With the Covid-19 theatre of global tragedy in apparent intermission, audiences everywhere may be speculating what new players and plotlines will appear on the world stage for Act II. Could a new viral outbreak “that’ll really get attention” (https://www.bitchute.com/video/tANGAQ9aCu6E/) be elemental to the rest of the script or will some other “catastrophic and catalyzing event” (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/sep/06/september11.iraq) stand in for the famous deadly viral vectors of disease? This presentation draws upon scholarship in communication theory and cognitive science as an effort to unfold and clarify the various ways in which deceptions are carried out by powerful organizations in the public discourse. Refining our powers of observation so as to recognize the major patterns of deception, it is argued, will have positive effects in our attempts to build solid intellectual self-defenses against further propaganda campaigns.
Daniel Broudy is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Okinawa Christian University. He holds a doctorate in applied psycholinguistics and undertakes research on the signs, symbols, images, and colors used as rhetorical tools to engineer mass consent. His primary interests are on the modification of perception and emotion through the deployment of agitation and integration propaganda. He is a coauthor of Okinawa Under Occupation (Palgrave, 2017) and a coeditor for The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness (Westminster, 2018). He also serves as a coeditor for Propaganda in Focus and as a research associate with the International Interdisciplinary Research Team.
