Propaganda and Persuasion

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Propaganda and Persuasion

Figure 1.2 In this "black" parody, c. 1944, the Germans used the image of the Russian leader Stalin in place of the traditional image of Queen Elizabeth. Other political symbols visible on this stamp include the Star of David and the Hammer and Sickle. The function of such parody stamps was more to create a symbolic awareness of the political association between the USSR and Britain than to undermine the economy of the postal system.

Parry-Giles (1996), by reviewing internal documents of the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies, revealed how the U.S. government used the domes tic news media to propagandize the American public during the Cold War by giving journalists the texts to be published in the newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s. By controlling the content and favoring journalists who cooperated, the government covertly disseminated propaganda to a domestic audience. This example of gray propaganda expands the definition to include, according to Parry-Giles, the attribution of the source to a nonhostile source (p. 53). An example of gray propaganda coming from a nonhostile source is as follows: Letters describing the successes of rebuilding Iraq, presumably written by American soldiers in Iraq in 2003, appeared in newspapers across the United States. A Gannett News Service (GNS) search found identical letters in 11 newspapers, and thus they appeared to be form letters. Six soldiers, whose names appeared on the letters, were questioned by GNS, and they denied having written them. A seventh soldier did not know about the