Propaganda
Organized persuasion that works on an audience's feelings, loyalties, and habits of mind rather than on its judgment, to move it toward a conclusion that serves the source. It may carry true claims or false ones; what makes it propaganda is the method.
The word began as the name of a Vatican office, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith founded in 1622, and for two centuries meant the organized spreading of any doctrine. The First World War, in which every belligerent built an apparatus for managing opinion, gave it the sense it has now: persuasion that handles the audience rather than informing it.
The serious definitions agree on three marks. Propaganda is deliberate, a decision rather than a rumor. It is systematic, a campaign rather than a remark. And it is one-sided in purpose: it exists to produce a response that serves the source, whether or not that response serves the audience. None of the marks requires falsehood. A great deal of propaganda is true statements selected and arranged, which is why fact-checking alone is a weak defense and why this site catalogs techniques instead.
The neighbors are easy to confuse. Persuasion is the wide category and includes honest argument; propaganda is the part of it that treats judgment as an obstacle. Advertising names its sponsor and declares its purpose, so it is usually not propaganda in the strict sense, though it uses every technique in the catalog. Disinformation is defined by falsity and intent to harm; propaganda cuts across it, since a campaign may run on lies, on true facts, or on emotional appeals that make no claim at all.
The long treatment is on What is propaganda?.
Sources
- Jowett, Garth S., and Victoria O'Donnell. Propaganda and Persuasion. 7th ed. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2019. ISBN 978-1506371344
- Lasswell, Harold D. "The Theory of Political Propaganda." American Political Science Review 21, no. 3 (1927): 627–631.
- Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. New York: Knopf, 1965.