1. What is the speaker's purpose?
2. What are the speaker's credentials?
3. Is there evidence of bias?
4. Does the speaker use persuasive language?
5. Does the speaker make sweeping generalizations or unsupported inferences?
6. Do opinions predominate in the talk?
7. Does the speaker use any propaganda devices?
8. Do I accept the message?
The Hoskison and Tompkins model (1987, pp. 81?82) contains six steps and uses large and small groups to accomplish the purposes of the strategy. The strategy is as follows:
Step 1: Initiating. Begin by talking about commercials and asking students about familiar commercials. Videotape a set of commercials and view them with your students. Discuss the purpose of each commercial. Use the questions about commercials presented in Figure 3?7 to probe students' thinking about propaganda and persuasive language. (The eight questions are listed above.)
Step 2: Structuring. Introduce the propaganda devices and view the commercials again to look for examples of each device. Introduce loaded words and doublespeak and view the commercials for a third time to look for examples of persuasive language.
Step 3: Conceptualizing. Have students work in small groups to critique a commercial, listing the propaganda devices and persuasive language used. Students might also want to test the claims made in the commercial.
Step 4: Summarizing. Review the concepts about propaganda devices and persuasive language introduced in the first three steps.
Step 5: Generalizing. Present a new set of videotaped commercials for students to critique. Ask students to identify propaganda devices and persuasive language used in the commercials.
Step 6: Applying. Have students apply what they learned about propaganda devices and persuasive language by creating their own products and writing and producing their own commercials. As the commercials are presented, have classmates act as critical listeners to detect propaganda devices, loaded words, and doublespeak.
While their model was designed to assist students in analyzing radio and television commercials, it can also be readily used to help students become critical consumers of print advertisements taken from magazines and newspapers.
Propaganda Using Graphs
While some attention has been given to helping students avoid being manipulated by propaganda contained in advertisements, little attention has been given to helping them learn to detect bias used in graphing. Graphs are designed to present data in a form that promotes knowledge, comprehension, application and analysis. However, graphs, like advertisements, can be used to misinform the unwary.
The opportunity to manipulate the public using graphs has not gone unnoticed by Madison Avenue. Account executives of commercial or political campaigns have begun to recognize that graphs can assist them in their attempts to present bias in ways that are effective but are generally unchallenged.
Madison Avenue is aware that people usually comprehend data that have been graphed more easily than they do if the data are presented using other means. Advertising executives are also aware that people tend to believe data that have been graphed. Consequently, graphs are being used with increasing frequency in advertising campaigns.
Graphs used in advertising campaigns can use accurate data and still mislead the public. By manipulating the vertical and horizontal axis of a graph, the data can appear to have different meanings or implications. For example, a graphic display of the budget deficit during the Reagan administration can be made to appear more dramatic by increasing the vertical axis, which represents the actual number of deficit dollars spent by the federal government, while decreasing the horizontal axis which represents the years 1980?1988. This technique could have been employed by the Democratic Party to sway people into viewing the Republican Party as being big spenders and financially irresponsible.
By reversing the process, compacting the vertical axis and extending the horizontal axis, Republican campaigners can depict the deficit as real but minimal. While both the Democratic and Republican campaigners may graph the same data, the impressions left upon the voters may be very different, and it is the impression that is most important for them. By varying the graphing techniques employed, a political party may minimize a problem for which it is responsible and maximize the effect of its adversary's problem. In either case, however, the effect is the same. The public is being manipulated.
The public must hold political candidates and parties accountable for their actions. The public must become aware of the graphing techniques being used by political hucksters and commercial advertisers to misinform them. An awareness of these propaganda techniques can begin in the nation's elementary schools in social studies classes. It can be accomplished by using a strategy designed to teach students to read graphs critically.
Before a student can read the usual political or commercial graphs critically, that student must be able to read graphs at more elementary levels. The following strategy incorporates this understanding and starts at an appropriate level to enable students to read graphs critically. It requires students to examine the three parts of each graph: the title and columns, the data, and the source. It also requires them to answer questions designed to promote critical comprehension of each of the three parts. The strategy is summarized in the following steps:
Step 1. The Title and Columns.
Begin by asking what information is presented in this graph. What quantities and/or time frames are given?
Step 2. The Data.
As students examine the data, ask specific questions which require interpretation. Specifically, the teacher should structure questions about specific entries of the graph regarding how much or many, how much or many more, or how much or many less. Basic comprehension of the data presented is needed to answer these questions.
Step 3. The Source.
Step three requires that students examine the source of the data and identify potential bias contained in the graph. Questions such as "Are the data complete?” "How accurate do you think they are?" or "Is there evidence of bias in the data?" can be used to assist students in improving their ability to detect bias.
Step 4. The Two?Thirds Rule.
When the purpose of a graph is to present information in an accurate manner, the two?thirds rule is used. The two?thirds rule is a convention used by reputable statisticians that provides that the vertical axis will approximate two?thirds the linear measure of the horizontal axis. The use of this convention ensures that deliberate attempts to distort graphic presentations will not occur.
To assess students' understanding of the application of the two?thirds rule, teachers ask questions about whether the two?thirds rule was followed. If the rule was not followed, teachers might ask if the graph was designed to mislead the reader.
Political Cartoons
While some merchants of deceit use commercial and political advertisements and graphic displays to manipulate people into buying products or ideologies, others use political cartoons. Political cartoons can be powerful in swaying people to believe a political point of view.
When people are presented a point of view of some political issue in narrative form, the merits of the idea can be cognitively processed and either accepted or rejected. However, when a political issue is presented in a cartoon form, its messages may be quite subtle. A point of view in a cartoon format generally leaves the reader with an impression that is often couched in humor. As the reader laughs at the cartoon, the message is imprinted at the subconscious level and often will reemerge without a scrutiny of varying perspectives of the issue.
While political cartoons generally use humor, they are frequently used to make a biased comment on a social issue. They use symbolism, exaggerations, satire and caricatures to present a point of view without any attempt to show other competing ideas (Jarolimek, 1986). Political cartoons provide answers to people who have not fully grasped the full significance of the issue addressed.
People's attitudes and beliefs can be altered by a concerted effort to do so by using political cartoons. It, therefore, would be to the citizen's advantage to be taught to read political cartoons at a critical level. People should understand that a political cartoon is designed to present a political point of view that is generally in accord with a publisher's political beliefs. They also must be aware that publishers have vested interests that may not be magnanimous.
Social studies teachers can assist students in learning how to evaluate the message of political cartoons and in identifying alternative points of view. They can do this by employing a strategy for assisting students to analytically read political cartoons. Students can learn to read political cartoons and evaluate their messages, but they must have both knowledge of current events and a comprehension of symbols frequently used by cartoonists. Devoting class time or assigning as homework the task of reading newspapers or watching national news broadcasts can meet the first precondition. Only when students become familiar with current events and the people associated with those events can they effectively read political cartoons. Presenting a handout of the symbols used by major newspapers or news magazines and teaching the students to recognize them in cartoons can develop the second precondition. The following page contains an example of such a handout.
After the two preconditions are met, students can read political cartoons, and a strategy developed by Lohmann (1975) appears to extend and enhance this ability even more. It calls for presenting current or historical political cartoons and asking the following questions that will lead students from a literal and shallow meaning to an analytical understanding of each cartoon presented.
1.What do you see in the cartoon?
2.What does each thing represent?
3.What action is occurring?
4.What is the cartoonist's message?
5.What other point of view might the cartoonist have taken?
With practice students can learn to read cartoons effectively to receive the cartoonist's message and to see that other points of view are not presented. The effect of the bias presented can be examined in this way rationally rather than emotionally.
In conclusion, a primary goal of social studies instruction is to prepare the nation's young to assume their citizenship rights and responsibilities, and this requires the development of enlightened citizens who make economic and political decisions based upon thought processes rather than by simply reacting emotionally to the huckster's manipulation attempts. If this conclusion is accepted, the obvious implication is that systematic methods of propaganda and bias detection should be included in the social studies curriculum. If this is done, the democratic institutions of the nation may be perpetuated and improved.
