Propaganda: Two case studies

I was lucky enough to come across two very different instances of propaganda recently. The first has to do with Iraq, the second with flavoured milk. (Come on, tell me, where else are you going to find Iraq and flavoured milk discussed side by side, huh?)

When the story broke, several months back, that the US government was placing news stories written by fake journalists in Iraqi papers (or, more accurately, paying a consulting firm to take care of it for them) I thought it was A Bad Thing. If you're trying to promote democracy and freedom of speech (ostensibly, anyway), it's a good idea to not undermine faith in supposedly free media by planting stories that cast doubt on the publications in their entirety. William Fisher has a good piece on the subject here.

Having just read a couple of examples of the fake news stories though, I've started thinking of them as more dumb than bad.

You know how old propaganda (or current North Korean propaganda) seems so silly? You read this ham-handed stuff and wonder how anyone could ever fall for it. We've gotten a lot more sophisticated, haven't we? Clearly the folks behind the fake news program don't think so -- or at least they don't think the Iraqis have.

Here is an excerpt, courtesy Harper's Magazine, where the articles were reprinted.

Iraqi Army Defeats Terrorism
...The underhanded forces of Al Qaeda remain bent on halting progress and inciting civil war. The honest citizens of Iraq, however, need not fear these criminals and terrorists. The brave warriors of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are hard at work stopping Al Qaeda's attacks before they occur.

Wow! No way anyone could spot that for propaganda, is there? "Criminals and terrorists" vs "brave warriors." These articles go on and on in this vein. And to think that most independent journalists earn a pittance, while the Lincoln Group was paid up to US$2,000 for each of these inept pieces that appeared in an Iraqi newspaper.

On to the flavoured milk.

My daughter came home from school this week with an advertising pamphlet from the Dairy Farmers of Canada, pushing flavoured milk. I'm going to leave aside the difficulty I have with the kids bringing home any kind of advertising and with the unassailable in that the milk lobby has with educators, and just look at one paragraph in the pamphlet.

Here it is, my emphasis added :

Milk contains a natural sugar called lactose. Manufacturers don't have to reveal the added sugar content of their products on new nutrition labels. But we can tell you that a 250 ml serving of 2% milk contains about 12 g of sugar in the form of lactose, and that flavoured milk contains more sugar, although that includes both natural sugar and added sugar. To give you a better idea of how much added sugar your favourite flavoured milk product may contain, look at its sugar content and compare it to an identical serving of white milk.

Basically, the milk producers are taking a simple product -- milk -- and tarting it up with added flavour and sugar. How much sugar? They won't tell you. In fact, they make it sound like they can't tell you, because it's not mandated by the nutrition labels. Of course they can tell us whatever they want -- they've just chosen not to instead.

Note also the repetition of the phrase "natural sugar" and the word lactose, designed to reinforce the idea that milk already contains sugar anyway, so what's a little extra?