Author: Simon Sheridan

Propaganda School Part 4: Headlines and Taglines

Once you learn to take a critical eye to journalism, the exaggerations and even outright distortions are so plain to see that you marvel that anybody could believe any of it. But the reality is that most people are only half paying attention while either reading or watching the media. You ‘watch’ the television news that’s on in the background while you’re getting dinner ready and you leaf through the newspaper while waiting for a train. Rarely do you sit down and give your full intellectual attention to the news.  

There does still exist media that is more weighty and requires more attention. There is still the concept or a ‘paper of record’ which is a serious newspaper that exists to verify and publish the hard facts. This can be contrasted with the free newspaper that you pick up at the train station and whose purpose is to distract you on your commute home from work. The latter is low quality while the former is high quality. The same dynamic exists on television in the difference between the evening news bulletin and an hour long investigative journalism show.

These distinctions have collapsed somewhat since the advent of the internet. One of the primary drivers of that is attention. There is no point in producing high quality journalism unless there is a market of people who have the time and energy to consume it. High quality journalism requires giving attention and implies having the time and energy to do so. But that is lacking nowadays as attention spans are now sub-divided between the thousands different competitors vying for eyeballs. For that reason and others, even papers of record have devolved into clickbait, tabloid-style journalism.

The point of clickbait is, you guessed it, to get clicks. On a web-based news site, there are three primary variables you can alter to try and get more clicks: the headline, the tagline and the photo. We have already talked about photographs in a previous post. Headlines and taglines barely require any explanation. The tagline is simply the short sentence beneath the headline that goes into slightly more detail on what the story is about.

Headlines, in particular front page headlines, have always been important as they are the first thing anybody sees whether it’s on a website or on the front of the newspaper sitting in the rack at the supermarket or convenience store. Tabloid newspapers often deliberately exaggerate headlines for effect. Papers of record, on the other hand, are expected to turn out factual and sober headlines that reflect the story accurately.

The simple choice of stories is, of course, the main way in which a newspaper affects its readers view of the world. For that reason, as educated readers we should seek out a variety of news media so that we can get a variety of alternative views on what is happening. Often just scanning the headline and tagline is enough to see what agenda is being pushed by one paper relative to another. Another thing to watch out for if you do read the article is whether the contents of the article actually match the headline. The headline serves as the frame in which the journalist wants to put the story. It predisposes the reader to interpret the article in a certain way. In the desperate fight for attention that predominates on the battleground of modern media, exaggeration in headlines is almost a necessity but there’s a fine line between exaggeration and fabrication.

For an example of exaggeration in a headline, check out this article from the BBC. It’s yet another example of their biased Trump coverage.

The headline states that Republicans were ‘alarmed’ by Trump withdrawing troops from Afghanistan but the body of the article quotes Mitch McConnell and another Republican saying they thought the idea was a ‘mistake’. Calling something a mistake is about as polite as it gets in the world of politics. It certainly does not connotate ‘alarm’. At best, you might say the Republicans in question were critical of Trump withdrawing troops but the BBC felt the need to exaggerate their headline no doubt motivated by their seemingly bottomless desire to make Trump look bad. Most other media outlets I saw simply reported the troop withdrawal and then had a quote criticising it. Apparently only the BBC felt the need to manipulate the headline in this way.

Let’s have a look at a more extreme example of exaggeration which borders on being outright misleading. This is one I came across while researching one of my posts on the coronavirus. As part of my research for that series, I read through a number of articles in media that proclaimed to report on various aspects of the science behind corona. One of the startling patterns I noticed was of a media article that was a misrepresentation of the science. This was often done by summarising a scientific article incorrectly (protip: if you have the time, follows the links in articles and see if the content of the link says what the journalist purported it to say. Often, it won’t).

Another pattern I saw was where the headline of the article did not follow from the content of the article itself. Here is one such example from the publication Nature.

The headline reads “Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus…”. Then in the first sentence we are told “After a detective hunt across China, researchers chasing the origin of the deadly SARS virus have finally found their smoking gun.”

“Solving the mystery” and finding a “smoking gun” give the reader the firm impression that the scientific evidence is overwhelming. Upon closer reading of the article, however, this is simply not the case.

Take this quote: “Although no single bat had the exact strain of SARS coronavirus that is found in humans, the analysis showed that the strains mix often. The human strain could have emerged from such mixing…”  The word ‘could’ alongside its cousins ‘may’ and ‘might’ have played a big role in the reporting on the corona event. The whole point of a smoking gun is that it is definitive and unarguable. You either have one or you don’t.  Could and might and may are not words you use when you have definitive evidence. So, the science as reported in the article is not conclusive and, ironically, the article even contains a quote from another scientist who throws cold water on the whole theory. The headline is misleading, giving the reader the impression of a certainty which did not exist. A reader not really paying attention, or without the necessary understanding of the science, would have been led to a false impression.

That is the power of headlines and taglines. They massage the meaning in the direction that the journalist or editor wants to go. Sometimes this results in simple exaggeration. Pushed too far, it creates a story where there really isn’t one and actively misleads the reader.

Reader Exercise

A more light-hearted exercise for this post. Check out The Sun, the British newspaper that has turned headlines into an art form and see how they use language playfully to represent what is in their articles.

Postscript

This series of posts will be a lot more fun if readers can contribute. Feel free to post in the comments with any juicy examples of ‘over-zealous’ headlines.

All posts in this series:

Propaganda School Part 3: Editorialising the News

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when newspapers had practically a monopoly on reporting the news. There used to be two editions of the newspaper per day. The morning edition was the main paper that contained all the editorial, op-ed, cartoons and advertisements etc. Then there was the afternoon edition which reported on the events that had happened during the day. Radio and television presented a challenge to the newspapers’ control when they arrived on the scene. But the three forms of media proved to be complementary and they settled into an equilibrium. It was just as expensive to run a radio or television station as a newspaper and this expense presented a barrier to entry which ensured that the supply of news was tightly controlled among a relatively fixed number of media companies.

Then the internet came along.

Evangelists promised the internet would be a tool of liberation.  Part of the reasoning was that it would remove restrictions on the flow of information. In the music industry, record labels would no longer control who got to record and distribute an album. In the book industry, publishers would no longer hold back the tide of brilliant writers waiting to publish the next War and Peace. And, when it came to news, the media outlets would no longer get to control the news we would access about what was happening in the world. The result would be a cultural revolution as the shackles holding back consciousness were thrown off and the truth would be allowed to flow forth from the fountains of freedom.

It hasn’t exactly panned out that way and one of the main reasons it hasn’t is because the supply side restrictions which got removed actually served a purpose. Record labels, book publishers and news organisations are filters. Their job is to take all the things that could be distributed and remove what is not up to standard. They do not do this out of the goodness of their hearts but because the financial viability of their business relies upon it. As boring and suffocating as they may have seemed, the filtering businesses had one virtue: they ensured a minimum level of quality. The same argument has been made for the success of McDonalds. McDonalds is not a high quality product but the thing that is does is provide a guaranteed minimum quality. Anywhere in the world, you know what you will get when you eat at McDonalds. Same with the filtering businesses. They did not necessarily provide high quality, just a guaranteed minimum of quality.

Did the filter work perfectly all the time? Of course, not. One of the main ways it went wrong was to filter out stuff that people would have liked. No doubt all kinds of brilliant art and important news stories never saw the light of day as they were snuffed out by incompetent editors or coked up A&R executives. That was a definite problem. But now we have a new problem and one that is, in my opinion, worse. Once upon a time, the filterers would have sorted the wheat from the chaff. Now we as consumers must do it for ourselves. The guarantee of minimum quality no longer exists.

Different filterers faced the challenge of the internet in different ways and with differing levels of success. Record labels and the major book publishers survived but, at least in Australia, they play it ultra-safe releasing cheesy, unadventurous clichés. The news media has seen a huge cut in their operating budgets due to falling revenue from sales but also because their advertising revenue was eaten into by a variety of different internet players. Google and Facebook are two obvious ones but real estate and car sales, once the backbone of newspaper advertising, are now run by external companies. That advertising revenue used to subsidise good journalism. But not anymore.

As noted above, newspapers used to provide value by telling readers the facts but the internet made the facts freely available. For most important events, you no longer need a newspaper to tell you what happened, you can watch it on video or look up the information directly from the source. One of the ways in which newspapers in particular have responded to this is to focus less on reporting the news and more on contextualising it. There was an idea within the industry that, with the avalanche of facts which the internet delivered, news readers’ main problem would be to make sense of it all. That was where the newspapers could add value; by helping readers to contextualise the news or, as I am calling it, editorialising the news.

The Editorial was, and still is, that part of the newspaper where the editors of the paper get to express their opinion. It’s the one place where they don’t just report the facts and cite the sources but are free to give an interpretation of events. Usually, this is something to do with the political issues of the day but could also venture into social commentary. It is the prerogative of the editors; a kind of reward for those who rise to the top of their profession.

The editorial is (or was) sharply distinguished from the rest of the newspaper. A journalist writing a news article does not get to insert their opinion. Any opinion they do include must have a source. But that has changed somewhat in the last couple of decades. Although still not common in reputable media outlets, it is no longer unusual to see reporters editorialising the news. The wall separating editorial from news has been, if not fully demolished, certainly reduced in height so that it is easily jumped across by nimble journalists looking to ‘put the news in context’.

We saw in part 2 of this series how the passive voice can be used to say something without giving a source. This is a way for a journalist or media company to insert their bias or agenda into the news while making it look like somebody else is making a claim. Editorialising the news is not nearly so subtle. In fact, editorialising the news involves simply putting opinion directly into a news article. Once upon a time, this would have been considered unthinkable and any journalist trying to do so would have received a firm rebuke from their editor.

Before we get to some examples of editorialising the news, let’s first take a look at an example of good journalism from this article in Reuters.  (Note: although not without its flaws, I find Reuters to be one of the media organisations that consistently upholds the old fashioned standards of journalism). Note that the article is a series of facts and statements. Each fact is referenced to a source and the article even contains the disclaimer – “With most communications down in Tigray and Eritrea, Reuters could not independently confirm the strikes. Officials on both sides could not be reached.” That is what good journalism looks like.

Let’s now have a look at an article which contains editorialising – this article in The Hindu – which is a report on the US presidential election.

“Republican leaders in four critical States won by President-elect Joe Biden say they won’t participate in a legally dubious scheme to flip their State’s electors to vote for President Donald Trump. Their comments effectively shut down a half-baked plot some Republicans floated as a last chance to keep Mr. Trump in the White House.” [emphasis added]

Why is it legally dubious? The article cites no expert opinion to make this claim. Who is making the claim? The journalist? Is the journalist an expert in US law? On what grounds are they claiming it is legally dubious?

Then we have the phrase ‘half-baked plot’ which might be defensible in an op-ed polemic but which is completely unacceptable in a news article.

“Still, it has been promoted by Trump allies, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and is an example of misleading information and false claims fuelling scepticism among Mr. Trump’s supporters about the integrity of the vote.” [emphasis added]

Why is the information misleading? Why are the claims false?

“There has been no finding of widespread fraud or problems in the vote count…”

This is a statement of supposed fact without any reference. It is not even clear what it means given a number of court cases and legal processes are underway or still getting underway.

There are other examples in the article but I’m sure the reader gets the idea. It is not for a journalist to insert their opinion into the news and it is not for a journalist to make claims without reference. This article could easily have been written just sticking to the facts like the Reuters article above. That is what good journalism requires but this article is not good journalism. It is propaganda.

Reader Exercise

Editorialising the news is far more common in the media that comes from countries which do not have the western journalist tradition. You can find it in spades in the English language media that comes out of China, India, Russia and other countries. It may very well be that within the culture of those countries, editorialising has a different connotation. But within the western media, editorialising the news is still relatively rare as it is a blatant breach of the journalistic standards that have evolved over many decades. But that is changing.

The BBC in Britain and their counterpart the ABC in Australia have pretty good journalistic standards overall but, for reasons that perhaps only a psychologist can explain, their reporting on Trump for the last four years has been absolutely abysmal as they threw all pretence of journalistic professionalism out the window. For this week’s exercise, check out this article in the BBC which also reports on developments in the US presidential election. It contains all of the techniques we have analysed so far in this series: guilt by association, the passive voice and amorphous plural nouns. There is also one blatant bit of editorialising. See if you can find it. (Tip: it’s in the section attributed to Will Grant).

Postscript

This series of posts will be much more fun if readers can contribute. Feel free to post any juicy examples of editorialising you find in the media.

All posts in this series:

Propaganda School Part 2: The Passive Voice

Part of my interest in the increase in propaganda that has happened in the last decades is because I am just old enough to remember what the media was like before the internet came along and almost destroyed its business model. When I was university, I toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist and did a couple of years of student journalism at the university radio station. Even though it was a student organisation, the work was taken very seriously because most of the students knew that they were creating a portfolio that would be crucial in securing them a job as a journalist later on. They were right. Several of the people I worked with at the station are now professional journalists in the Australian media.

One of the things we learned as student journalists was that good journalism is all about stories and stories rely on sources. The journalist’s job is to find the story and let the people involved tell it. Climbing through the hierarchy of journalism is in large part about getting access to better sources and better stories. As student journalists, we tried and failed to get interviews with certain members of Parliament or other high profile people but I did once get an interview with the well-known Greens politician, Bob Brown. His party, of course, relied on the student vote and so he was willing to talk to us. That’s how it goes. You start off at the bottom on a student radio station and, if you climb the ladder high enough, one day you might be interviewing the Prime Minister and dealing with stories of national importance.

Good journalists will always quote their sources where they can or at least state that the source must be kept secret. Entire movies and television shows have been made about the dramatic cases where the source must be kept anonymous for their own protection and how the journalist is pressured to betray their ideals to reveal the source. That’s how important sources are in journalism. Good journalists should also provide both sides of the story (this is actually a legal requirement in Australia) and so articles should usually contain at least two opposing views. For example, if there is something controversial happening in industrial relations, you get a quote from a union official and from a government official. That’s known as balanced journalism.

Journalists are supposed to report just the facts and the facts needed to be verifiable. Much like with a scientific paper, if you make a statement in your journalism piece, there should be a reference for it. In the rare case that you make a statement without a reference, you should state that it is opinion e.g.  ‘the ABC believes that…’.  

The point is clear: sources are important and good journalism should always state its sources.

That is where the passive voice comes into the equation because it’s a syntactic structure in the English language that explicitly hides the subject. Therefore, it can be used to make statements without being clear about who is making the statement. Here are some examples of sentences where the active voice is transformed into the passive:

“He believed the politician was lying” –> “It was believed the politician was lying”

“They discussed the matter” –> “The matter was discussed”

“The government passed the law” –> “The law was passed”

Syntactically, the writer who want to use the passive voice can add the subject of the sentence back as follows:

“The law was passed by the government.”

As educated readers of news and propaganda, we should be very suspicious whenever we see passive voice in a media article. As we will see shortly, the passive voice can be used to make claims that have no source and therefore are either distorting or even fabricating the news. Whenever we see the passive voice, we should always ask the question “by who/whom?” and make sure the article answers our question.

Before we get to today’s examples, there’s one other linguistic usage which, although not technically the passive voice, functions in the same way: the use of plural nouns.

One of the things we see a lot of these days in the media are phrases like “observers noted…”, “scientists agree…”, “experts say….”. We should be very suspicious of such plural nouns which denote amorphous, indefinite groups. A journalist is supposed to get a statement from a real expert or scientist. It takes time to do that. Maybe the journalist will have to contact half a dozen scientists before they find one who is willing and able to be interviewed. But that is the job of a journalist. That is why they get paid. Simply stating “scientists say” is at best lazy journalism and at worst propaganda.

With all that in mind, let’s have a look at an article liberally peppered with both plural nouns and the passive voice. This one from the RT.

The headline reads:  

‘MaidenGate’: Twitter warriors allege US election fraud committed by hijacking of changed names…others label claim a ‘conspiracy’

We have two plural nouns in the headline alone. It’s a battle between twitter warriors and others. What exactly is a twitter warrior? And who on earth are others?

Things don’t get much more concrete in the first sentence of the article where we hear that ‘tens of thousands of people have reacted’ and ‘some believe’.

Later, there is a formal example of the passive voice in the phrase ‘the hashtag #MaidenGate was launched late on Monday’. Launched by who exactly?

Of course, this is just a very silly article that is nothing more than a report about what happened on twitter on a Monday evening. For many years, mainstream media avoided referencing twitter because they knew that twitter was a big threat to established media enabling, as it does, the instant dissemination of news around the world. The media had the problem of needing to verify the facts before publishing. Twitter users have no such compunction and therefore ‘news’ spreads faster on twitter. A large part of the decline in traditional media standards is driven by this need for professional media to keep pace with social media.

So, media avoided mentioning twitter for as long as it could but then realised twitter wasn’t going away. It is now very common to see media articles referencing tweets or, as in the case of this RT article, an entire report which might as well be a paid advertisement for twitter. If a piece of journalism can be judged based on the weight of its sources, using random twitter accounts as your source is surely one of the lowest form of journalism. You’d get more reliable information polling the patrons at the local pub ten minutes before closing time on a Friday night.

So, yes, this RT article is rubbish journalism. But the technical elements are there in the use of both plural nouns and the passive voice. By asking the question ‘who’, we see that this whole article is nothing more than a twitter storm-in-a-teacup and can be safely consigned to the garbage can where it belongs.

However, the passive voice can be a lot more consequential. Let’s now look at a more serious example of the use of those same techniques.

In Part 1 of this series, we saw this article in the DW which was trying to smear the Querdenker group by associating them with fringe political parties. That’s a serious allegation and, in order to make it, the DW used the passive voice to make assertions without any source at all.

“…many were shocked to see tens of thousands of people regularly gathering around the country as a movement known as “Querdenker” (“lateral thinkers”) built momentum.”

Who are many? Why were they shocked? The DW does not tell us.

“…the Querdenker movement (and associated demos by smaller groups) has been marked by an unlikely alliance of far-right and far-left fringes, as well as a handful of conspiracy theorists.”

Marked by who? The DW does not tell us.

“The movement’s commitment to Germany’s democratic order was also questioned in late August…”

Questioned by who? The DW does not tell us.

This is serious stuff. If you are a member of the Querdenker, you now have the state sponsored media in Germany giving its readers the impression you are a fringe political group. It does so quoting no sources whatsoever, not even anonymous twitter users. In a court, you have a right to know your accuser. But when a media outlet reports on you using the passive voice, your accuser is unknown.

So, we see that the passive voice is a potentially dangerous tool that can go beyond sloppy journalism and into outright defamation. As readers, we need to be very cognizant of its use. Whenever we see the passive voice or amorphous plural nouns we should always ask the question “by who?” and if the journalist does not tell us we should suspicious of either their competence or their motives.

Reader Exercise

Here is yet another twitter-driven storm-in-a-teacup non-story but I thought this might be fun, in particular for international readers. Check out this BBC article which relates to an occurrence in Australian politics that happened this week. The story refers to a ‘bonk ban’ which was implemented a couple of years ago by a political party in Australia. For those who don’t know, ‘bonk’ is Australian/British slang meaning have sex with. The Prime Minister of Australia interrupted a colleague to object to the use of the word ‘bonk’ by a journalist. His objection seems fair enough to me. They were, after all, at parliament house and ‘bonk’ is a mildly inappropriate word in a formal setting. But, of course, the story got twisted somehow into a gender relations controversy. Strange that the BBC would run it high on their front page. I would have thought they have more pressing problems over there right now.

In any case, there are a few examples of both the passive voice and plural nouns used in the article. So, for this week’s exercise, have a read of the piece and find where they are. Note, the headline is also in the passive voice but because of the use of syntactic elision this is not so obvious. Write out the headline as a full English sentence in order to see that it is in the passive voice. Whenever you see the passive voice, ask yourself the question ‘by who?’ and check that the article provides the answer for you.

Postscript

This series of posts will be more fun if readers can contribute their own examples. Feel free to comment with any juicy examples of the passive voice you find.

All posts in this series:

Propaganda School Part 1: Guilt by Association

One of the primary functions of propaganda is to create in-groups and out-groups. Almost by definition, propaganda is meant to be consumed by an in-group which is the ‘us’ while the content of the propaganda is about the out-group ‘them’. The in-group is not explicitly stated but rather implied by editorial position and the demographics of the viewership. This was once a lot of more obvious than it is these days. For example, it was once the case that there was a newspaper specifically target at different segments of society, often a particular class of people. The newspapers in Britain still have some of this old fashioned delineation to an extent and there are still a lot of different newspapers in circulation there. Thus, a reader of The Spectator is expected to share certain views as are readers of The Sun and of The Times and so on. In the same way, a viewer of Fox News in the US is expected to differ ideologically from a viewer of CNN.  

Given an implied in-group, propaganda then must define the out-group who are going to be portrayed in a less than flattering light. One of the primary ways to do this is to invoke the association fallacy and more specifically guilt by association. That is, the propagandist takes an individual or group that they want to define as the out-group and associates them with a label, stereotype or image that is negative. One of the more common ways this is done in modern propaganda is to call somebody ‘right wing’ to distinguish them from an implied in group that is ‘left wing’. If you want to make the portrayal even more negative, you call them ‘far right’ and if you want to go nuclear you call them ‘fascist’. The same dynamic exists for right-leaning in-groups where the nuclear option involves calling somebody from the out-group a ‘communist’.

Just flat out calling somebody a nasty word is, however, a little crude. That kind of thing might be acceptable on social media but not in the professional media where things must be done with more subtlety. Let’s have a look at that more subtle method now courtesy of a recent article in the Deutsche Welle (DW) English edition.

As an aside, the DW will probably provide a large amount of content for this series of posts containing, as it does, a large amount of juicy propaganda. Surprisingly, the DW is the government funded media outlet in Germany. It might as well be funded by Davos billionaires as its editorial position is that of the globalist elite. Therefore, one of the primary out-groups for DW is any kind of populist politics which threatens the prestige and power of the globalists. During the corona event in Germany a group that sort of fits that description appeared out of nowhere. They call themselves the Querdenker (‘lateral thinkers’) and have been organising protest rallies. Let’s have a look at an article about one such rally.

The article we’ll be looking at can be read here – https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-germany-braces-for-violent-anti-lockdown-protests/a-55513848

One of the counter intuitive things about the massive increase in propaganda in the last couple of decades is that it’s never been easier to verify facts for yourself. Naturally, the Querdenker have their own website. They look like an interesting group and claim their members include “artists, musicians, lawyers and doctors.” This seems to be true from their videos, which include a singer singing a song to the crowd at a protest. You can have a look at the website here. Even if you don’t speak German, you can get some kind of feel for the type of people who represent the Querdenker. They look pretty normal to me. Another German newspaper, the FAZ , reports on a university study that finds the Querdenker to be an “amorphous and complex” movement.

Sounds pretty cool to me. I’d love to see more mass demonstrations by lateral thinkers. I’d like to go to one myself but where I live we are not allowed to demonstrate at the moment. In Germany, the courts have ruled it unconstitutional for the government to extinguish the right to protest, something that should give all Australians pause for thought given that our government and our courts have ruled the other way.

In any case, it seems that the Querdenker are a diverse group of people who simply disagree with lockdowns and forced mask wearing. This shouldn’t be a great surprise as, at least in my experience, opposition to corona measures cuts across the usual political boundaries. Two examples from Australia stand out in my memory. One was a folk singer from Byron Bay and another was the wife of a famous football player. Hardly the usual suspects when it comes to dissenting political viewpoints. However, both were duly mobbed on social media for expressing their opinion.

Given this background, how does the DW portray the Querdenker to their readers? They do it using guilt by association and there are three primary groups that DW wants to associate with the Querdenker as we can see in the following quote:

“On the streets, the Querdenker movement (and associated demos by smaller groups) has been marked by an unlikely alliance of far-right and far-left fringes, as well as a handful of conspiracy theorists.”

Note the phrase marked by. This is an example of the passive voice. Another prime technique of propaganda that we’ll look at in a future post.

Out of a crowd of tens of thousands, the DW has somehow picked out just these three groups which, in their own words, represent a ‘handful’ of those present. Just a coincidence? Not a chance. This is a prime example of guilt by association. The DW wants their readers to associate the Querdenkers with fringe political groups. It reinforces this in its choice of photographs to represent the protestors. The main photo at the top of the article features a protestor holding a sign mentioning “forced vaccination, 5G and “Connection of Humans – AI” (presumably signifying the ‘conspiracy theorist’ demographic) while further down the page there is a video of a man holding a nationalist flag who no doubt represents the ‘far right fringe’. The DW could have chosen photos of the speakers who actually represent the Querdenker. They could have chosen a video of the folk singer singing to the crowd about freedom. But they chose those photos.

That is how guilt by association works. The Querdenker look to be a fairly representative sample of the German population in general but the DW wants its readers to believe they are made up a fringe political groups and conspiracy theorists. It does that using text and photo. The right-wing association fallacy is very common in Germany due to the obvious historical connotation it has there. And, of course, conspiracy theorist is fast becoming the most overused phrase in English and pretty much denotes anybody who questions the government narrative. Ironic that it should get applied in a derogatory fashion to a group called the lateral thinkers who self identify as people who will question the dominant narrative.

Reader Exercise

Guilt by association works by either associating an individual with an undesirable group (eg. ‘he has been supported by far right groups’) or by using an undesirable individual to represent a group. The DW used the latter tactic by having the individual carrying a nationalist flag represent the Querdenker.

Photographs are one of the easiest and commonest ways to establish guilt by association. Have a look at this report from the Australian national broadcaster (ABC) about the US election and notice the photographs chosen to portray Biden and Trump supporters respectively. What associations is the ABC trying to create for Biden and Trump supporters? What does this say about the ABC’s editorial position on the two presidential candidates and their supporters?

Postscript

This series of posts will be a lot more fun if readers can contribute. Feel free to post in the comments with any juicy examples of guilt by association you find in the media.

All posts in this series:

Propaganda School: Introduction

Over on one of my favourite blogs, John Michael’s Greer ecosophia, the topic of propaganda came up this week. I had been taught about propaganda in high school English class and, having taken a natural liking to the subject, it’s been a hobby of mine ever since to pick apart the techniques of propaganda that are used in the media and by politicians. From a couple of remarks I’ve seen, it seems that high schools in the USA also used to teach their students how to recognise propaganda but this doesn’t seem to be taught anymore. That’s a real shame because in the last couple of decades our exposure to propaganda has escalated massively with the information technology revolution. Everybody now carries a (potential) tool of propaganda in their pocket with them at all times. We are more connected than ever and therefore more exposed to propaganda than ever. Therefore, now more than ever, we need to know how to spot propaganda so as to defend ourselves from it. Given that this is a subject in which I have a strong interest, I thought some posts which describe the tools of propaganda may be a valuable exercise and will certainly be fun to write. In this series, I’ll write a short description of a propaganda technique in each post with examples from current media/political discourse. And I’ll include an exercise for the reader to complete each time. It’ll be just like being in school. Propaganda School.

But before we get to the specific techniques, we need to define the meaning of propaganda that I will be using.

Propaganda is a dirty word these days. But it was not always so. The etymology of the word relates to propagate and its history begins with the Catholic Church where it was used to denote efforts to spread the message of the Christian faith. The negative connotation entered the culture after the world wars. Governments had engaged in substantial propaganda operations during the wars as a way to win public support for the war effort. This included notoriously manipulative pictures, videos and articles aimed at demonising the enemy. The general horror of the wars and in particular the notion among some soldiers and members of the public that governments had deceived them washed off on the word propaganda and sticks to it right up to this day. Propaganda now means to be misled and misinformed by authorities. It is mostly reserved for particularly egregious examples of misinformation used to justify drastic action while the more mild, everyday types of propaganda have come to be called fake news. Prior to that there was the concept of ‘spin’ which was popularised in the Blair-Clinton eras.

The modern meaning of propaganda thus has distinctly political overtones. Being misinformed by another person would be simply called deception. But propaganda implies an agency or institution in a position of power. Again, this was not always so. George Orwell, using the old meaning of propaganda, once argued that all art was propaganda, not because the artist was in a position of power, but simply because the artist was conveying a message. Just like with the original Church meaning, it was not required that the message be deceptive, only that there was a message. For Orwell, the conscious intentions of the propagandist were not strictly relevant but they are in the modern meaning. For us, propaganda is a message given with, at best, intent to shape a worldview and, at worst, intent to deceive and mislead. If you write a novel which portrays a used car salesman in a flattering light, you aren’t engaged in propaganda. But if you’d been paid by the Australian Used Car Salesman Association to write the book, then you are. Thus, a key meaning of modern propaganda is the intent with which it is delivered.  

Orwell’s invocation of art as propaganda is interesting in another way because, for us, propaganda does not belong in the refined air of high literature but in the grubby appeal to the baser elements of human nature. Propaganda should play on the emotions and in particular the negative emotions of fear, anxiety and hatred. A well-reasoned, logical, scientific paper appeals to the rational faculties while a movie reel showing the enemy in an unflattering light appeals to the emotional faculties. You can deceive with the scientific paper (although it would be harder to do so). But it’s the mass media that constitutes the primary medium through which modern propaganda is channeled.

Finally, there is the issue of who is responsible for propaganda: the propagandist or the audience? Implied in the modern usage of the word is the notion of a kind of all-powerful manipulator who makes the public dance like puppets on a string. The reality is that the audience tells the propagandist what they want to hear to a large extent. The propagandist has some wiggle room to shape the audience’s views but is constrained to a large extent by what they will accept. This was always true, but the advent of social media has shown beyond doubt that the public are very willing participants in the game of propaganda. In fact, much of social media discourse consists of the most base forms of propaganda imaginable and is for that reason quite a distasteful sight to see. In theory, the peer-to-peer communication afforded by the internet could have led to an explosion of new ideas and worldviews. In practice, it hasn’t. Arguably the public discourse has become even more polarised and one dimensional in the age of the internet. What we have seen is that the audience itself will regulate the discourse. The propagandist may provide the initial seed but it is the audience that will tend the plant and defend it from attack.

Taking all these things into consideration, the definition of propaganda I will use is: a message spread from an institution or representatives of an institution to the wider public with the intent of shaping their worldview.

This definition is broad and covers both the more extreme and more subtle forms of propaganda. However, in this series of posts, I will be concentrating on the more subtle forms. The reason is because I believe these have not received the attention they deserve. Much has already been written about the more obvious forms of propaganda such as governments misleading the public in order to go to war or the manipulation of the subconscious which forms the backbone of modern advertising. What I haven’t seen is a focus on what you might call the everyday tactics of propaganda used mostly in the media and by politicians. These techniques are so common that most people wouldn’t even notice they are there. That’s what makes them effective. This series of posts will be about those subtle methods. Because they are so subtle, learning how to spot them can also be quite a lot of fun. At least, it is for me. I’m quite aware that a lot of people take the news very seriously these days. I do not and it’s probably worth briefly explaining my position so that the tone of the subsequent posts is clear.

My first assumption is that what is in the media simply isn’t that important. Do you remember the media predicting the GFC before it happened? What about the rise of Trump or Brexit? What about corona? Me neither. Most of the important things that are really going to change your life don’t appear in the media until they have already happened. The media does not predict events, it exists to provide post hoc rationalisations for those events. In doing so, it appeals to human vanity and makes us think we know much more than what we really do.

Secondly, I don’t take the media that seriously because I don’t take my own opinions seriously either. The reason for that is because, for most of my opinions, I have never made any real effort to verify that they are true. Opinions are mostly just things we’ve picked up along the way, often based on information provided by the media, which we otherwise wouldn’t have thought twice about.

“Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them.” – Descartes, Meditations of First Philosophy.

What was true for Descartes back then is just as true for all of us now. We have all kinds of opinions, most of them fed to us through propaganda, that we simply have never even tried to verify. For that reason, we should view even our own opinions with a deep scepticism let alone the opinions of organisations who have a vested interest in promoting certain ideas. There are a few things in life that I know well enough to know for sure whether something that was written about it in the media is accurate. But most of the time I don’t know enough to be able to judge. In that case, my preference is take everything with a grain of salt. To be highly sceptical rather than highly trusting.

The final reason to take a light-hearted attitude to the media is because most of what is in the media is simply not important. The media feeds primarily on people’s fear of missing out. People like to be informed so they can seem smart. The media also helps to smooth over everyday interactions with others by providing shared topics for conversations. These might be useful functions in the social sphere but, as items of knowledge to be used to as the basis for action, they are of dubious value. The truth is, we don’t really need to know most of that stuff. Take two weeks to completely remove yourself from all news and see if it makes any difference to your life. My guess is that it won’t. Most of us these days consume far too much news and other propaganda. It is bad for our mental health in exactly the same way that consuming too many french fries is bad for physical health. The best way to address that is to cut down on your consumption. The second best way is to turn propaganda consumption into fun. Having a basic understanding of how the media is trying to manipulate you allows you to filter out the stuff you don’t need and just get down to the basic facts. Once you learn the tricks and can spot them, you can triangulate between different sources of propaganda and start to see who is pushing what agenda. That will give you a better understanding of what is really going on because propaganda is really a battle for control of the public opinion. Think of it like sports or music: if you understand the rules, you’ll enjoy it more.  

That’s what this series of posts is about. The idea is to make you, the reader, more attentive to the tricks of propaganda. This can not only be a bit of fun but also has the practical advantage of making you more immune to those tricks and better able to form an independent view of the world.

All posts in this series: