Recognizing Propaganda
Every minute of every day you are subjected to propaganda. People are using words, pictures, and even music to influence the way you think. Before I get into how propaganda works, the techniques that are used, I should define the term as used in this post.
Propaganda is the use of one-sided messages to influence the emotions, opinions, attitudes, and actions of targeted audiences for political, ideological, or commercial purposes. The messages may or may not be factual. That’s a paraphrase of a definition provided by Richard Alan Nelson in a Wikipedia article.
A very effective explanation of how propagandists manipulate us is a documentary, Propaganda and Manipulation: How mass media engineers and distorts our perceptions, by Jerry Kroft, Ph.D., a Psychologist, who wrote Duped! Delusion, denial, and the end of the American Dream. You can see it on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfo5gPG72KM
He explains the basic tools that are used.
1.Reframing
2. Repeated Affirmations
3. Vicarious/ Imitative learning
4. Distraction and denial
5. Classical & operant conditioning.
It would be great, in my view, if this were shown to every11th grader in the United States.
Dick's World 