The science of propaganda, spin and doubt: A short summary

At the least, the information in this post should be mandatory knowledge for both a high school degree and for any post high school credential. If a person does not know this, they are more susceptible to the dark arts than is justifiable in American democracy. -- Germaine, 2022

Context

Lots of books and thousands of research articles have been written on propaganda and why and how it works so well. Propaganda became sophisticated in America a couple of years before World War 1. To get the US into WW1, president Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information. The CPI was a gigantic US government deceit and emotional manipulation machine. Tens of thousands of spinning con artists worked for it. Wilson's goal was to con the American people into supporting American entry into the war and feeling emotionally justified, e.g., making the world safe for democracy. Some of the greatest propagandists of the 20th century, maybe of all time, worked on that effort. It was a smashing success.

Wilson's massive public disinformation effort jump-started modern propaganda ("public relations") in support of businesses and commerce (discussed here). Business leaders watching how effective propaganda could be to get people to walk into a brutal war quickly realized that good propaganda wasn't just for governments to use to deceive people into making the ultimate self-sacrifice. It could be used by businesses to deceive both customers and governments. It was, and still is, a freaking super rich gold mine chock full of diamonds, platinum, lithium and all the hot, juicy cheeseburgers that T**** could ever eat.

A short summary of propaganda tactics

In 2021, two researchers, Rebecca Goldberg and Laura Vandenberg, at the University of Massachusetts, Department of Environmental Health Sciences, and School of Public Health and Health Sciences, published a very nice summary of spin or propaganda tactics from 5 major sources.[1] Their paper is entitled, The science of spin: targeted strategies to manufacture doubt with detrimental effects on environmental and public health.

The paper's abstract includes these comments:

Results: We recognized 28 unique tactics used to manufacture doubt. Five of these tactics were used by all five organizations, suggesting that they are key features of manufactured doubt. The intended audience influences the strategy used to misinform, and logical fallacies contribute to their efficacy.

Conclusions: This list of tactics can be used by others to build a case that an industry or group is deliberately manipulating information associated with their actions or products. Improved scientific and rhetorical literacy could be used to render them less effective, depending on the audience targeted, and ultimately allow for the protection of both environmental health and public health more generally.

The list of tactics that special interests who used them is shown below in Table 1 from the article. Table 2 lists the logic fallacies the propagandists tend to rely on.

Tactics or strategies 1, 2, 3, 8 and 21 were all used by all five sources of deceit and doubt.

• 1. Attack Study Design: To emphasize study design flaws in A** that have only minimal effects on outcomes. Flaws include issues related to bias, confounding, or sample size
• 2. Gain Support from Reputable Individuals: Recruit experts or influential people in certain fields (politicians, industry, journals, doctors, scientists, health officials) to defend B** in order to gain broader support
• 3. Misrepresent data: Cherry-pick data, design studies to fail, or conduct meta-analyses to dilute the work of A
• 8. Employ Hyperbolic or Absolutist Language: Discuss scientific findings in absolutist terms or with hyperbole, use buzzwords to differentiate between “strong” and “poor” science (i.e. sound science, junk science, etc.),
• 21. Influence Government/Laws: Gain inappropriate proximity to regulatory bodies and encourage pro-B policy

** “A” refers to information generated to combat scientific evidence and facts

“B” refers to information generated to promote narratives that are favorable to the industry

Logic fallacies

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Larry Motuz for bringing the work of these two researchers to my attention.

Footnote: 

1. The researchers describe the five sources of propaganda like this:

The first, Big Tobacco, is widely considered to have “written the playbook” on manufactured doubt [1]. The tobacco industry has managed to maintain its clientele for many decades in part due to manufactured scientific controversy about the health effects of active and secondhand smoking [1, 2, 4, 6, 10,11,12,13].

The other industries we examined include the coal industry, whose employees often suffer from black lung disease [14], yet the industry has avoided awarding compensation to many affected miners by wielding disproportionate influence in the courtroom [15,16,17,18,19]; the sugar industry, which distracted from its role contributing to metabolic and cardiovascular diseases [20] by deflecting blame toward dietary fat as a plausible alternative cause for rising population-level chronic disease rates [21,22,23,24,25]; the agrochemical business, Syngenta, manufacturer of the herbicide atrazine [26,27,28], which conducted personal attacks against a vocal critic of atrazine whose research revealed disruptive effects on the endocrine systems of aquatic animals [29, 30]; and the Marshall Institute, a conservative think tank comprised of Cold War physicists eager to maintain their proximity to government, and associated scientists who deliberately misrepresented information to the government to both minimize and normalize the effects of fossil fuels on global temperatures [1, 4, 31].