Disinformation and deception techniques

Y. M. Vlasov

Faculty of Journalism, Moscow State University

The disinformation technique used by the bourgeois press, radio and television is a direct manifestation of their class essence.

The books “Journalism in Bourgeois Society” and “In the Service of Monopolies” examined the place of bourgeois journalism in modern capitalist society and the system of control and management of it by the monopolies, the main features of its activity as an information and propaganda system of capital countries with a corresponding division of labor between various mass media and propaganda, and at the same time within each of them, counting on a different audience.

This book analyzes the methods of activity of bourgeois journalism, the system of techniques with which it performs its functions of manipulating public opinion and consciousness in bourgeois society, processing the masses in the interests of big capital.

Bourgeois journalism and its theorists reject the principles of objectivity in the press, radio, and television.

They oppose them with the principles of relativism and refusal to search for truth, the comprehension of which, in their opinion, is impossible. Such a position is explained by the social functions of bourgeois journalism, designed to protect the dying world.

For her, revealing the truth of life, revealing the laws of social progress are contraindicated, because this is contrary to the interests of the class she represents.

The system of bourgeois propaganda is based on ignoring knowledge of the laws of social development.

Its methods of influencing people are different due to the specifics of the media and also depend on who this or that material is addressed to. For managers, for those who directly serve them, such methods of influence and indoctrination are used that make it possible to put forward and consolidate certain theses of bourgeois propaganda in accordance with the worldview and interests of the ruling class.

As for the controlled, mass audience, here the manipulative role of bourgeois journalism is most fully revealed, its technique of disinformation, juggling the real facts of reality, and based on the latest research in social psychology and semantics, the system of emotional: tlno influence on the audience.

Bourgeois journalism assigns the leading role in propaganda to various techniques and methods of suggestion in order to develop certain attitudes in the audience. When addressing a mass audience, in most cases she refuses to use detailed argumentation, replacing it with a technique of suggestion based on principles that practically deprive the audience of the opportunity to reason.

The bourgeois press, radio, and television offer their audience ready-made solutions and do everything to ensure that they are often embedded in their consciousness even against the will of people. In essence, bourgeois journalism uses methods of ideological violence against readers, viewers, and listeners.

One of the main places among the methods of bourgeois propaganda is occupied by the method of stereotyping. A stereotype is something between an image and a representation - every time it appears in the mind when a person is not able to independently evaluate this or that phenomenon, event, fact.

Of course, the method of stereotyping used by bourgeois propaganda does not assume that the audience thinks only in stereotypes. The technique of suggestion also plays a significant role in order to introduce certain attitudes and the attitude necessary for bourgeois propaganda towards many important and complex phenomena.

Bourgeois journalism seeks to avoid thinking about certain phenomena and therefore replaces them with more straightforward and emotionally saturated settings that correspond to the interests of the ruling class.

At present, with the development of audiovisual, sound-visual propaganda, primarily through television, in the system of suggestion, the introduction of 11 stereotypes, a picture, image, image directed from the screen play a crucial role in shaping ideas, the scale of assessments that is implanted by bourgeois propaganda.

All this serves to fulfill a very complex ideological task - to inspire the most mass audience, primarily the exploited, with those ideas that in their essence contradict their most important vital class interests.

In the system of influencing a mass audience, emotional techniques play a particularly significant role. They are widely used by the television screen, by the bourgeois press, which publishes many illustrations. In the technique of disinformation, they play a leading role.

After all, illustrations, and television shots, as a rule, reproduce real events and give that plausibility to the theses and attitudes of bourgeois propaganda, behind which its false essence is hidden. Pictures, illustrations with an external semblance of truth fence off the audience from understanding the essence of phenomena.

And it is no coincidence that the decisive role here is played by the word, which is designed to interpret the image in a way that pleases the propagandist and prevent the reader, the viewer, from thinking about the essence of the fact.

That is why those means of journalism, which seem specially designed to reproduce the reality of life in all its diversity and richness, are especially actively used by bourgeois propaganda for the purpose of disinformation and deception.

The technique of instilling attitudes and manipulating the consciousness of modern bourgeois propaganda is a direct successor to Hitler's technique of the "big lie", the very lie that, having poisoned the consciousness of millions, played an ominous role in the history of peoples. No matter how much today's bourgeois theoreticians and practitioners dissociate themselves from Goebbels' methods and techniques of propaganda, they actively use them, which is shown in a special section of the book.

If stereotyping in the bourgeois press is designed to create attitudes, then the argumentation is to support them by means of journalistic information, in which, in the presence of many arguments, one, the main one, is the truth, the truth of life.

Information policy occupies a significant place in bourgeois propaganda. The abundance of messages gives the audience the appearance of awareness, access to information sources, the ability to draw their own conclusions, give their own assessments.

Meanwhile, the very selection of facts is the first and most important method of disinformation. And it is no coincidence that today they talk about the information pollution of consciousness in bourgeois society. The abundance of insignificant messages masquerading as significant, the frequent suppression of the most important events contribute to the creation of a distorted information picture of the world, which paves the way for the technique of lies.

If we add to this the skillful introduction of the technique of suggestion into the information process, the development of an emotional attitude to messages, it becomes clear that information is today the most important means of disinformation. And here again, the same paradox as with photographs and television film frames: credibility kills truth.

The technique of distorting the picture of the world with the help of purposeful selection of messages involves a shift in real evaluative emphasis. All this is most strikingly manifested in the sensationalism of the bourgeois press, when attention is focused on facts of very little social significance and facts that are really important for understanding the laws of social development are pushed into the background.

The striving of bourgeois propaganda to distort the truth in such a way as to preserve the confidence of readers made it necessary to give the appearance of plausibility to its statements.

One of the most cunning methods of bourgeois journalism is the methods of half-truth and insinuation, when a lot of details and real facts that took place in reality are given only in order to substantiate a completely false and unfounded conclusion and pass it off as the truth.

In this case, numerous argumentation moves and information richness are also called upon to give the appearance of plausibility.