Blog #6

 PROPAGANDA

    Propaganda and advertising may seem very similar. Advertising is something we encounter every day: Think about all the commercials we see on television, the ads we scroll through on social media, or the pop-ups on websites we visit. While some ads may exaggerate the benefits of, or fail to disclose the negative traits of the products they promote, the Federal Trade Commission is the government agency responsible for making sure that the message delivered by advertisers is generally true. Propaganda, on the other hand, is information that is deliberately biased and is used to try to influence the way people view an idea or a belief. Britannica defines propaganda as “dissemination of information – facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies – to influence public opinion.” (Britannica, 2019)

    It only makes sense then that war seems to cause a lot of propaganda. In Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler created the Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda in 1933. This organization was led by Joseph Goebbels and controlled most aspects of German culture at the time, including “films, theater, music, the press and radio broadcasts.” (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) 

         

    These pictures are from the website of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and are just two examples of how the Nazis used propaganda to convince the German people that Jewish people were evil, that they were responsible for the problems facing many Germans and for trying to provoke war. Consider this:

The Nazi regime used propaganda effectively to mobilize the German population to support its wars of conquest until the very end of the regime. Nazi propaganda was likewise essential to motivating those who implemented the mass murder of the European Jews and of other victims of the Nazi regime. It also served to secure the acquiescence of millions of others – as bystanders – to racially targeted persecution and mass murder.  (US Holocaust Memorial Museum website)

    I don’t know that I can think of any worse implications of propaganda than mass murder and persecution that led to a World War. Not all propaganda has such dire consequences, but just last year we saw propaganda used to influence the 2020 election. But was it really propaganda?

    When the Covid-19 Pandemic began in 2020, President Trump was criticized and even ridiculed for implying that the virus could have started in a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The mainstream media outlets from CNN to CBS, from the New York Times to the Washington Post all called the idea ridiculous and false. On May 5, 2020, Chris Cilizza of CNN wrote: “Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and perhaps the single most prominent doctor in the world at the moment….was definitive about the origins of the virus.”

"If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated ... Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species."

    “Now, before we play the game of "he said, he said" remember this: Only one of these two people is a world-renowned infectious disease expert. And it's not Donald Trump.” (Cilliza, 2020) CNN did everything they could do to make President Trump look stupid hoping that they could convince people not to vote for him. When President Trump referred to Covid-19 as the “Wuhan Virus” or the “Kung Flu” he was called a racist.

    One year later, months after President Biden was inaugurated, reports began to come out that support the theory that the lab was the cause of the virus all along. Some of the very same media outlets that criticized President Trump now praised President Biden for demanding an investigation into The Wuhan Institute of Virology. In an article published on www.cnn.com on May 26, 2021, Zachary Wolf wrote “President Joe Biden said Wednesday he has directed the US intelligence community to redouble its efforts in investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and report back to him in 90 days.”  

    What changed in a year? Yes, we know a lot more about Covid-19 than we did in May of 2020, but the biggest change to me seems to be who is living in the White House. So for CNN, their “propaganda” worked, but maybe President Trump’s idea wasn’t so far from the truth after all?

Sources

The Federal Trade Commission Website  

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/truth-advertising

Britannica

https://www.britannica.com/topic/propaganda/additional-info#history

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Website

https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/nazi-propaganda-1

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-propaganda

The Point with Chris Cilliza, www.cnn.com

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/politics/fauci-trump-coronavirus-wuhan-lab/index.html