Five Original Examples in Propaganda

Name Calling Propaganda

Name calling is usually used to make one product look good by pointing out how bad is another one and it is usually used in political advertisings. For example, American media like to some negative words to define foreign groups in order to demonstrate how bad some foreign groups are. For example, USA media and government referred Bin Laden to a terrorist. The word terrorist is usually related to someone who does evil things and brings harm to other people. For example, Bush government related the word terrorist to Saddam Hussein to create the image that Saddam Hussein was evil. The word is used for the justification for Iraq war so that his government could win the applause from people to wage the war.

Red Herring Propaganda

Red herring refers to a kind of fallacy that an irrelevant topic involved in an argument to divert the attention of listeners. It is often used in literature. Here is one original example of red herring used in MSNBC.

"Julian Epstein, Democratic counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, told MSNBC that he doesn't think any new evidence turned up by Reno (about the standoff at Waco) will amount to much. "You can Monday morning quarterback this thing all you want, but that's not going to change what happened," he said. "The FBI had information that children were being hurt inside the building, and they took action. Unless we come up with something that contradicts what the FBI was told, I don't think this investigation will amount to much."

The paragraph above states that you can argue what you want, but FBI is right in any way. The suspected child abuse has nothing to do with the behavior of FBI. The person just wanted to use the example to divert the attention of audiences.

Fallacy of Division

It is related to the logical fallacy that if the whole thing is true, then one or more parts of the thing is also true. For example, one adverting said: The general condition of America education is better than China. Therefore, Seattle Community college is better than Tsinghua University . The fact that the general condition of American education is better than that of Chinese does not mean that any university in the USA is better than that of Chinse university. Hence, the example above makes the logical fallacy.

Bandwagon Effect

The term is something similar with the other term snowball. It refers to the phenomenon that when some products or services become trends or fashions, more and more people would like to follow the trends. Bandwagon advertising usually utilizes people’s desire to be associated with the psychology of winners. Many advertising uses bandwagon technique to attract an audience. For example, in one old advertising, Pepsi companies pushed the commercial advertising by putting forth the slogan the choice of a new generation. In the commercial, two men were driving cars and dancing in hip hop. The logo of Pepsi was reflected in the car. At the end of the commercial, the slogan ‘The Choice of New Generation’ comes out. The commercial was to attract audiences and lead them to think that drinking Pepsi is cool and fashionable. The commercial also made people think that Pepsi is superior, which attracts the audience to purchase it.

Fallacy: Appeal to Authority

Appeal to authority refers to use authority as evidence though the facts of authority are irrelevant to the argument. Advertisers like to use authority to appeal to audiences. For example, in one propaganda proposed by the USA healthcare center whose title is How are bowels? The propaganda is as follows:

In ancient times, people did not say "How do you do?" They said, "How are your bowels?" The ancients thought that the bowels were the seat of the emotions. We find in the Bible, the expression -"Bowels of Compassion." Today the same writer would probably say -"Heart of Compassion."

From the above words, it can be seen that advertisers cited Bible as authority to demonstrate the importance of bowels.