I came across this book in my search for the answers to "Who dropped the ball in our HIDstory that they OVERlooked the vital reason that they are still able to conduct themselves in a manner in which if we would have obtained "Human Rights" during the "Snivel Rights" Era, there would have been Humanitarian rescues, and our cemeteries would be less full.
Let us discover their tactics that have brought about dixtractions and ideologies that have been embed in our psyche of altered information and blatant lies of all of the people that they felt that we weren't able to have or create dialogue that could extinguish any thought of a conflict. The competition has always been against "poverty" and not each other.
Defining propaganda as "efforts by special interests to win over the public covertly by infiltrating messages into various channels of public expression ordinarily viewed as politically neutral," this book argues that propaganda has become pervasive in American Life.
Pointing out that the 1990s society is inundated with propaganda from numerous sources (including government, business, researchers, religious groups, the news media, educators, and the entertainment industry) the book exposes these channels of propaganda and the cumulative effect they have on public opinion and the functioning of American democracy.
Chapter 1: reviews materials on diverse vantage points from which American writers and opinion
leaders have tried to reconcile mass persuasion with the democratic way of life during the 20th century.
Chapters 2-6: examine propaganda in:
(1) government (e.g., Federal Bureau of Investigation, aid to the
Contras, Star Wars, presidential styles);
(2) research and religion (e.g., national security, private sector, religion and politics);
(3) news (e.g., getting good coverage, pressure groups, and business);
(4) classroom (e.g., business propaganda, pressure groups, textbooks, pressures on teachers); and
(5) entertainment (e.g., film, television).
Chapters 7 and 8: question:
(1) what action a democratic people should take to safeguard intelligent discussion and free choice from the taint of devious communication;
(2) to what extent propaganda casts a shadow over public life; and
(3) whether large:scale, engineered persuasion can ever be squared with the ideal of democratic - public deliberation.
Extensive chapter notes and an index are included.
Chapter 1:
THE REALM OF PROPAGANDA 1
The Propaganda Problem 2
The Muckrakers and The Discovery of Propaganda 11
The Great War and Furor over Propaganda 14
The Communication Industry and Progressives' Critique 18
The Practitioners Respond 24
The Social-Scientific Approach 26
The Rationalist Approach 32
The Polemical Approach 37
The Return of Progressive Propaganda Analysis 40
Chapter 2:
PROPAGANDA IN GOVERNMENT 53
Government by Propaganda 54
Government and the Press 62
Darker Sides of Government Propaganda 67
The Big Two Agencies 76
Two Illustrative Cases 87
Government Propaganda versus Public Information 94
Chapter 3:
PROPAGANDA IN THE TWO Rs: RESEARCH AND RELIGION 105
Pressures on Researchers 106
Researching for National Security 110
Research for Federal Domestic Agencies 113
Hired Guns for the Private Sector? 118
Support from the Charitable Foundations 12
Religion and Politics 126
Religion in Political Movements 133
Chapter 4:
PROPAGANDA IN THE NEWS 145
News: The Modern Rhetoric 146
Practices of Objectivity 150
Getting the Important News 154
News as a Business 158
Getting Good Coverage: The Establishment 165
Getting Good Coverage: The Dissidents 171
Pressure Groups in the News: Case Studies 175
Business and the News 179
Free Speech and American Business 181
Chapter 5:
PROPAGANDA IN THE CLASSROOM 191
Propaganda versus Education 192
Business Propaganda in the Schools 193
Pressure Groups and the Schools 199
Whose Propaganda is in the Textbooks 202
Propaganda of the Marketplace 205
Pressures on Teachers 217
Reform, Ideology and Education 223
Chapter 6:
PROPAGANDA IN ENTERTAINMENT 235
The Entertainment Norm in Public Communication 236
Film: A Lively Propaganda 238
The Propaganda of Prime Time 252
Image Propaganda in an Age of Appearance 262
Chapter 7:
THE ENVIRONMENT OF PROPAGANDA 283
Incapacitated Speakers 284
The Passive Polis 288
The Poverty of National Discourse 300
Democracy's Dilemma 318
Chapter 8:
PROPAGANDA AND THE PUBLIC 327
No Panaceas, No Liberators 328
What Kind of Propaganda Analysis? 332
Restoring Eloquence 339
Building Citizens 354
INDEX 357
Subject 357
Names 367
THE REALM OF PROPAGANDA
Do we need a term such as propaganda to focus attention on the manipulative dimensions of communication? If one had asked this question of most students of communication in 1955, the answer would have been an emphatic "no!"
The previous decade had seen the disappearance of propaganda as a significant theoretical term in American social science and its replacement with the more euphemistic concepts of communication and persuasion.
Verbal neutrality of this latter kind seemed to fit the post-World War II era when social researchers aspired to the value-free status attained by those scientists who studied physical phenomena.
A few scholars, such as sociologist Alfred McClung Lee, did continue to use propaganda in the sense in which the term was commonly understood during the 1920s and 1930s, that is, as a descriptor for
efforts at self-serving mass persuasion by institutions and groups.
Most social scientists of the 1950s and early 1960s, however, recoiled from a term carried the inherently negative connotations of covert manipulation.' How could researchers accept grants from the U.S. government and from business organizations to study mass persuasion under a label that cast aspersions not only on the messages themselves but also on the communicators and their purposes?
Yet, now in the 1990s, we are in the midst of a revival of propaganda as a serious term for understanding social influence. What is going on? Why this return to a theoretical formulation which, however neutrally it is defined, ever reminds us of the self-serving behind communications that organizations and interest groups present to the public?
The answer seems to lie in certain moral ambiguities inherent within methods of twentieth-century mass persuasion. During times of social stability, such as were the 1950s, the relative consensus abroad in society may dull concerns about the orchestration of public opinion. No matter
how hard we try to rationalize or evade them, however, the tactics of propaganda raise troubling questions for a society that wishes to retain not merely the forms of democracy but also its realities.
In Chapter 1, I invite you to begin with me an odyssey into the ebb and flow of contemporary mass persuasion and the dangers that propaganda's siren songs pose for a democratic people. Beginning with a view of the "propaganda problem," the journey takes us to several vantage points from which American writers and opinion leaders have tried to reconcile mass persuasion with the democratic way of life.
Chapters 2-6 act as our vehicles for spying propaganda in today's society and public life.
After this view of propaganda's modern haunts, I pose some questions in chapters 7 and 8: What action ought a democratic people take to safeguard intelligent discussion and free choice from the taint of devious communication? To what extent does propaganda cast a shadow over our public life? Can large-scale, engineered persuasion ever be squared with the ideal of democratic public deliberation, and if so, how?
THE PROPAGANDA PROBLEM
The expression propaganda has a checkered history. Although propaganda lacks a negative connotation in Romance languages, the English language treats the term as a sinister sister to legitimate persuasion.
This linguistic anomaly is attributable to the early connection of the term propaganda with the Roman Catholic Church. The word originates from the Congregatio de propaganda fide (Society for the Propagation of the Faith), an organization having charge of the missionary work of the Roman Church. Given the antipathy toward Catholicism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and among the English residents of the American colonies, it is not surprising that the term became, in the English-speaking world, a synonym for suspicious and disreputable persuasion, or worse.
The Oxford English Dictionary logs many nineteenth-century instances wherein propaganda was used, for instance, as "a term of reproach to secret associations for the spread of opinions"; however, it was not until World War I that political commentators found a context for using propaganda as a pointed theoretical concept to understand modern society.
During the war, Americans discovered the covert persuasive efforts of the Central Powers (Germany and Austria) and, after the war, those of the Allies (Britain and France) also came to light. These exposures of hidden persuasion shaped the context in which propaganda entered general parlance. During the 1920s, a variety of further conditions transformed propaganda into an especially apt concept for understanding the march of modern society.
Propaganda, with its focus on the strategic cultivation of persuasion by organizations, seemed a
term particularly suited to explain social influence, given the rise of radio, the solidification of powerful governmental and commercial institutions, the increasing activities of organized interest groups, and the spread of transnational political ideologies, such as fascism and communism.
Further, propaganda was a useful concept in an era that saw the decline of the great orator, the persuasive power of great speeches, and the direct-influence effect of pamphleteering, three vehicles characteristic of social suasion in the early nineteenth century.
Propaganda fit the new phenomenon of mass persuasion whereby large groups and institutions seemed newly able to surround the public with symbols conveying synthetic, made-up meaning.
To say that propaganda fit a new situation of institutionalized persuasion, however, does not convey a suitably specific definition for our purposes in this book. Nor is it sufficient to point out that definitions have varied and continue to differ.
While the task of constructing a definition of propaganda is not easy, it helps to begin with the idea that most conceptions of propaganda present the term as having inevitably negative connotations.
Most uses of propaganda emphasize the manipulative power of mass persuasion by causing us to recognize four conditions frequently found in questionable efforts at social influence.
The first is manipulation through covertness;
second is the overpowering of people with a massive and self-serving outpouring of symbols;
third is distortion through tricky language;
fourth is the pursuit of a special interest as opposed to pursuing objectives of wider public good.
Oh this is just the beginning of us tappin in to making a new decision about the direction they have us headin?!
If you read this far, it's gotta be mando that you leave your opinion of what you have read so far.
Share if you care, Share if you don't...
Someone cares enough for the both of us!
POPE Ben E. Ficial the First
Comments