingly and within the proper framework of assumptions, and fundamental dissent virtually excluded from the mass media (but permitted in a marginalized press), makes for a propaganda system that is far more credible and effective in putting over a patriotic agenda than one with official censorship.
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It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attach and expose corporate and government malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality of the command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance. (Emphasis Added)
— Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent; The Political Economy of the Mass Media, (Pantheon Books, New York, 1988), pp. xiv, 1—2.
The use of words is integral to propaganda techniques. Dr. Aaron Delwiche, at the School of Communications at the University of Washington, provides a web site discussing propaganda. Delwiche recounts how in 1937, in the United States, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis was created to educate the American public about the widespread nature of political propaganda. Made up of journalists and social scientists, the institute published numerous works. One of the main themes behind their work was defining seven basic propaganda devices. While there was appropriate criticism of the simplification in such classifications, these are commonly described in many university lectures on propaganda analysis, as Delwiche also points out. Delwische further classifies these (and adds a couple of additional classifications) into the following:
Word Games
Name-calling
Labeling people, groups, institutions, etc in a negative manner
Glittering generality
Labeling people, groups, institutions, etc in a positive manner
Euphemisms
Words that pacify the audience with blander meanings and connotations
False Connections
Transfer
Using symbols and imagery of positive institutions etc to strengthen acceptance
Testimonial
Citing individuals not qualified to make the claims made
Special Appeal
Plain Folks
Leaders appealing to ordinary citizens by doing “ordinary” things
Band Wagon
The “everyone else is doing it” argument
Fear
Heightening, exploiting or arousing people’s fears to get supportive opinions and actions
(See the previous link for descriptions of these devices.) A vivid example of such use of words is also seen in the following quote:
Since war is particularly unpleasant, military discourse is full of euphemisms. In the 1940’s, America changed the name of the War Department to the Department of Defense. Under the Reagan Administration, the MX-Missile was renamed “The Peacekeeper.” During war-time, civilian casualties are referred to as “collateral damage,” and the word “liquidation” is used as a synonym for “murder.”
— Dr. Aaron Delwiche, Propaganda Analysis, Propaganda Critic Web site, School of Communications, Washington University, March 12, 1995
Political Scientist and author, Michael Parenti, in an article on media monopoly, also describes a pattern of reporting in the mainstream in the U.S. that leads to partial information. He points out that while the mainstream claim to be free, open and objective, the various techniques, intentional or unintentional result in systematic contradictions to those claims. Such techniques — applicable to other nations’ media, as well as the U.S. — include:
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Suppression By Omission»
o He describes that worse than sensationalistic hype is the “artful avoidance” of stories that might be truly sensational stories (as opposed to sensationalistic stories).
o Such stories he says are often “downplayed or avoided outright” and that sometimes, “the suppression includes not just vital details but the entire story itself” even important ones.
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Attack and Destroy the Target»
o Parenti says, “When omission proves to be an insufficient mode of censorship and a story somehow begins to reach larger publics, the press moves from artful avoidance to frontal assault in order to discredit the story”.
o In this technique, the media will resort to discrediting the journalist, saying things like this is “bad journalism”, etc., thus attempting to silence the story or distract away from the main issue.
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Labeling»
o Parenti says that the media will seek to prefigure perceptions of a subject using positive or negative labels and that the “label defines the subject without having to deal with actual particulars that might lead us to a different conclusion”. (Emphasis added)
o Examples of labels (positive and negative) that he points to include things like, “stability”, “strong leadership”, “strong defense”, “healthy economy”, “leftist guerrillas”, “Islamic terrorists”, “conspiracy theories”, “inner-city gangs” and “civil disturbances”. Others with double meanings include “reform” and “hardline”.
o Labels are useful, he suggests, because the “efficacy of a label is that it not have a specific content which can be held up to a test of evidence. Better that it be self-referential, propagating an undefined but evocative image.”
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Preemptive Assumption»
o As Parenti says of this, “Frequently the media accept as given the very policy position that needs to be critically examined”
o This is that classic narrow “range of discourse” or “parameters of debate” whereby unacknowledged assumptions frame the debate.
o As an example he gives, often when the White House proposes increasing military spending, the debates and analysis will be on how much, or on what the money should be spent etc, not whether such as large budget that it already is, is actually needed or not, or if there are other options etc. (See this site’s section on the geopoltiics for more on this aspect of arms trade, spending, etc.)
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Face-Value Transmission»
o Here, what officials say is taken as is, without critique or analysis.
o As he charges, “Face-value transmission has characterized the press’s performance in almost every area of domestic and foreign policy”
o Of course, for journalists and news organizations, the claim can be that they are reporting only what is said, or that they must not inject personal views into the report etc. Yet, to analyze and challenge the face-value transmission “is not to [have to] editorialize about the news but to question the assertions made by officialdom, to consider critical data that might give credence to an alternative view.” Doing such things would not, as Parenti further points out, become “an editorial or ideological pursuit but an empirical and investigative one”.
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Slighting of Content»
o Here, Parenti talks about the lack of context or detail to a story, so readers would find it hard to understand the wider ramifications and/or causes and effects, etc.
o The media can be very good and “can give so much emphasis to surface happenings, to style and process” but “so little to the substantive issues at stake.”
o While the media might claim to give the bigger picture, “they regularly give us the smaller picture, this being a way of slighting content and remaining within politically safe boundaries”. An example of this he gives is how if any protests against the current forms of free trade are at all portrayed, then it is with reference to the confrontation between some protestors and the police, seldom the issues that protestors are making about democratic sovereignty and corporate accountability, third world plunder, social justice, etc. (See this site’s, section on free trade protests around the world for a more detailed discussion of this issue.)
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False Balancing»
o This is where the notion of objectivity is tested!
o On the one hand, only two sides of the story are shown (because it isn’t just “both sides” that represent the full picture.
o On the other hand, “balance” can be hard to define because it doesn’t automatically mean 50-50. In the sense that, as Parenti gives an example of, “the wars in Guatemala and El Salvador during the 1980s were often treated with that same kind of false balancing. Both those who burned villages and those who were having their villages burned were depicted as equally involved in a contentious bloodletting. While giving the appearance of being objective and neutral, one actually neutralizes the subject matter and thereby drastically warps it.”
o (This aspect of objectivity is seldom discussed in the mainstream. However, for some additional detail on this perspective, see for example, Phillip Knightley in his award-winning book, The First Casualty (Prion Books, 1975, 2000 revised edition).)
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Follow-up Avoidance»
o Parenti gives some examples of how when “confronted with an unexpectedly dissident response, media hosts quickly change the subject, or break for a commercial, or inject an identifying announcement: ‘We are talking with [whomever].’ The purpose is to avoid going any further into a politically forbidden topic no matter how much the unexpected response might seem to need a follow-up query.”
o This can be knowingly done, or without realizing the significance of a certain aspect of the response.
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Framing»
o “The most effective propaganda,” Parenti says, “relies on framing rather than on falsehood. By bending the truth rather than breaking it, using emphasis and other auxiliary embellishments, communicators can create a desired impression without resorting to explicit advocacy and without departing too far from the appearance of objectivity. Framing is achieved in the way the news is packaged, the amount of exposure, the placement (front page or buried within, lead story or last), the tone of presentation (sympathetic or slighting), the headlines and photographs, and, in the case of broadcast media, the accompanying visual and auditory effects.”
o Furthermore, he points out that “Many things are reported in the news but few are explained.” Ideologically and politically the deeper aspects are often not articulated: “Little is said about how the social order is organized and for what purposes. Instead we are left to see the world as do mainstream pundits, as a scatter of events and personalities propelled by happenstance, circumstance, confused intentions, bungled operations, and individual ambition — rarely by powerful class interests.”
Furthermore, with concentrated ownership increasing (as is discussed in detail in the next section on this site) a narrower range of discourse can arise, sometimes without realizing. The consequences of which are summed up by the following from UK media watchdog, MediaLens:
Focusing on leaders’ thoughts is often a kind of propaganda. It involves repeating the government line without comment, thereby allowing journalists to claim neutrality as simple conduits supplying information. But it is not neutral to repeat the government line while ignoring critics of that line, as often happens. It is also not neutral to include milder criticism simply because it is voiced by a different section of the establishment, while ignoring more radical, but perhaps equally rational, critiques from beyond the state-corporate pale. A big lesson of history is that it is wrong to assume that power, or “respectability”, confers rationality. Media analyst Sharon Beder describes the reality of much mainstream reporting:
“Balance means ensuring that statements by those challenging the establishment are balanced with statements by those whom they are criticising, though not necessarily the other way round.”
Talk of leaders’ “hopes” teaches us to empathise with their wishes by personalising issues: “Blair desperately hopes to build bridges in the Middle East.” This is also a kind of propaganda based on false assumptions. It assumes that the reality of politicians’ “hopes” — their intentions, motivations and goals — is identical to the appearance. Machiavelli was kind enough to explain what every politician knows, and what almost all corporate media journalists feign not to know:
“It is not essential, then, that a Prince should have all the good qualities which I have enumerated above [mercy, good faith, integrity, humanity, and religion] but it is most essential that he should seem to have them; I will even venture to affirm that if he has and invariably practises them all, they are hurtful.”
— David Edwards, Turning Towards Iraq, Media Lens, November 27, 2001 (Emphasis is original)
As mentioned above just concentrating and reporting on the “official line” without offering a wider set of perspectives can also impact people’s opinions. In another article, MediaLens also highlights this and the impact it has on how global issues are perceived:
One of the secrets of media manipulation is to report the horror and strife of the world as though Western power, interests and machinations did not exist. Vast poverty, injustice and chaos in the Third World are depicted as unconnected to the cool oases of civilisation in Europe and the United States, which look on benignly but helplessly, or pitch in heroically to right wrongs as far as they are able. The idea, for example, that the vast economic and military might of North America might in some way be linked to the vast poverty and suffering of neighbouring Central and South America is unthinkable.
An important feature of the reporting that maintains this audacious deception—not consciously but through an internalised sense of what is “just not done” — is to relay our enemies’ “claims” of benign motives as claims, while reporting our governments’ claims without comment, or as obviously true — the message, tirelessly repeated, gets through to the public and an important propaganda function is thereby fulfilled. This is called “honest, factual reporting”.
— David Edwards, Burying Big Business, Media Lens, May 22, 2002 (Emphasis is original)
Furthermore (and while not a complete study of the mainstream media), media watchdog, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) did a study showing that there can be heavy political biases on even the most popular mainstream media outlets. The outlets they looked at were ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News in the year 2001. They found that “92 percent of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican.”
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