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Firstly, It Is Difficult At Times To Establish What Exactly Propaganda Is. ...

Firstly, it is difficult at times to establish what exactly propaganda is. The British press, for instance, has always been relatively free from Government control and, as such, the Soviet centralised propaganda machine has been eschewed for a more subtle form of corporate manipulation based upon the operations of a free market. Louis Althusser suggests that the ideological state apparatus controls the individual; he suggests that ideology interpolates individuals as subjects (1971, 170). By this, he means that the ideological state apparatus, which includes the print media, the entertainment industry, and the citizens themselves, create a public consensus together based upon information that is disseminated to them. As such, dissident voices are marginalised or simply taken off the agenda. Prior to the First World War, the importance and the efficacy of propaganda in shaping public opinion was overlooked. Indeed, the development of propaganda elements in the mainstream press (encapsulated by the development of Communist and, later, Nazi party techniques for manipulating the media) and the visual component which tended, through a process of repetition and distortion of the actual facts, was created in many respects for the first time in the perception of The Hun in the popular European and American presses at the time. For the first time to this large degree, the utilisation of mass media for the creation of a stereotypical enemy was used to generate a particular public opinion.
This essay will look firstly at the history of propaganda, at how visual elements of propaganda have been used in the print media (and earlier). Then, I will look at how this differs in the First World War, and the effects, if any, that this has had upon press freedoms.
A Historical Overview of Propaganda and Media Manipulation: Seminal Texts of Press Freedom from 1750.
Although propaganda and its effects were only formally studied as a mainstream subject after the First World War, the utilisation of graphic and textual imagery to persuade the public is considerably older. Indeed, Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell suggest that the use of propaganda as a means of controlling information flow, managing public opinion, or manipulating behaviour is as old as recorded history (36). The powers of persuasion have been studied in Ancient Greece, and the utilisation of the techniques of rhetoric can be traced back to the writings of Confucius in the Analects. Propaganda and persuasion has always been used to persuade and manipulate public opinion and, as such, the issue of press freedoms has always been problematic because, from this point of view, there is technically no such thing as freedom because everybody is manipulated by communication. The use of visual imagery in persuading the masses also has a long history of use.


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