I'm not a great fan of Cynthia Boaz, but I'll give her fair due. She's written a cracking piece which you can see on TruthOut.org's website, entiled "14 Propaganda Techniques that Fox 'News' Uses to Brainwash Americans."
It's a pretty inclusive article, but she should have added how elements of the Right, specifically the Tea Party, borrowed principles and techniques from Saul Alinsky and used them to their advantage -the organising and the targeting of communities and people within these communities in order to grow a movement from within. This whole current Republican Party borrowed a lot of organisational methods from the old communist party, in point of fact.
As much as they like to invoke his sainted memory, the Republican Party is not the party of Reagan. These people are the grandchildren of Barry Goldwater and direct lineal descendents from the Birchers of the Fifties and Sixties. The Birchers borrowed a lot of organisational practice from the communist party, from the era when the communists were trying to infiltrate the union movement.
It was from the old communist handbooks that the Birchers learned to infiltrate the lowliest organisations, mingle with the hoi polloi in order that they might see and accept them as people much like themselves (which they were), and then move onto something bigger and better. Start with the PTA, move onto the Town Council, run for Mayor, County Supervisors, State General Assembly etc etc. This might take time, but these people, unlike a lot of people today, understood that incremental change is change that lasts.
Thus, when the Democratic party, under the urbane and suave leadership of Gary Hart and co, newly-minted voters from affluent, professional, white-collard middle class homes, people with no emotional or traditional connection either to the working class or the labor movement, kicked the working class of the rural South, Midwest and other areas of the country to the political curb, the "family values" Republicans, many of whom were people these folks had known all their lives, were there to pick them up, dust them off and turn them in direction Right. Even though a lot of this effort took 30 years to achieve.
Cynthia's right to emphasize the fear tactics and brainwashing used by Fox News and the Right, in general, in order to keep their vast demographic so pulverised with fear that they're basically infantilised - hey, it's always easier to control scared children - and it's fair to say that a lot of this necessity on behalf of the Right's public voice arose after 9/11, when we were all pretty much scared cackless. It's pretty accurate to say that whilst George Bush and Co mananged to keep the country in a heightened state of fear over the spectre of Osama bin Ladin for 8 years, that fear now has been handed on by the Right to focus on the figure of the President, himself.
I'll grant you, for forty years, the Right has systematically demonised the Left to the point that the Left accommodated the Right and abandoned the use of the word "liberal" as a pejorative - instead, reinventing itself under the guise of "Progressive."
We watched the Republicans throw various dirty bits at Bill Clinton, mostly in the shapely shapes of women coming out of the woodwork to tell about his sexual exploits. He was also labelled a cocaine trafficker and a murderer. And now we've seen the Right vilify and seek to delegitimise Barack Obama in a myriad of ways which are just as bad, and worse, than the way Clinton was morphed into Public Enemy Number One, by the GOP.
He's been called a Kenyan, a Mau-mau, a socialist, a communist, a Marxist and a Nazi. He's been accused of being a curious Manchurian candidate, smuggled as a baby into the country by his mother and raised and groomed for the highest office in the Land. Some on the Right have characterised him as an uppity thug; one even called him a liar to his face. He's been accused of wanting to establish death panels, in order to determine who might live and who might die under his Healthcare program. All of this has been force-fed various tranches of the public to the point that they are convinced and nothing and no information could persuade them that they've been fed a tissue of lies.
And that's just from the Right.
Because as the Right has borrowed extensively from the Left in order to beat them at their own game, so the Left is borrowing from the Right and - for some reason - undermining this Administration.
Let me show you how, using some of Cynthia's listed propaganda techniques.