Propaganda and Persuasion

Chapter 1 What Is Propaganda, and How Does It Differ From Persuasion?

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Propaganda is an art requiring special talent. It is not mechanical, scien tific work. Influencing attitudes requires experience, area knowledge, and instinctive "judgment of what is the best argument for the audience." No manual can guide the propagandist. He must have "a good mind, genius, sensitivity, and knowledge of how that audience thinks and reacts." (pp. 195-196) (This quotation is from the original six-volume classified study of the USIA done in 1954 that Bogart's work condenses. The study was released in abridged form in 1976, and the introduction to it was revised in 1995.) Scholars have studied propaganda in specific institutions. Alex Carey (1997) regarded propaganda in the corporate world as "communications where the form and content is selected with the single-minded purpose of bringing some target audience to adopt attitudes and beliefs chosen in advance by the sponsors of the communications" (p. 2-1). Noam Chomsky, in his introduction to Carey's collection of essays, said that Carey believed that "the twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy" (p. ix). Carey said that "commercial advertising and public relations are the forms of propaganda activity com mon to a democracy. . . . It is arguable that the success of business propa ganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century" (pp. 1-4, 2-1). Shawn J. Parry-Giles (2002), who studied the propaganda production of the Truman and Eisenhower Cold War operations, defined propaganda as "conceived of as strategically devised messages that are disseminated to masses of people by an institution for the purpose of generating action benefiting its source" (p. xxvi). She indicated that Truman and Eisenhower were the first two presidents to introduce and mobilize propaganda as an official peacetime institution. In a 'war of words,' propaganda acted as an integral component of the government's foreign policy operation. To understand propaganda's influence is to grasp the means by which America's Cold War messages were produced and the overall impact that such strategizing had on the ideological constructions of the Cold War. (p. xvii)

Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton (2000) see propaganda as part of a historical tradition of pleading and convincing and therefore