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Fake News, Misinformation, & Propaganda: Propaganda

Defining and identifying fake news.

Propaganda

According to the Encyclopedia of Social Problems, propaganda can be defined as simply "persuasion in bad faith." According to the Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications, "The term “propaganda” has roots in the religious, intellectual, and political struggles of the Counter Reformation, when the Roman Catholic Church launched a counterattack against breakaway religions and secular explanations of natural phenomena." During times of war, propaganda has been used to boost morale or encourage civilian participation.  

Seen as a willful act, propaganda is not always deceptive.  In order to evaluate an item as propaganda, it is important to view the accuracy, method, intent, and scale (Marshall, 2008). 

This page covers resources on propaganda and includes links to numerous online collections. 

Internet Resources

50 powerful examples of visual propaganda and the meanings behind them

Explore this online collection of 50 examples of visual propaganda from Canva. 

Source: https://www.canva.com/learn/examples-of-propaganda/

Influence & Persuasion: Crash Course Media Literacy

We’ve mentioned already that there’s a lot of money in media and a huge chunk of that money is spent on trying to get you to do something – buy something, vote a certain way, change a behavior. How does advertising work? And what’s the difference between advertising, public relations, and propaganda? We’re going to talk about all that and more today.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXhLmkrN0-I

Lesson Plans

Art With A Message: Protest And Propaganda, Satire & Social Comment

This program investigates the ways various art forms are used to sway minds and to argue political causes. Examples include Napoleon and Hitler; artist such as Daumier, Hogath and Shann; writers Dickens, Swift and Orwell; and pop artists who mock popular ideals.

Source: Kanopy

Perspectives

How Propaganda Works

How propaganda undermines democracy and why we need to pay attention Our democracy today is fraught with political campaigns, lobbyists, liberal media, and Fox News commentators, all using language to influence the way we think and reason about public issues. Even so, many of us believe that propaganda and manipulation aren't problems for us--not in the way they were for the totalitarian societies of the mid-twentieth century. In How Propaganda Works, Jason Stanley demonstrates that more attention needs to be paid. He examines how propaganda operates subtly, how it undermines democracy--particularly the ideals of democratic deliberation and equality--and how it has damaged democracies of the past. Focusing on the shortcomings of liberal democratic states, Stanley provides a historically grounded introduction to democratic political theory as a window into the misuse of democratic vocabulary for propaganda's selfish purposes. He lays out historical examples, such as the restructuring of the US public school system at the turn of the twentieth century, to explore how the language of democracy is sometimes used to mask an undemocratic reality. Drawing from a range of sources, including feminist theory, critical race theory, epistemology, formal semantics, educational theory, and social and cognitive psychology, he explains how the manipulative and hypocritical declaration of flawed beliefs and ideologies arises from and perpetuates inequalities in society, such as the racial injustices that commonly occur in the United States. How Propaganda Works shows that an understanding of propaganda and its mechanisms is essential for the preservation and protection of liberal democracies everywhere.

Archives

Propaganda: The Art of Selling Lies

Demystifies the predominant methods of persuasion that have been employed by those seeking power, analyzing the present day and contextualizing it by looking back at periods when propaganda defined nations and kept populations in check.

Source: Kanopy