Hiding Intent to Coerce
I can now drawn together my themes. To summarize - In political competition, parties sometimes claim that the views of broadcast media and political organizations who oppose them are propaganda. This charge involves conceptually expanding the definition of propaganda as governmental coercion of political views to include nongovernmental organizations. This is conceptual equivalency; nongovernment equals government. It is usually political parties on the left, representing collectivism, that make charges of propaganda. Deliberate verbal confusion and making of equivalencies often hide intentions of revolutionary change.
What is being hidden by the Left's accusation of propaganda against conservative news media? It is the Left's intent to coerce the individual in the name of collectivism. Get rid of this basic agenda and not much remains to socialism. The Left plays a familiar game. Accuse someone of what you intend to do, to divert attention from your own intentions. We do not need rehearse the history of the Marxist Left in Western society for the past century to establish this point. After all, it is the collectivists of all stripes - socialists, communists, radical feminists, and postmodernists - who deny the existence of the autonomous individual able to make rational political choices. And it is the collectivists who wish to reform society by re-forming individuals, a goal that can only be accomplished by denying individuals their autonomy.
The best way to thwart the political verbalisms of the Left, and unmask its intent, is to chop apart its conceptual equivalencies. Regarding propaganda, we can do this by restricting the word propaganda to governmental coercion of political beliefs through control of information. This definition respects the notion that the individual is autonomous and rational. The point of the definition is that we need to protect the individual's independence and ability to choose. We should use familiar words to label the blatant misuse of news reporting for political purposes. Biased journalism, editorial journalism, opinion journalism, dishonest journalism, and yellow journalism are terms that should carry significant rebuke to news organizations.
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