Why propaganda

With all of the propaganda and psychological aspects involved in a war it is sometimes hard to believe what we read in the mass media. Certainly everyone must have some bias due to the plethora of media information out there taking one side or another. Most of the media sources we read have a natural and, one could argue, unavoidable bias. For example the media embedded in the troops in Iraq have probably gone through a survival course by the U.

The use of propaganda also exists within a government or regime. Officials within the regime used propaganda when conveying information up the chain of command. Information would only pass on if it would impress Hitler. This had a negative effect on Hitler, because he would not see the whole picture of the war Greene, 25 Mar, The terror throughout the regime could result in uses of propaganda to make higher officials happy to avoid getting killed. This hurts the regime because information may not be accurately passed on to Saddam himself.

Often the media claims that the purpose of the media is to offer a non-biased view of current events. This is nearly impossible to achieve because every bit of writing takes some angle on an issue. Johann Galtung, a professor of peace studies, is studying how the media plays a role in the violence and misery around the world.

He focused on some of the things that media sources do that causes them to take one side or another which often results in convincing the public of the same view. Galtung laid out 12 of the main things that the media does wrong when reporting violence. Dualism : reducing the number of parties in a conflict to two, when often more are involved. Stories that just focus on internal developments often ignore such outside or "external" forces as foreign governments and transnational companies.

Manicheanism : portraying one side as good and demonizing the other as "evil. Armageddon : presenting violence as inevitable, omitting alternatives. Focusing on individual acts of violence while avoiding structural causes, like poverty, government neglect and military or police repression. Confusion : focusing only on the conflict arena i.

Excluding and omitting the bereaved, thus never explaining why there are acts of revenge and spirals of violence. Failure to explore the causes of escalation and the impact of media coverage itself.

Failure to explore the goals of outside interventionists, especially big powers. Failure to explore peace proposals and offer images of peaceful outcomes. Confusing cease-fires and negotiations with actual peace. Omitting reconciliation: conflicts tend to reemerge if attention is not paid to efforts to heal fractured societies. When news about attempts to resolve conflicts are absent, fatalism is reinforced.

That can help engender even more violence, when people have no images or information about possible peaceful outcomes and the promise of healing. The mistakes of the media often change the public opinion of the people of the U. It is interesting to look back to the beginning of the war on Iraq and realize that the original reason that the U.

The U. The focus in the media, however, changed after the war started. Eventually the war became an effort to free Iraq. In a group of journalists, students, and media experts got together and discussed issues journalism. Included in their writings was an outline of how the media prepares the country for war. The media first prepares the country by bring up issues of poverty and dictatorship such as the case with Saddam. The implementation stage is similar to the control that the media has over the public view of the war on Iraq, and the aftermath is already being portrayed by the media starting to not focus on the war as much as in the beginning.

The Justification Stage - during which big news is produced to lend urgency to the case for armed intervention to bring about a rapid restitution of "normality";. The Implementation Sta ge - when pooling and censorship provide control of coverage;. The Aftermath - during which normality is portrayed as returning to the region, before it once again drops down the news agenda. Source: The Peace Journalism Option, This may not have been state literally but when it comes down to it if someone can control public opinion then they have all the power.

A government cannot have power if it does not have the support of the public. In order to gain support of the public propaganda is used to promote the government and the ideals behind it.

Many of our ebooks are available through library electronic resources including these platforms:. Our democracy today is fraught with political campaigns, lobbyists, liberal media, and Fox News commentators, all using language to influence the way we think and reason about public issues.

He examines how propaganda operates subtly, how it undermines democracy—particularly the ideals of democratic deliberation and equality—and how it has damaged democracies of the past.

He lays out historical examples, such as the restructuring of the US public school system at the turn of the twentieth century, to explore how the language of democracy is sometimes used to mask an undemocratic reality.

Drawing from a range of sources, including feminist theory, critical race theory, epistemology, formal semantics, educational theory, and social and cognitive psychology, he explains how the manipulative and hypocritical declaration of flawed beliefs and ideologies arises from and perpetuates inequalities in society, such as the racial injustices that commonly occur in the United States.

How Propaganda Works shows that an understanding of propaganda and its mechanisms is essential for the preservation and protection of liberal democracies everywhere. Its trove of tools and insights is impossible to completely summarise here. Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow , the lofty perspective of How Propaganda Works challenges researchers to fill in gaps with more detailed, particular explanations of how and why.

Sometimes slogans have fired the imaginations of people in the past and continued their influence down to the present. Propaganda makes use of slogans, but it also makes effective use of symbols. A symbol is a concrete representation of air idea, action, or thing—a sign that stands for something, as crossed rifles stand for the Infantry and as wings and propeller represent the Air Forces.

A symbol can be a word, a mark, an object, a song, a flag, an image, a picture, a statue, or some collective or grouped representation—anything that conveys a common thought to masses of people. A symbol is a kind of cement that holds together a social group. The propagandist knows the art of working with symbols. He uses symbols to develop both favorable and unfavorable attitudes. Symbol usage will create likenesses that are used much as a stenographer uses shorthand.

Cartoonists have stereotyped symbols to represent the taxpayer, the college professor, and many others. There is some reason to believe that in the past half century there has been a decrease in the number of popular symbols used in the Western nations. But a vast amount of symbolism has been created by the fascist, Nazi, and communist states. The Nazis made their symbols so unmistakable and conspicuous that if any German omitted to display or use them, he would be quickly detected.

These symbols, you will recall, included the Nazi salute, the swastika, and a lot of titles, badges, and uniforms. Catchwords and slogans abound in Nazi propaganda, contrived for the sake of impressing the German people. Then new ones are coined and must be on all German lips. The chief symbol used to inspire the Japanese civilian and fighting man is the emperor. The Japanese higher-ups maintain their internal power by making a god of their emperor—emphasizing his alleged descent from the sun god.

This symbol of the emperor as god is used to stimulate the fighting effectiveness of soldiers and sailors. The psychologists are not agreed as to the extent to which attitudes and opinions can be propagated by prestige, but it seems certain that prestige does play an important role.

The influence the parent has over his child, for example, can be traced in part to the prestige of an adult-in size, strength, knowledge, and power. Some individuals or groups resent expert opinion and are unwilling to respond to the suggestions made by fact-finders and scientists.

But there seems to be no doubt that in politics prestige is a decided factor. The prestige of businessmen has been a factor in political campaigns, especially in times of prosperity. In wartime, belligerents stress the prestige of their military and political leadership.

Sometimes this prestige is increased by legends, which are another means of influencing the attitudes of people. Usually legends are built up around a core of truth, but the end result may be like a character from fiction. The legends of Ulysses, Roland, and Siegfried, for example, grew up around mighty warriors.