Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

ClassyDee takes me to task for recommending a "slick Flash" that presents facts about one aspect of how the Florida election was stolen. He writes, in part:

The data in the report may be accurate but the piece is still just propaganda and that is bad news. While a robust fight against the end of democracy is required it shouldn't be carried using the weapons of totalitarianism... clearly the messages just blur together into a large blitz of value based attack ads, and nobody is the winner after such a thorough destruction of reason and sanity.

No one wants political discourse to consist of nothing but slick Flashes, but that it's slick doesn't mean it's propaganda. Rhetoric matters. Rhetoric is legitimate. Rhetoric is unavoidable. Candidates should do more than issue position statements. Political conversations are not merely rational debates. They can't be because no debates are merely rational unless — impossibly — the sides don't care about their points of view. Politics requires that sometimes we be out to convince others, and not every effort to convince can be counted as propaganda if the term's going to mean more than "What humans say."

Some of the earmarks of actual propaganda: It makes no reference to any facts. It lies. It does nothing but associate emotive images. It's got the word "Fox" displayed in the lower right.