What is Propaganda?

1. What is Propaganda? Politics and Aesthetics Week 6 Lecture 1

2. Understand the classic and evolving definitions of propaganda • Decipher fallacies in arguments, looking at how some questions can bear very confusing and irrelevant answers • Understand techniques of political communication in national and international politics

3. To Propagate • To make many plants from one original plant, the gardener snips off a plants shoots and puts them in the ground nearby. They grow into new plants. This is propagation. • Hence, to propagate ideas, we use propaganda. • Propaganda is often used as a pejorative term: at is simplest level, though, it means to spread ideas.

4. How Do We Define Propaganda? Part I • Wait, isn’t rhetoric about propagating ideas? • Isn’t everything potentially about propagating ideas? (And thus, all media?) • How do we define propaganda as different? • A partial rhetoric (Bryant, 1953) • An unethical rhetoric. • Rhetoric is about reason and argument – hence all the rhetorical fallacies we noted in the last lecture fall outside rhetoric. • Propaganda is something more than just persuasion, but something less than coercion or force.

5. Bryant’s “Spectrum of Influence”

6. Adapted from Bennett and O’Rourke, a “Prolegomenon to the Future study of Rhetoric and Propaganda” in Jowett and O’Donnel, Eds, “Readings in Propaganda and Persuasion.” Sage, London. 2006.

7. Definitions of Propaganda – Jacques Ellul • “The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas but to provoke action. It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action…it is no longer to transform an opinion, but to arouse an active and mythical belief.” (Jacques Ellul)

8. Jacques Ellul • “The propagandist does not normally address the individual’s intelligence, for the process of intellectual persuasion is long and uncertain…” (16) • Rather, the propagandist appeals to…emotion.

9. Jacques Ellul • Ellul distinguishes between political propaganda and sociological propaganda. • Political Propaganda is what we will talk about today: much of it is quite obvious. Campaign ads. War propaganda, etc. But in coming weeks, and a little bit today, we will talk about • Sociological Propaganda:“the means by which any society seeks to integrate…individuals and unify its members.” eg: religion, advertising itself, some would include ‘news’, public service announcements..

10. Is this propaganda? • Social Propaganda? Educational film from 1958 in the United States about Popularity from Coronet Films, would be shown in school: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eqpe7Y_6rmQ

11. Propaganda in Politics - Methods

12. White Propaganda: From a known source. The audience is aware of the political “angle” of the media. • Black Propaganda: From an unidentified or mis-identified source. Could be one side posing as another. The audience is deliberately confused as to the political “angle”.

13. Examples of Propaganda in International Politics • Black Propaganda (source is meant to be unclear): • Soviet government paid an academic to write a paper suggesting HIV/AIDS had been developed in a secret plot by the American government. • Grey Propaganda: (agenda is somewhat transparent) • A news service that appears independent but is government run and partially political in content. • White propaganda: (source is clear as is message) hosting the Olympics • [Opening Ceremony Beijing 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUy9OgRRXnw] Transparent, people know where its coming from.

14. Techniques • Focusing on some things and not others. • Ex. During first war in Iraq, the US wanted Iraqis to believe that they would invade through Kuwait. • “Public affairs officers carefully drew the media’s attention to Marine exercises in the area.” • Forces actually came in from the West across the desert as had been planned. • Pentagon official: “We told no lies…The reporters wanted to believe what they saw and simply did not ask the right questions. More fool them.” Macdonald, 11.

15. Staging a photograph or a film. • Civil War photographs • 1898 – Battle of Manila Bay shown in movie theater news reels  filmed in a bathtub. • Pancho Villa, Mexican revolutionary, “sold film rights to his battles…scheduled executions for the camera…restaged battles after the fighting had ended…”

16. Staging a Film or Photograph • 1944 – “The Fuehrer Gives the Jews a City” created for neutral states to show that relocated Jews were living happily (which was obviously not the case). • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sD90XrGe6E&feature=related

17. Source: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/in-an-iranian-image-a-missile-too-many/ • Altering a photograph or film. • Iranian Missiles (2008)

18. Altering a photograph or film: • 2004, Bush Campaign Ad http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/photo_database/chronological/P90/

19. Altering a photograph or film: • Gorbacev’s birthmark On the left, the leader’s natural birthmark. Didn’t always appear on his official portraits, right.

20. Photomontage John Kerry, alone at a podium John Kerry supposedly next to anti-War activist Jane Fonda at a rally.

21. Photomontage • University alters photo to make it more “diverse”

22.  This photograph was published in the LA Times. The photographer was ultimately fired. • Photomontage – journalist alters photo for a better shot • -jour

23. Propaganda in War • In a war incited in the media, should people fight back with the media? • Case Study: Rwanda in 1994 • Rwandan genocide incited over the radio. • Extremist seized an FM radio station, the RTLM (Free Radio-Television of the Thousand Hills) • Incited violence against Tutsis, and also urged Hutus to flee their homes. • This meant thousands of people panicked, living in refugee camps.

24. Radio was key in spreading the word – why didn’t anyone “counterattack” with radio? • UNAMIR’s head in the region, Canadian Major General R.A. Dallaire, wrote: • “These broadcasts were …responsible for spreading panic…and should have been jammed. The United Nations should have aired counter broadcasts to give the population a clear account of what was actually happening…yet…no country came forward to offer jamming or broadcasting assets. • It later turned out the broadcasts were coming from one Radio transmitter in the back of someone’s Toyota – it could’ve easily been destroyed, but wasn’t.

25. Propaganda and Aesthetics

26. How Do We Define Propaganda, Part II • How do we account for propaganda that is also art? • Sharon Tuttle Ross’ “Epistemic Merit Model” • She defines propaganda as • “an epistemically defective message used with the intention to persuade a socially significant group of people on behalf of a political institution, organization, or cause” (Tuttle 2003, 10)

27. Adapted from Sharon Tuttle Ross.

28. Tuttle: “Messages presented through works of art…are not in the form of an argument but rather made through the use of icons, symbols, and metaphors.” (Tuttle 12) • It’s critical to realize that art can be a source of knowledge and a source of misinformation at the same time.

29. Art and Propaganda Have a Long History Together

30. The Line Between Propaganda and Art?A US Newsreel, some Soviet Caroons, and The Triumph of the Will

31. US Propaganda Newsreels • Political Propaganda US Propaganda Newsreel (1962) The Berlin Wall http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9mWgqYBZos

32. Soviet Propaganda Cartoons • Black and White (1934) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7qiVMgom8g&p=37B751CC04FB3666 • Ave Maria (1960s) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lMhOtp62xc&p=37B751CC04FB3666 • Mister Twister (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4gUI9VUi4k ) • Which is your favorite and why?

33. Triumph of the Will • Film by Leni Riefenstahl • Chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg • Released in 1935 • Film won many awards at the time.

34. Director Riefenstahl later said in an interview: • “My first reaction was to say that I did not know anything about the way such a thing worked or the organization of the Party, so that I would obviously photograph all the wrong things and please nobody - even supposing that I could make a documentary, which I had never yet done. Hitler said that this was exactly why he wanted me to do it: because anyone who knew all about the relative importance of the various people and groups and so on might make a film that would be pedantically accurate, but this was not what he wanted. He wanted a film showing the Congress through a non-expert eye, selecting just what was most artistically satisfying - in terms of spectacle, I suppose you might say. He wanted a film which would move, appeal to, impress an audience which was not necessarily interested in politics.”

35. Film focuses on Hitler as leader. • People of Germany are an “undifferentiated mass enthusiastically supporting the state.” • Through various symbols in the film Hitler becomes Germany. • Uniting the people. • Film never addresses Hitler’s attitude toward Jews nor the lebensraum push for territory in the East.

36. Opening sequence (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcFuHGHfYwE )to around minute 10. • Shots of the city: what do you notice about it? • What kind of people are shown • 14:30- Morning in Tent City (about 5 Minutes) • 65:00 Tribute to War Dead • 1:30:01 – END Final Squence

37. Do You Believe Ms. Reifenstahl? • "If you see this film again today you ascertain that it doesn't contain a single reconstructed scene. Everything in it is true. And it contains no tendentious commentary at all. It is history. A pure historical film... it is film-vérité. It reflects the truth that was then in 1934, history. It is therefore a documentary. Not a propaganda film. Oh! I know very well what propaganda is. That consists of recreating events in order to illustrate a thesis, or, in the face of certain events, to let one thing go in order to accentuate another. I found myself, me, at the heart of an event which was the reality of a certain time and a certain place. My film is composed of what stemmed from that.”