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Hi Canoneer,Propaganda [from modern Latin: 'propagare', literally "extending forth"] is a concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of large numbers of people. Instead of impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense presents information in order to influence its audience. The most effective propaganda is often completely truthful, but some propaganda presents facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis, or gives loaded messages in order to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the cognitive narrative of the subject in the target audience.
The key here is the phrase "a concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of large numbers of people". Propaganda is regularly unleashed on the American public by politicians and special interest groups, it is not just the property of an amorphous "enemy". Furthermore, calling what the US Government, as a whole, produces Strategic Communications" is somewhat of a misnomer - Brownian Semantics (aka mindlessly wandering all over the semantic map) would be a better term .
Abdul, you raise a good point, but let me toss one back at you. Part of becoming an American involves adopting certain attitudes and perceptions (it's one of the reasons why I won't take out US citizenship - I'm an inveterate monarchist ). These perceptions and attitudes fit in with that idea of "a concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of large numbers of people" or propaganda.
Now, I'm not saying that that means that you, or anyone else, has to adopt specific attitudes towards specific events (like believing that the Iraq war is a "just war"). Those types of specifics aren't required by the oath of citizenship, and propaganda aimed at establishing them is certainly subject to question. At the same time, the de facto restrictions imposed by current understandings of S-M have a tendency to muzzle one source of "facts" in an ongoing discussion in US society - something that actually is against the attitudes implicit in the oath of citizenship.
This is even worse when you get into the problem of language (something Canadians know all about !). The founding fathers of the US assumed that all public discourse would always be in a common language and that citizens would learn that common language. For a whole slew of historical reasons, there are now large parts of US society who do not speak English (the assumed common language) well enough to fulfill their obligations as citizens so there is a real problem. In Canada, we solved this partly by adopting a policy of official bilingualism (read "illiterate in both official languages" ). In the US, language is still a hot button issue and I doubt that we will see an official bilingual (or multi-lingual) policy at the federal level. So, how are citizens going to fulfill their obligations if they can't access large parts of the debate?
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