propaganda
- 1Public communication aimed at influencing an audience that is biased, misleading, or designed to provoke mainly emotional responses.
The regime flooded the airwaves with propaganda blaming foreigners for the food shortages.
Critics dismissed the documentary as propaganda dressed up as journalism.
Similardisinformation, misinformation, spin
Note
A charge more than a description: to call a broadcast or film propaganda is to say it manipulates. Bias, distortion, or an appeal to emotion over reason can each earn the label. The noun often stands before another noun, as in propaganda posters or a propaganda commission. Noam Chomsky's Media Control (2002) credits the Creel Commission with turning a pacifist population war-mongering within six months.
- 2Information, publicity, or agitation spread among the public to sway opinion and advance a particular cause or agenda.
The ministry's propaganda campaign encouraged citizens to conserve fuel during the shortage.
Early Soviet filmmakers treated cinema as a powerful vehicle for propaganda.
Similarpublicity, promotion, agitprop, advocacy, messaging
Note
Organized persuasion with no judgment attached is the older use of the word, and it now sounds dated. Most readers hear the derogatory sense first, so calling a fuel-saving campaign propaganda can imply deceit you did not intend. Publicity is the safer neutral word. The noun is usually uncountable, though the plural propagandas exists for distinct campaigns or doctrines.
- 3The propagation of the Catholic faith by the Church through missionary work and related efforts.
Cardinal Barberini championed the propaganda of the faith in the missions of East Asia.
Seminaries in Rome trained clergy specifically for propaganda in newly explored territories.
Similarpropagation, evangelization, evangelism, proselytism
Note
The sense closest to the word's birth comes from Congregātiō dē Prōpāgandā Fidē, the committee of cardinals Gregory XV set up in 1622 to oversee foreign missions, literally "congregation for propagating the faith." Propaganda is the Latin gerundive of prōpāgō, "propagate." As a historical term it belongs to accounts of Catholic missionary work, where it means spreading belief, with no hint of deceit.
Practice
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Origin
From New Latin prōpāganda, a shortening of Congregātiō dē Prōpāgandā Fidē, the name of a committee of cardinals set up in 1622 by Gregory XV to oversee foreign missions, literally "congregation for propagating the faith." It is properly the feminine gerundive of Latin prōpāgō ("propagate"). The modern political sense dates from World War I and was not originally negative.