Manipulating the Mind Part Three

Repetition as a Propaganda Tool

I expect everyone is familiar with the “sound bite”, but in case you have been on the moon during the last 5 years or so I will define it:

Sound bite: Short, catchy phrases, carefully worked out for a specific situation or crisis, that plant a desirable opinion, an idea or impression in the mind of another. It is used by politicians and PR people as a coordinated, simple, blanket response to a given situation/crisis. It is usually re-enforced by constant repetition.

Did you notice the sound bite after the recent stock market crash? The sound bite was “we are in the middle of a global economic crisis”.

Every labour politician was repeating this same phrase, the key part of the phrase being “Global economic crisis”

This is actually and example, not of PR but of propaganda.

With an election round the corner and a government already in trouble and on it’s way out (per the opinion polls) it cannot afford to be blamed for the economic crash and the resulting unemployment.  In fact they ARE to blame but I can tell you with total confidence that a meeting with the spin doctors would have been very near to the first action that Gordon Brown did when the crisis happened.

His immediate attention would not have been on how to solve the crisis but how to prevent him (as the former Chancellor) being blamed for it or maybe how to mitigate Opposition attacks and how to avoid this spiralling out of control and triggering a leadership contest or even worse, a General Election.

There would have been a hurried meeting and a spin doctor (sorry, Prime Minister’s Adviser), would have advised the cabinet on a tactic of distracting the general public by repeating the phrase “Global Economic Crisis” over and over again.

In other words “everybody else is in trouble too, it is everybody’s fault, not just ours”. The truth is we are in a worse recession that everyone else because of Prime Minister’s policies, and the government positively encouraged the banks in their reckless lending. They probably knew the party and the sham would end sometime but were hoping the crash would occur when the Conservatives were in power after the General Election.

So it is “Global Economic Crisis” this and “Global Economic Crisis” that and Gordon Brown being a “Global Economic Leader”, and we should be grateful to him for rescuing us (except he hasn’t) but the real problem here is IT WORKS.

It seems to be a sort of hypnotic thing. If you repeat something over and over again day after day after day, eventually it is accepted as truth. It is based on the simple principle that says “if you can repeat something in enough places, enough times, if you have enough money, you can make a person believe anything”, and the single repeated phrase is the most effective.

The other recent famous sound bite was “the War on Terror”. We went to war in Iraq on the basis that Saddam Hussein was harbouring terrorists and had weapons of mass destruction. To cover this up in the U.S and the U.K the sound bite “War on Terror” was repeated over and over again and it made us accept the war for years.

So the next time you see a phrase being repeated over and over by politicians or Pr people , realise this is a sound bite, and realise there is usually a lie, something nasty underneath, look into it and find out what they are really up to. Think and challenge the propagandists.

Politicians are treating you like fools, don’t let them.

Alan Peter Cook

22^nd April 2009