Propaganda, Advocacy & How to Tell the Difference
By: Stephanie Essin
Tags: Abortion, Journalism, Planned Parenthood

Advocacy journalism has its good parts. It aims for truth telling, admits to have bias where applicable. It aims to inform citizens to promote positive change for the community. David Carr writes:

“Activists can and often do reveal the truth, but the primary objective remains winning the argument. That includes the argument about whether a reporter has to be politically and ideologically neutral to practice journalism.”

Some advocacy sites claim to incorporate truth telling and journalistic integrity in their reports. I would argue that if truth telling and informative intent are clearly stated, they can be considered to be a credible organization. Unfortunately, in a time when anyone can post — or pose — as a truth telling do-gooder, it is hard to be able to distinguish between persuasion and propaganda in our media.

Propaganda is:

“Any conscious and open attempt to influence the beliefs of an individual or group guided by a predetermined end and characterized by the systematic use of irrational and often unethical techniques of persuasion.”

Thomas Bivins, who was also my journalistic ethics professor a few years ago, attributed this definition to Ted Smith, editor of Propaganda: a Pluralistic Perspective.

Knowing what a credible source looks like is really important as a news consumer. It is critical to be able to identify those who are using ethical standards to tell you true things, in order to promote positive change, versus groups whom tell you things using unethical, hyperbolic strategies for their own agenda.

With no reign on who can post what, its hard to know if what you’re reading and watching is coming from an accurate source. Since any kind of media can go viral, inaccurate information could influence billions.

One organization made recent news by posting a video that had the weight to strip government funding of Planned Parenthood. The video was aiming to frame PP for illegally selling fetus tissues. The Center for Medical Progress, the group behind these claims, saw that they “oppose any interventions, procedures, and experiments that exploit the unequal legal status of any class of human beings.”

The NYT points out CMP’s agenda against PP, saying they made a “dishonest attempt to make legal, voluntary and potentially lifesaving tissue donations appear nefarious and illegal.”

Parts of the video were clearly cut out — things that put the conversation in context — PP admits to selling the tissues for a small amount, just enough to cover transportation fees, and lab processing.

While the video has rallied many anti-abortion activists, the CMP has been met with a lot of pushback from the video — resulting in a temporary restraining order from the Supreme Court to prevent them from releasing anymore videos.

The CMP has been met with a lot of push back from the video — resulting in a temporary restraining order from the Supreme Court to prevent them from releasing anymore videos.

Factcheck.org, a non-partisan organization with the mission to lower the confusion on political facts. “Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding,” they claim.

They cite the video in it’s entirety. The full, unedited version. In their review of the video, they found that Deborah Nucatola — the Planned Parenthood executive who appeared in the video — stated many times that PP’s clinics want to foot the bill for their own costs, to not make profit, when donating fetal tissue for scientific medical research.

The video, and the organization who released it, clearly have holes, yet so many are charged by their message. The roots of the CMP are kept alive by the funds of Operation Rescue, a Christian anti-abortion organization. A handful of Republican presidential candidates have even cited it on their social media campaigns. Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul, and Rick Perry have all posted about it as if it were a tenable piece of evidence.

So what would a credible advocacy group look like? If there appears to be any kind of agenda within an organization, how can we trust what we’re being told? If presidential candidates are using propaganda to promote their campaigns, how can the rest of us make informed decisions about what to believe or how to vote?

RH Reality Check, a daily online publication, is a lot like the CMP. They both aim to cover health, and promote justice within the medical sphere. There are huge differences in how RH gathers their stories and conducts investigations compared with CMP, however. Where CMP’s blog has one author — its own founder, David Daleiden — RH has a plethora of really, really well researched articles by numerous reporters. They also include a page-long mission statement on their site that sets the tone for the organization’s standards.

In their mission statement, RH includes their overall vision, a description of their identity (completed with bios of their employed directors, editors, analysts and reporters). They also include a journalistic ethics code taken from the Center for Independent Media’s News Journalist Fellow Program’s web site.

Checking mission statements and reviewing ethical standards in the media we consume should be second nature to the average news consumer. In CMP’s case, there are no ethical standards that are clearly written, and judging by their illegitimate tactics to bring down PP, their reputation will hopefully be known for what it truly is.

But it isn’t all on them. Citizen’s have responsibilities in news too. Now more than ever, people must be their own fact checkers. In the flood of gossip, propaganda, accusations, and facts that make up the social media landscape, it is our job to know how to filter it. We are the gatekeepers. Gone are the days of big journalism cooperations who decide what the public will know.

The American Press Institute quotes Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s book The Elements of Journalism in speaking about the responsibilities of citizens who consume news:

Writing a blog entry, commenting on a social media site, sending a tweet, or “liking” a picture or post, likely involves a shorthand version of the journalistic process. One comes across information, decides whether or not it’s believable, assesses its strength and weaknesses, determines if it has value to others, decides what to ignore and what to pass on, chooses the best way to share it, and then hits the “send” button.

The act of persuasion in journalism is rife with with ethical hurdles. When we are in the act of persuading our audience, the urge to manipulate might be hard to pass up. But it isn’t impossible. And as citizens, there will always be opposing sides. But, if we can remember to be constant fact checkers, and choose to spread only what we find to be the verified truth, we can make progress faster.