[Music] put simply propaganda is the dissemination of ideas intended to convince people to think and act in a particular way and for a particular purpose it's crucial to understand that it's the instigators purpose that defines or distinguishes propaganda from other similar forms of activity such as advertising and education while the definitions have changed the concept of propaganda has not really changed but what has changed are the means of communications from the early print media both written and visual to the electronic I'm thinking obviously of film radio television and of course now the internet and this
change in the means of communications has had a profound effect on both the speed with which propaganda has diss been disseminated and also the scale on which it has been disseminated to the term propaganda is a 20th century term pretty much it and it essentially came out of the first world war the U first major State propaganda agency was Britain's Ministry of information and nice or welli in term uh the idea of information was to as they put it direct the thought of most of the world I think propaganda has become devalued as a word
and as a concept um because it has been defined neg so negatively in so many different countries so that for example if you talk about propaganda as it were to I think to my generation they would think immediately of the Soviet Union and of the Communist block if you talk about propaganda to an earlier generation they're probably thinking much more about second world war and even the first world war but I think that what's happened is that the the whole sort of concept of propaganda Spin and all the rest of it has just become defined
very very negatively we often think of propaganda in terms of its very Vivid Infamous iconography such as Nazi propaganda and star propaganda but really the most powerful propaganda of the 20th century and the 21st century is Insidious something that we often don't recognize something that's disguised and it comes from two words public relations words that were invented by Edward bernes back at the at the beginning of the 20th century when he said that the Germans during the first world war had given propaganda a bad name he wanted to make it respect able and PR public
relations has not only made propaganda respectable I'm talking about PR used by great power such as States it has made it in both Insidious and all powerful I think it is true that even today people still associate propaganda with lies and falsehood um as something to be avoided at all cost almost a sort of cancer on the body politic I think this misunderstands the basic nature of the concept propaganda is about persuading people but it's also also about reinforcing existing opinions and prejudices Alis Huxley wrote in the 1940s that a propagandist is a man who
canalizes an already existing stream in a land where there is no water he digs in vain and I think this preoccupation with lies and falsehoods miss this is the basic uh concept of propaganda that it is ethically neutral it can be good or bad The crucial factor I think here is to recognize that the real problem is the Monopoly of propaganda so for example in dictatorships or totalitarian states where you do have a monop monopoly of the means of communication then of course you have a real problem with propaganda because you are not getting alternative
sources of information how do you measure the success of propaganda this is a per perennial problem it's a very difficult uh question to answer it's often cited that British propaganda in the first world war is a classic example of successful propaganda indeed both Lenin and Hitler in the interwar period wrote that they believe that British propaganda during the first world war had a profound effect on the outcome of that conflict today the news is happening every single second of every single minute in every single country in the world and it's happening not just via television
screens and radio and newspapers and magazines it's happening on people's phones on people's iPads in people's cars on trains on planes all around us all the time the news is [Music] unfolding [Music]
