Don’t shoot propaganda!

Propaganda has been used in wartimes throughout the history in order to win people’s devotion towards a certain cause. Public Communications professionals working in that field are aware that their job is ‘dirty’. They are known with the pejorative term ‘spin doctors’ because of their ability to use manipulative PR tactics, such as selectively presented facts, in an efficient way to serve their purposes.

A type of a very deceitful propaganda was used in the last decade in Iraq war, where the US government resorted to fabrication concerning Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaida and the Iraqi nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Obviously, transparency cannot be expected in a war where its real purposes must not be revealed to the public.

As we live in a digital era, the power of image has become much stronger and technology helps people with a lot of creativity, to kind of release their talent. ’Homemade’ produced videos by the US army itself, Photoshop to change images to serve a certain purpose and embedded journalists were some of the techniques that permitted the US government to ‘cook’ the information released in the US media. It seems that in democratic countries, where there is supposed to be free press, it is much easier to camouflage propaganda by using third party endorsement to convince the public for the accuracy of the information.

The US government might has won the propaganda war in their own country but in the rest of the world people were more skeptical about what was being projected in the media. They did not trust the American political statements and the ‘action movie like’ videos. They were also doubting the real purposes of this war, believing that the real reason was control of the oil and profit making. Some of them even dared to say that the US Government was aware of the 9/11 attacks before it even occurred.

All that created a negative image of the country in general and the credibility of the US politicians was ruined. That makes me wonder, whether these PR techniques that were used back in the Second World War to propagate the public and justify war should be used even today. Of course if we need Public Relations in the political arena to achieve short-term purposes without caring for a country’s long-term reputation, then I guess keep propaganda alive!