I was always the type of person to take at face value whatever I saw or read on the news, without giving much thought that there may be people with agendas behind it who would like me to believe a certain way and will feed me half truths or outright lies. I have in the recent few years come to a sort of red pilling, as they call it, of how much propaganda we get fed through the various media we consume, whether it’s the news or social media. This has made me have a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ kind of approach, even to people in my life. Because people in general, can often fail to be straight forward and if they don’t agree with you on something, they may opt to just go along to get along and you think that this person agrees with you on an issue until a crisis brings out the truth.
When I watch the news now or scroll through my social media, I try to spot the PR. Is this the actual story or is there an agenda behind it? Some of it is so subtle that you consume it and it subconsciously affects your opinions or beliefs without you even knowing. I’ve been reading up on PR lately and realized it’s such an important subject that literally everyone should be educated about. I’m currently reading a book called Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, damned lies and the Public Relations Industry. This book is a classic on the subject of PR and makes us savvy to the tricks of the trade.
One of the classic examples that’s well known in the PR world is from the father of PR himself, a man called Edward Bernays, who was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychology. He is credited with popularizing the smoking of cigarettes by women, by planting some actresses he hired to smoke openly as they participated in a women’s march. When the newspapers were writing their coverage of the event, he made sure to supply them with these pictures showing these classy women lighting up and smoking in public, branded it as a women’s liberation act, and thus managed to break the taboo of women smoking in public and it became a cool thing to do.
Imagine reading an article about an actual thing that happened, so it’s real news, but what is targeting you is the picture accompanying the article, targeting your subconscious to change your attitude or opinion about something. That’s quite different from a straightforward ad telling you to ‘drink this coffee, it’s the best coffee’ or something like that.
Governments use PR to affect public opinion about policies they would like to make or change. If they want to go to war, they fire up the PR machine and incite the public against the enemy, and voila, they can have their war, or make some laws that perhaps the public would have been against but the public opinion has now been changed by the propaganda machine.
Sometimes we may never get to know the agenda till much later. Or maybe there is no agenda, perhaps it’s just the news. But always better to keep an eye open and try to spot the PR.
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