Propaganda is so pervasive that a student of critical thinking
must learn to deal with it. Like mosquitoes in the woods, you can't
make it go away, but there are things you can do to make things
more bearable.
Think about all the sources of propaganda you encounter each day.
The radio, the television, billboards, bumper stickers, magazines,
signs at the grocery store, text books, teachers, friends, parents,
and on and on. If you watch thirty hours of TV per week, you will
view roughly 37,822 commercials per year. That about 100 TV ads
per day. You will see another 100 to 300 ads per day through the
other mass media. (Age of Propaganda, Pratkanis and Aronson, p.
4) And that's only advertising. By no means is all the propaganda
you encounter advertising. In fact, advertising is perhaps the
least insidious. Even though advertising is effective (that's why
advertisers use them), the results aren't usually that serious.
At some level most of us don't really trust ads. What you've got
to worry about are those whom you do trust, your teachers for instance.
With those whom you trust, there is a tendency to let down your
guard.
If you take a marketing class, they will teach you that advertising
provides a service to the target audience because it provides them
with needed information about the availability of the product,
and so on. If you accept that, then you've just been propagandized.
Sure, there's some truth to that claim, but there is a lot more
going on with advertising. Anyone who didn't just fall off the
proverbial turnip truck knows that advertising manipulates people
into buying all sorts of things that they don't need for all sorts
of illegitimate reasons. But they don't spend much time discussing
the evils of advertising in marketing classes. What's more, the
students and the teacher want to believe that advertising is an
honorable activity, so everyone is willing to accept this distorted
view of advertising. You've just learned two very important things
about propaganda. First, it is partly true. Indeed advertising
does give the potential buyer some useful information. For instance,
one may not have known that the product existed otherwise, or where
to buy it, and so on. But we all know that there's a lot the advertiser
doesn't tell us. For instance, that there may be competitors who
make better versions of the same thing for less money, or that
no one actually needs this product. Second, you learned that propaganda
works because the audience wants it to work. The folks in the marketing
class want to believe that advertising is a purely wholesome activity
with little or no negative side.
- Propaganda is that which is sent from one individual to another
and is not true when taken as a whole.
- Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels or Göbbels
was Hitler's minister of propaganda. Goebbels
insisted that Nazi propaganda be as accurate as possible. That
is very interesting, because people think of propaganda as
nothing but a pack of lies. Because propaganda is often true,
at least to a degree, people more easily succumb to it.
- The term "propaganda" embraces
the following: psychological action, psychological warfare,
reeducation and brainwashing, public and human relations, and
advertising.
- Example: "Communist propaganda" The
very term is propaganda. It creates the myth that anything
a communist says is propaganda. It also implies that anything
non-communists say is not propaganda.
- Example: "Marlboro cigarettes" One
cannot think about Marlboro cigarettes without thinking of
cowboys and the American west. And yet they are manufactured
on the east coast. Tobacco isn't grown in the west. It is likely
that most people who buy them are not cowboys. The image is
nothing more than a created myth that is artificially associated
with this brand.
- Myths by which people live and make their decisions.
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