What's Propaganda? (Part I)

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"Propaganda is communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda)

First, by its very nature, every assertion is aimed at influencing, because every assertion includes endorsement. You can't assert something without thereby endorsing the assertion. I take this to be a logical point, not a psychological one. Whatever your secret thoughts happen to be, the very act of asserting something includes endorsement. That's just part of what it means to assert something.

You can say/speak/sound-out something without asserting it, in the sense that I can say "Richard Nixon was the greatest president of the 20th century" without asserting that he was. (If my voice is suitably snide, I'll probably be asserting that he was awful.) But I can't assert that Richard Nixon was the greatest president of the 20th century without thereby endorsing that he was.

     To communicate a message (even with the kind of pristine impartiality of which we can only dream) is to assert it. And insofar as you assert it you thereby endorse it. And endorsement is a kind of influence. And so the aim of influencing does not set propaganda apart from other kinds of communication.

Second, all communication requires selectivity. We can't say everything. And even if we could say everything, we can't begin with everything. In this way, selectivity is absolutely inevitable. We must select what to say and what to say first.

     If you want to communicate well, you'd better select carefully! In any case, you must select. And so selectivity does not set propaganda apart from other forms of communication.