Let’s try this from a slightly different angle . . . 

Why? To give you maybe a way to think about a different study strategy, one where you use a narrative or storytelling to make important information ‘stick,’ instead of just trying to memorize and file away somewhere in those organic algorithms (i.e., the brain and cognition). 

Okay, you should have a sense that propaganda implies attempts at mass persuasion (check out Edward Bernays, a true practitioner. From the 1920s). You can also no doubt grasp how the advertising industry uses propaganda to persuade, although sometimes it does seem like asking fish to describe water (it’s ubiquitous, meaning it has filled every nook and cranny in the modern media landscape). And how politicians might like to learn some of those principles for their own use. There is a reason Robert Cialdini writes about ‘compliance professionals.’ And in a media-saturated world, where even the news must compete for attention, and where news organizations are mostly funded by commercial advertising, maybe it’s easier by this point in the term to understand how you are likely to see some of these persuasion techniques used to ‘bait’ an audience, to confirm their views, to keep them coming back. And that’s by the news organization–and of course they are reporting on politicians using these techniques (usually without pointing them out for their audience), and the advertising inserted in every available space, either on TV, in social media, on Internet news sites, in podcasts, etc., is pure propaganda.

We have talked about a wide variety of techniques, such as:

• the 4 stratagems of persuasion (from ‘Age of Propaganda’ by Anthony Pratkanis and Eliot Aronson);
• Here those strategies are applied to the US Government’s campaign to demonize Iraq’s leader at the time, Saddam Hussein, and justify an invasion and occupation as a response to 9/11 (and here to climate change);
• Brian Patrick’s so-called ‘Ten Commandments’ of propaganda. I wouldn’t test on anything we haven’t covered in class, but some important ones we did address are:
  • Disambiguation–removing uncertainty, often by creating an oversimplistic framework (for instance, there are only two political viewpoints, republican and democrat, or left vs right–commercial news organizations use this to the point it has become normalized);
  • Distancing propaganda from its source (we’ve discussed corporate front groups or ‘astroturf’, source-filtering (in week 2), public relations (Rick Berman–you can see many of the techniques in this interview with Rachael Maddow, and week 5 has other material on PR);
  • Reflect the values and beliefs of the audience (this is the essence of confirmation bias–giving the audience what will reinforce beliefs)
  • Accommodate informational needs and habits (we’ve talked about sports metaphors, and think about rooting for your ‘team’ or ‘side’, or we discussed how White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt often uses aggressive tactics against reporters that seem more like a professional wrestling promotion–that’s probably what she’s channeling and she knows her audience understands [disambiguation in that post, too]);
  • Personalize and dehumanize as appropriate (Initial stories on Alex Pretti’s killing in Minneapolis by federal agents, before blowback [and after. Sort of])
• In week 3, we discussed heuristics and social proof, from Cialdini.

One way to think about heuristics and propaganda techniques is to think of heuristics–mental ‘shortcuts’ that people use, not consciously, really, but it is more likely the brain’s response to reducing stimuli–as conditioned responses that are vulnerable to propaganda techniques. Propagandists know how to take advantage of this human tendency, and in the digital age, with the pace of life accelerated, information coming in from all directions (and most of it market-tested and pre-processed), tailor-made for everyone having little pocket computers, trying to get one’s bearings and avoid the noise and the echo chamber effect becomes more challenging–it’s certainly something that propagandists might also try to exploit (when what Americans need, really, IMHO, is media literacy starting at a pretty early age, since now even pre-teens have pocket computers, which we convenient call ‘phones,’ or worse, ‘smart phones.’

So (for example) the technique may be social proof (Cialdini’s chapter 4 or Pierce’s ‘rules‘ are worth reviewing), and the heuristic is the shortcut people use. ‘Oh, Rick Berman says 70% of economists think raising the minimum wage is a bad idea, so I guess if economists feel that way . . . ‘ First, we don’t get a source from Mr. Berman. Second, who knows which economists he found to say that making $7.25 / hr is better than making double that for a household of four with one employable adult. Third, he also uses distancing the source from the propaganda with his ‘minimumwage.com‘ site. And you can imagine, if a politician from a state that still has the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr needs a source, he can contact Mr. Berman or direct people to minimumwage.com, where the full persuasion arsenal that Mr. Berman is so legendary at using is available to justify not increasing the minimum wage (or the dozens of other causes Mr. Berman’s clients want protected from regulation, for instance). 

With all that noise, what’s a news consumer to do? The unprepared or uninitiated human brain can’t compete with all of that expertise and cognitive subterfuge. Some will resort to heuristics just to make some of that noise go away. But they are more vulnerable to persuasion and deception in doing so. Now apply all of this to people trying to keep abreast of current events by following the news, all the choices they have to make in doing so–many of them uninformed–the ways in which even news outlets use these techniques now and are subject to the pressures of filtering mechanisms, and what would we expect to emerge? A healthy, functioning democracy where politicians are public servants doing the bidding of the informed electorate that put them in office?