Propaganda and Persuasion

Chapter 1 What Is Propaganda, and How Does It Differ From Persuasion? 9

Environmental groups protested the legislation on the grounds that it was unhealthy to cut down healthy trees and harm wildlife. Michael Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, revealed that the U.S. Forest Service will make about $312,000 by cutting 4.5 million board feet of timber in southern Montana's Gallatin National Forest alone ("Gallatin National Forest Thinning Plan Moves Ahead," 2005). What is "healthy" depends on our associations. An Associated Press article titled Doublespeak: Lingo in Nation's Capital As Important as Issues offered several examples of language that evades "responsibility and accountability"—a government report on hunger in America referred to "food insecurity" rather than hunger; descriptions of suicide by war captives labeled them as "self-injurious behavior incidents," and interrogations as "debriefings" (Bozeman Daily Chronicle, 2006, p. Al). When the sky became dark and dirty with smog during the first few days of the Beijing Olympics in August 2008, in a Los Angeles Times article it was officially called "haze" (Plaschke, 2008, p. S4). "Operation Desert Shield" was changed to "Operation Desert Storm" when U.S. forces invaded Iraq in January 1991. Changing Shield to Storm enabled people to alter their perception of the U.S. military operation from "protective" armies to "raging" forces. The second invasion of Iraq in March 2003 failed to achieve a successful slogan. "Shock and Awe" was tried, but it only lasted for 1 week. Frank Rich, editorialist for The New York Times, said that the television images from the Arab network Al Jazeera that depicted American soldiers who had been killed or taken pris oner by Iraqi forces contradicted the slogan. "For the first time we could smell blood, American blood, and while that was shocking, it was far from awesome" (F. Rich, 2003). President George W. Bush began to use the phrase "the war on terror" shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and continuing through his reelection campaign in 2004. Gilles Kepel, in The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (2004), said, "The phrase was engineered to heighten fear while simultaneously tapping the righteous indignation of citizens in 'civilized nations' against barbaric murderers who would perpetrate despicable atrocities on innocent victims" (p. 112). President Bush, however, made a serious gaffe when, in impromptu remarks, he described America's goal to annihilate Al Qaeda's Taliban hosts in Afghanistan as a "crusade." In the Muslim world, "crusade" represented medieval European Christianity's Crusades against Islam. There was an uproar over the religious connotations of the word, which suggested that Bush wanted to conquer Islam. Bush retracted the term immediately and promptly visited a mosque in Washington, D.C., in an attempt to nullify the