“Propaganda is information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented.”
Encyclopedia Britannica
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”
Thomas Paine – in his book Common Sense
Apparently, we have staved off another Federal governmental shutdown. When this governmental inaction will be weaponized again is unknown, but I fear that it will be. I don’t know about anybody else but apart from the morbid fascination of seeing all of this play out, my most dominant feeling is exhaustion. Don’t get me wrong – I have railed in this forum on more than one occasion about how there is no willingness in our government to compromise on ANYTHING. It is always: “We will shove it down their throats”. Here was a case where the two houses of Congress sat down, rolled up their sleeves and hammered something out. I doubt that either political party was all that happy with the product but that is how our system works – NOBODY gets everything they want. I applaud their work. I might add that the process that was followed was suggested in this little rag that I call my blog many weeks ago. Of course, now the President seeks to go around the Congress with his emergency declaration. “I will shove it down their throats”. I don’t know how that will all work out, it will no doubt be tested in the Courts and if this action is unconstitutional, hopefully our Supreme Court will do their duty and say so. If it IS constitutional, it still doesn’t seem like a good thing to do, but so-be-it.
So, what’s my beef now? I talked about my exhaustion above. I think what makes me sick of all this is that there is this seemingly endless drumbeat from both warring factions “spinning” every development to their advantage. Adding a “spin” to any piece of information or news is really propaganda. As I grew up in the 60’s, we learned that propaganda was the misinformation sent out by Tass in the Soviet Union or by Chairman Mao in Red China – and it was an EVIL thing. Of course, politicians in every country in every age including the US have used propaganda to varying degrees. Its usage today seems to have reached proportions that I don’t really remember. Adding to all of this is that we now have “news” organizations that engage in it every bit as much as the politicians – think MSNBC, Fox News or the Huffington Post.
Well if propaganda has always been around what’s the problem? I think that given its dimensions and ubiquity now, that we run the risk that Thomas Paine saw in 1775. We hear this stuff so much that we start accepting it as fact. Or we get confused and don’t really know what the facts really are. Of course, that is part the desired effect. This then results in acceptance of biased facts, which can also be called half-truths or half-lies, as absolute truths. This makes compromise all but impossible to achieve. Just once, for just a little while I wish that politicians would just tone it down a little bit and affirm that there can be TWO or more positions on an issue that are not crazy. And I wish that they wouldn’t promise things that they really can’t deliver on their own. When they can’t, they try to find a way out of their predicament by “spinning” the news.
Trying to find the truth these days seems a lot harder than it used to be. About a year ago, I spent quite a bit of time trying to find the news source that was felt to be the most unbiased. Sadly, I learned that the most respected news source in America is the BBC!! That’s right, Americans trust the BRITISH BROADCASTING COMPANY more than any of our American sources. That seems like a sad commentary. Well I couldn’t really live with that, so my compromise was to subscribe to a service that provides stories from up to ten different news sources. When I chose my ten, I intentionally included Fox News and Huffington Post. I can just about always count on them to contain bias. But I still find them to be of value, because they cause me to test the meddle of the other sources and to question what I am reading. And in the end, I do what everybody else does – we do the best we can with what we have heard.