Page 203 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

PROPAGANDA

out of hand or to seek to ‘ban’ or control it, or to purge it from the
media, would be to miss the point. For all communication has some
sort of spin, especially communication addressed to a large,
anonymous public from across demographic boundaries. The wise
reader might prefer to see propaganda as a genre rather than as an
infestation; it is better to knowit than to knock it. The generic
characteristics of propaganda (compared to realism in both fact and
fiction) include the following.
. News and fiction draw attention into the text, seeking to resolve
conflicts diegetically, within the story. Propaganda directs attention
beyond the text, seeking to provoke conflict in the reader.
. News and fiction are images of the past, in which the action is
completed. Propaganda aligns the reader with the future, towards
actions yet to occur. News and fiction continue existing meanings.
Propaganda seeks to change the future.
. News and fiction position the reader as uncommitted, even passive
recipients or consumers. Propaganda calls the reader towards
participation.
. News and realist fiction seek to convey the impression that they are
true, unauthored, real. Propaganda seeks to produce faithfulness in
a relationship between addresser and addressee.
. News and fiction employ transparency and verisimilitude to
produce the effect that techniques used in the communication are
‘not there’. Propaganda can experiment with a much broader
palette of rhetorical and visual techniques, and drawattention to its
own communicative status.
. News is diegetic. Propaganda is dialogic.

Propaganda can still be politically controversial, especially in its
clandestine form. After the events of September 11, 2001, the US
Defense Department set up an ‘office of strategic influence’, which
planned to feed information, some of it false, to foreign news agencies,
in an attempt to influence public opinion across the world (especially
the Islamic world) in favour of the US-led ‘war on terrorism’. The
plan caused outrage within and beyond the US when it was revealed in
February 2002, and the ‘office of strategic influence’ was ‘restruc-
tured’.

Further reading: Hartley (1992a: 51–55)

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