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Behind The Fiction, Past
A Fiction Column
By Michael G'Francisco


POLITICAL PROPAGANDA—FICTION:

There are obvious propagandistic advantages in popularizing lies and paradoxes of political agendas. Successfully published false propaganda tends to take on a face when added to ideas people already hold as true.

In actuality, rhetoric combined with false logic is being used more and more in TV programming. Writers of fiction have been engaged to inject messages of the right and left-wingers bias political beliefs.

Is news propaganda? No, but how it’s presented can be. The success of propaganda depends on reaching target audiences throughout its media. Let it be understood, that certain news medias are owned by left-wingers and their political agenda always serves their positioned political figures that are running for office. As bad as that may seem, it’s true.

It seems that the news medias aren’t the only outlet for political fodder. Now, writers are being paid to interject political views into TV shows using subliminal messages or half-truths.

Black and white family sitcoms and sitcoms created for the younger set (20 to 30 years) are presently quite popular and are excellent open-door slide-in advantages to channel viewing propaganda without viewers noticing they are being propagandized. (What grabs me the most is the constant canned laughter).

A good example is the 4th all time ranking show: All in the Family, which featured the character Archer Bunker portraying a bigot. Others include the two famous animated cartoon television shows created by Mike Judge: Beavis and Butt-Head, and King of the Hill, which he created for the political right-wing Fox Broadcasting Television network.

Propaganda, whether it be used for political or product commercializing propaganda combined with a flavor of truth, is easily created with the magic of words.

Even religion doesn’t escape being propagandized. Again, Fox commissioned Trey Parker and Matt Scott to do a sitcom on Comedy Central about the Prophet Muhammad, which received a “ warning” about their presentation of the prophet in a bear’s costume. Waging a war against a mythical higher authority goes beyond me.

Parker’s and Scott’s “That’s My Bush” political satire/sitcom created to clean-up the past President’s Bush’s image is another good example of my subject.

Alas! If you want to take a walk back in time to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852) which became quite a controversial novel in its time, sometimes considered a propaganda novel, when actually it’s probably a “social problem” novel.

Let’s face it Hollywood has been using subliminal advertising or a form of propaganda in movies for years. Remember a pack of cigarettes on a table in a tender or action scene, or a coke bottle setting somewhere off to the left in a war movie. These are forms of subliminal advertising.

 


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