As we get closer to the 2014 General Election, we all need to be very careful of what "news" items we accept and pass on to our followers and friends. Popular news media often specialize in propaganda techniques to skew the message and influence their viewers. Here are 14 of the most popular:
1. Panic Mongering: "This goes one step beyond simple fear mongering. With panic mongering, there is never a break from the fear. The idea is to terrify and terrorize the audience during every waking moment."
2. Character assignation/ad hominem: Here the media "go after the person's credibility, motives, intelligence, character, or, if necessary, sanity. No category of character assassination is off the table and no offense is beneath them. "
3. Projection/Flipping: " involves taking whatever underhanded tactic you're using and then accusing your opponent of doing it to you first. "
4. Scapegoating/othering: "The simple idea is that if you can find a group to blame for social or economic problems, you can then go on to a) justify violence/dehumanization of them, and b) subvert responsibility for any harm that may befall them as a result."
5. Rewriting history: "This is another way of saying that propagandists make the facts fit their worldview."
6. Conflating violence with power and opposition to violence with weakness: "it has the potential to make people feel falsely emboldened by shows of force - it can turn wars into sporting events. "
7. Bullying: "Bullying and yelling works best on people who come to the conversation with a lack of confidence, either in themselves or their grasp of the subject being discussed. The bully exploits this lack of confidence by berating the guest into submission or compliance."
8. Confusion: "As with the preceding technique, this one works best on an audience that is less confident and self-possessed. The idea is to deliberately confuse the argument, but insist that the logic is airtight and imply that anyone who disagrees is either too dumb or too fanatical to follow along."
9. Populism: "This is especially popular in election years. The speakers identifies themselves as one of "the people" and the target of their ire as an enemy of the people. The opponent is always "elitist" or a "bureaucrat" or a "government insider" or some other category that is not the people."
10. Invoking the Christian God: " This is similar to othering and populism. With morality politics, the idea is to declare yourself and your allies as patriots, Christians and "real Americans" (those are inseparable categories in this line of thinking) and anyone who challenges them as not. "
11. Saturation: "There are three components to effective saturation: being repetitive, being ubiquitous and being consistent. The message must be repeated cover and over, it must be everywhere and it must be shared across commentators."
12. Disparaging Education: "There is an emerging and disturbing lack of reverence for education and intellectualism in many mainstream media discourses. "
13. Guilt by Association: "Here's how it works: if your cousin's college roommate's uncle's ex-wife attended a dinner party back in 1984 with Gorbachev's niece's ex-boyfriend's sister, then you, by extension are a communist set on destroying America. Period."
14. Diversion (also known as Wagging the Dog): "This is where, when on the ropes, the media commentator suddenly takes the debate in a weird but predictable direction to avoid accountability. Any attempt to bring the discussion back to the issue at hand will likely be called deflection, an ironic use of the technique of projection/flipping."
This information is shared from this article: http://truth-out.org/news/item/1964:fourteen-propaganda-techniques-fox-news-uses-to-brainwash-americans
As we enter the final months leading to probably the most important election in recent history, please watch out for anyone using the techniques and call out the ones who choose to use them.
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