When should political/societal propaganda be a sanctioned tactic?
2 years ago
6 Comments
I'm defining propaganda as intentionally spinning, falsifying, or leaving out of information in order to promote a specific doctrine, system of principles, or call to action.
Tags: politics, propaganda, tactics
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Topic Details
This topic was started by jslife on March 15th, 2006. 73 grupies have voted on one or more of the 9 answers.
Tags: politics, propaganda, tactics
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Humm, do you consider a "lie of omission" wrong or false information?
'lie of omission' is analogous to the 'leaving out' part of my propaganda definition above to me.
Definition (according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda ):
Propaganda is a specific type of message presentation directly aimed at influencing the opinions of people, rather than impartially providing information.
In the immortal words of Howard Zinn, "You can't be neutral on a moving train."
In an ever-changing world, there is no such thing as impartiality, and as a consequence nothing that ISN'T propoganda. There is no way that every bit of minutae of every single topic could be discussed in a news release, or even a good long one on one talk. By that fact alone there are inherent lies of omission in every transmission.
Check out the Fallacy Files - http://www.fallacyfiles.org - It falls under the category of "Informal Fallscies" - Look for "One-sided arguements" and "Supressed Evidence."
Anyhow. Propaganda is just a five dollar word for "sales pitch." This question needs to be a bit more pointed. There's nothing wrong with propaganda, per se. However, there are some types of propaganda which I think are pretty sketchy. (Advertisements disguised as news segments, for example.)
wow you guys really take these questions to heart.
holotone should be on a debate team or something.
Actually, one more comment: In regards to holotone's remark "...there is no such thing as impartiality." - This is not strictly true.
(BTW, impartiality is still under philisohical debate - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impartial)
IMNSHO, one can be impartial when it's in one's best interest to do so - any type of referee, for example.
While I agree with your general theme, I think the reality is less extreme than you make it out to be.
P.S. It just became clear to me that this topic is, in and of itself, a one-sided question. Propoganda is defined as bad, with nefarious purposes. Thus pointing us all in the direction of a certain response. The question is doing extactly what it's professing to be a bad tactic.