Mastering Public Opinion essays

Mastering Public Opinion essays How much of what a person sees and hears, on any given day, can be qualified as clear and truthful information? If persuasion, as an idea, has a purpose then who gets to be the target? Is every advertising campaign, political message or military campaign we come across, propaganda? Little is known about this concept yet it has governed our emotions, our fears and our joys since the beginnings of the first dominating nations. Let us examine the mechanism that drives public support and which makes a whole country to stand in solidarity with its government. Propaganda implies the dissemination of ideas and information for the purpose of inducing or intensifying specific attitudes and actions. The word propaganda comes from the Latin verb propagare, to propagate. Originally, propagate meant to reproduce or to spread. It came to mean also to transmit and to spread form person to person. Every since people began to live together, they have tried to influence one another. In early Babylonian, Egyptian and Roman times, priests played on popular superstitions to keep themselves in power. Ramses II, the Egyptian pharaoh, filled the walls of his temples with victorious war scenes to emphasise his strategic and military skills. Propaganda requires the exposed beliefs to become clear to a large population. Good speakers have and still use their charisma and worldly intelligence to advertise. Some examples of such successful characters are Lenin, Stalin, Jaruzelski, Mussolini, and Hitler. After a leader clearly points out the so-called enemy, different revolutionists appear in a crowd, and capture all the attention. Short after this, the people would gather around and become receptive to the spoken phrases of the agitators. The message revealed is the message learned by speakers at meetings of the party they represent. At this point in time,...