A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: TV networks slant Republican

Ever hear the old claim that the news media are in the pocket of liberal Democrats? Well apparently not ... at least not in every election from 1992 to 2004. That's the word from a new Indiana University study that analyzed coverage on ABC, NBC and CBS.

Indiana University study shows Bill O'Reilly using propaganda techniques

By Diane Silver

Why am I not surprised? Indiana University today released a study showing that Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly out-propogandizes one of the top hate mongers of the 20th Century.

The study published in the spring issue of Journalism Studies notes, and the emphasis in bold is mine:

Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Conway, Grabe and Grieves found that O'Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials. His editorials also are presented on his Web site and in his newspaper columns.

The seven propaganda devices include:

• Name calling -- giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
• Glittering generalities -- the oppositie of name calling;
• Card stacking -- the selective use of facts and half-truths;
• Bandwagon -- appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd;
• Plain folks -- an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are "of the people";
• Transfer -- carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and
• Testimonials -- involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.

The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O'Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin.