Journalism: “How to Infuse Subliminal Bias into Your Education Reporting, a Primer”
Executive director of Choice Media explains how to bias news stories in favor of traditional, unionized public educational programs.
Business: Everything about a restaurant menu is designed to trick you into spending more money.
Lengthy descriptions, flowery wording, made up names of farms of origin, the type font used, the order that items appear, the weight of the menu paper, the binding, the colors, the photographs – every aspect of a restaurant menu is working to manipulate your decision.
Communications: A propagandist is manipulative when they attempt to persuade you of something they know is a lie
When someone tries to persuade you of something that is not actually true, and the persuader knows it is not true, then the persuader is engaged in manipulation – versus argument or discussion.
Social media propaganda: This poster is essentially correct
Rare do we see a propaganda poster that is, essentially accurate 🙂
Propaganda method: Recycle old stories that are years out of date-“The American Dream Is Killing Us”
Recycling an old opinion column by an author who focuses on persuading you that life is miserable, not fair and getting worse – is an interesting twist on propaganda. The date – its old -is not presented until a footnote at the very end of the very long column; the column was written during the recovery from The Great Recession, immediately after significant economic turmoil. This is the media’s usual focus on negativity by an author who makes his living on negativity.
Propaganda methods: Framing the story
We all have “frames” of reference that describe various life scenarios. When we walk into a restaurant we have a “frame” that pretty much explains how we expect the restaurant experience to go. We each carry around a lot of subconscious “frames” about how we think the world works. Effective propaganda messaging links to the frames we expect the target to already have. This is not all that surprising but what is old is now new again 🙂
Zohnerism: use of a true fact to lead an ignorant public to a false conclusion
Zohnerism is the “the use of a true fact to lead a scientifically and mathematically ignorant public to a false conclusion”.
This is a good example of why we must practice “factfulness” and verify what we are told daily by media and activist propaganda urging us to adopt someone else’s agenda.
Climate Communications: Climate media coverage lacks facts, say researchers
Two professors took a look at how the media has reported on the topic of climate and found that almost all news reports leave out critical and basic facts about climate. A corollary is that instead of reporting facts and the use of logic that supports anthropogenic climate change, most turn to propaganda methods such as appeal to authority, fear, name calling (“deniers”), get-on-the-bandwagon and so on. Incredibly, as I was writing this post The Nature Conservancy sent an email fundraising solicitation which illustrates the point: the first sentence of the email makes 4 demonstrably false claims to create fear about changes in climate. “Factfulness” teaches us how to detect when we are being misled – this turned out to be classic example of a charitable organization making exaggerated claims not supported by reputable science organizations (IPCC, NOAA, The Royal Society).
This post may be the first of several on how climate communications has been badly bungled by reliance on propaganda methods, rather than sticking with facts and logic.
Cambridge Analytica used the Phillipines as a test bed for propaganda algorithms
Cambridge Analytica tested their propaganda algorithms in smaller social media market countries before unleashing their propaganda campaigns in target countries such as the United States. This enabled CA to optimize their propaganda messaging and targeting to obtain the greatest effectiveness.
Oxfam’s annual report on income inequality is nonsense designed for propaganda messaging
Oxfam issues its annual report on global wealth inequality, but this time, many notice that its methodology is garbage, designed to produce a specific outcome for citation in propaganda campaigns. Specifically, many U.S. university graduates with good paying jobs, nice apartments, cars, smart phones, cable TV and Internet access are identified as among the poorest people on earth. Really?