COWBOY'S CORNER

When you read this column, you know (more or less) what you're getting--my opinions, backed by at least some fact. Your daily newspaper, however, regularly presents opinion as fact. This is known, of course, as propaganda, and is a regular feature in all the so-called "news media".

As any politician or propagandist (if candid enough) can tell you, one of the first steps in a good campaign is to define the terms of the discussion in your favor. (You may recognize this technique from Orwell's 1984.) An excellent example is the term "pro-choice", rather than the more accurate "pro-abortion". "Choice" does not have the negative connotations of "abortion". By extention, this technique can lead right into demonizing your opposition. Remember when the Republicans were "starving our children"? The Republicans hadn't cut a single cent from school lunch programs (what they did, in fact, was increase spending less than the Democrats wanted). Then there were "cop-killer" bullets. Teflon-coating bullets had absolutely nothing to do with their ability to penetrate Kevlar vests, but was done to protect the bore of the gun. The media, however, loved these sensational sounding terms, and used them so often that people came to believe the untruths behind them. (Another real beauty is the oxymoron "semi-automatic assault rifle". An assault rifle is, by definition, capable of full automatic fire.)

Recent highly-publicized shootings have been characterized as "massacres" or "slaughters". A quick look at the dictionary (I checked both the OED and Random House unabridgeds) shows that the definitions of these both words include the same ideas--the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. Killing individuals against whom you feel you have a grudge can hardly be called "indiscriminate", and none of these killings involved large numbers of people (think of the Battle of the Somme, which surely was a slaughter.)

So why, you ask, am I going on about propaganda? Partly it's recent headlines in the paper. Partly it's the way propaganda wars are being substituted for reasonable discussion of public policy. But mostly, as an experienced propagandist myself, I want to warn you about the way you are being manipulated by the unscrupulous politicians and mass media. The use of emotionally charged words is intended to replace thought with the gut reactions desired by the writer. As Orwell put it, the purpose of manipulating the language is "to make all other modes of thought impossible." Our future as free people is dependent on our ability to distinguish fact from propaganda. Here at City2, we make no bones about where we stand. If only others were as honest.

Cowboy
Columnist & Contributing Editor
City2 e-news

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