Propaganda Today

What is propaganda? I want to start out my post by giving a simple definition. Propaganda is information, normally seen in the political world, that is very misleading and full of false words. Propaganda has impacted the world in a multitude of ways. This article gives us Adolf Hitler as an example of someone who spread masses of propaganda. He was able to convince through his words that he would be a great letter for his country. Men and women in the military were also involved in his scheme. Members of the military community would make up things about the war and their enemies and spread it to the public so the public believed anything but the truth. Why were these leaders willing to do this? The sad reality is they were willing to do it because they really did not see it as doing a bad thing. They didn't see it as doing a bad thing because they had been told to promote a sense of love for their country through propaganda.

However, even though I just spent a good amount of time talking about propaganda from many years ago, let's not forget propaganda is still very much a problem and constant force in our modern world. Let's look at politics for example. What is political propaganda? Political propaganda is something false that is spread to advance or tear down a political agenda. There are two different types of language or information that really make up political propaganda. The first is disinformation. Disinformation is false information that is spread specifically to change people's understanding of an issue or topic. The second is misinformation. Misinformation is information that is spread that is not meant to cause harm or change people's understanding of an issue or topic. We all spread misinformation all the time. Anyone who ever played the telephone games knows exactly what I am talking about. The word never comes out the way the first person said it at the end. 

I know I just explained what propaganda looks like today, but how is it impactful in our world today? Let's think about the whole year of 2020. Fake news made our country be more divided than arguably ever. We know that a house divided by itself can not stand. Therefore why were the Republicans so against the Democrats and the Democrats so against the Republicans. It's because we were in the biggest problem we've been in. Our country has not seen a raging pandemic in quite some time. We were not prepared for it nor were our news sources. With this being the case propaganda was everywhere. It got to the point where people really believed every Republican was racist and every Democrat was completely far left when this was really not the case at all. So often in this world we let our news dictate how we think. We should use the new to gain knowledge or information, but it should not change the way we think on a daily basis because you never really know if the news you are reading is true or not.