Persuasion and Propaganda

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Persuasion and Propaganda
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• Which photo would you choose to use
• If you support Obama as president?
• If you oppose Obama as president?

Write a caption or headline for each to support
the effect.
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Persuasion and propaganda, key questions

• How can you tell the difference between
  persuasion and propaganda?
• Why might it be important to distinguish between
  them?
• Why might the distinction sometimes be a
  difficult one to make?

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How can we persuade?

• Brainstorm in groups different methods of
  persuasion. It may help to think of ways in which
  perception, language, emotion reasoning can be
  used to persuade.

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Language

• Repetition
• Jargon
• Innuendo
• Metaphor

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Emotion

• Pity
• Fear/Anxiety
• Belonging
• Borrowed associations
• Misleading use of sources

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Reasoning

• Problematic premises e.g. immigrants are a drain
  on the economy, therefore no country should
  accept immigrants.
• Flawed generalisations
• Black and White thinking
• Flawed cause.

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Your task

• Working in groups produce a short (1 min
  max) political advert to achieve one of the
  following
• Positive impression of Obama
• Negative impression of Obama
• Positive impression of McCain
• Negative impression of McCain
• Negative impression of both

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The Rules

• No fake images/movies
• No straightforward lies. Half truths and somewhat
  misleading statements are okay e.g. NO Obama is
  a muslim whilst OKAY Obama was brought up in
  the Muslim country of Indonesia and his father
  was a muslim
• Nothing explicitly focusing on race or gender

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Using the 4 principles of representation

• Selection
• Emphasis
• Emotional colouring of language or image
• Treatment in context to support a perspective.
• An example

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America

• America is a beautiful country with wonderful
  hard working citizens..
• Senator Obama wishes to reward your hard work
  with higher taxes
• The forces of evil and chaos hate out freedom and
  liberty, they want to annihilate out way of life
  utterly.
• Senator Obama wishes to talk with our enemies
  like Iran a country that funds terrorism and had
  repeatidly called for the annilation of Israel
  one of our closest allies.

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America

• America is a beautiful country with wonderful
  hard working citizens..
• Senator Obama wishes to reduce taxes for 19 out
  of every 20 Americans. Millions of hard working
  American families will pay less tax.
• The forces of evil and chaos hate out freedom and
  liberty, they want to annihilate out way of life
  utterly.
• Senator Obama believes that the war in Iraq has
  been a failure and that we need to look for new
  ways bring all countries into the international
  community and ensure a successful and lasting
  peace that will protect American lives and
  American ideals.

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Breaking it down

• First ensure that all of your team are clear
  about the basic policy position of the candidate
  work together to use your own knowledge
  http//snipurl.com/5u1s8 to brainstorm as a team
  the key points stats.
• Now you need to pick a selection (or possibly
  only 1 or 2) of issues to focus on.

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• Once you have selected your issues I would
  suggest you discuss ideas as a group about how
  you will use them to persuade the audience
  (depending on whether you are trying to show your
  candidate in a positive or negative light!)
• Then you need to work together on how you will
  bring images, text, music and possibly acting
  together to create a convincing and persuasive
  ad

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Finally..

• We will present the videos and analyse them as a
  class
• We will be looking for evidence of selection,
  emphasis, emotional language/image/music, context
  any other form of persuasion such as appealing
  to pity/fear/anger, repetition, statistics,
  generalization, correlation etc.

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Homework - due Friday.

• Homework this week has two parts
• To write a ToK blog entry this week Id like you
  to find an example of a persuasive image on the
  internet, include the image and a description
  outlining how it persuades and what makes it
  effective.
• Gather images, sounds, music, stats, facts etc
  that could be useful for creating your ad.

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Bibliography

• Outline of the different forms of persuasion from
  Theory of Knowledge course companion by Eileen
  Dombrowski et al.
• Images from google images, china.