Propaganda and Persuasion

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

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Square in Beijing in 1989, the government blacked out news reports of the protest to smaller cities and the countryside. Chinese citizens in these areas never knew about the Beijing unrest and the demands for reforms. The world saw the demonstrations because the media were in Beijing to cover Mikhail Gorbachev's visit there. When the government brutally massacred student protestors fleeing from tanks and grenades, it distorted the truth by claiming that thugs and counterrevolutionaries had murdered soldiers of the People's Republic of China, who fired back in self-defense. Here, the Chinese government successfully controlled information flow to its own people, but other people of the world knew about it. Expansion of access to information around the world through new mass communication technologies has made control of information flow difficult. CNN and the BBC World Service bring television news to almost everyone except where they have been banned in North Korea and China (Bogart, 1995, p. xxxiii). Htun Aung Gyaw, who was sentenced to death in absentia in Burma for leading the student resistance to the Burmese military regime and who escaped to the United States, runs the Civil Society for Burma over the Internet from Ithaca, New York (http://www .csburma.net). He gets information to supporters in Burma, who then smuggle it to the resistance workers. He also sends faxes to foreign com panies that do business in Burma to detail the atrocities of the military regime (Ryan, 1998, p. 12). Censorship is stringent in North Korea where cell phones are illegal; newspapers, radio, and television are tightly con trolled by the government, and ordinary citizens cannot access the Internet. Enforcement is carried out by security troops who enter and check homes. Yet, human rights activists have recruited North Koreans who are permitted to travel, arming them with cell phones, then posting their phoned and texted reports on websites seen in South Korea and America. The North Korean government, however, monitors cell phone calls, and police drive around the countryside with tracking devices. If caught, the callers are publically executed (Sang-Hun, 2010). The Management of Public Opinion Propaganda is most often associated with the management of public opinion. Public opinion has been defined by Land and Sears (1964) as "an implicit verbal response or 'answer' that an individual gives in response to a particular stimulus situation in which some general 'question' is raised" (quoted in Mitchell, 1970, p. 62). Walter Lippmann (1922/1960) regarded public opinion as that which emanated from persons interested in public