Page 202 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

PROPAGANDA

Murroni (1996) point out, are often intervening in operations and
management to a greater extent than governments have in the past.
Privatisation has been a driver of globalisation. This raises
concerns that we will experience a scenario whereby a handful of
privately owned global corporations with the capital to buy publicly
owned utilities will replace national publicly owned enterprises.
Government, in this scenario, would be forced to bargain increasingly
with private companies.

See also: Anti-globalisation, Deregulation, Globalisation

PROPAGANDA

‘Propagation’ – derived from the organisation set up by the Roman
Catholic Church in 1622 to propagate that faith in the aftermath of
the Reformation and the rise of Protestantism; propagation in
adversarial or competitive circumstances. This sense of propaganda
was later deployed by totalitarian regimes of both left and right –
communist and fascist – who took pains to make the ‘propagation’ of
state ideology a matter of policy, not chance. Where communist
governments had not been established, the task of ‘agit-prop’ –
‘agitation and propaganda’ – was assigned to trustworthy militants.
Small wonder that liberal democracies, especially those founded in
Protestant countries, regarded propaganda as a ‘term of reproach
applied to secret associations for the spread of opinions and principles
which are viewed by most governments with horror and aversion’
(OED).
But the governments protested too much. Soon everyone was at it.
Propaganda under the guise of ‘government information’ is a staple of
contemporary life, and its privatised form, PR and advertising, is a
mainstay of the contemporary economy.
Propaganda is still controversial because it suffuses the media of public
enlightenment, especially news. It may take the banal form of PR
handouts that get reproduced verbatim in the local give-away paper or it
may take a much more expensive and sophisticated form – political and
commercial campaigns, for instance. So much so that wise readers and
viewers regard everything they see and read as propaganda for
something, always in someone’s interest, whether in the factual or
fictional media. There is a continuing need to ask, ‘Who says?’
Scepticism about news and fictional realism is healthy, and requires
some work by the reader or viewer, but simply to dismiss propaganda

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