Propaganda Rhetorical Analysis

Propaganda is usually associated with brainwashing and manipulation, however it is justifiable when it is used to promote safety and health. For example, in public service announcements to warn the citizens of hazards and to promote safety to protect the people from the dreadful habits of the modern world. The main purpose of PSA’s are to make people aware and to make them act to reach a goal.
Public service announcements are a form of advertisement that is made to appeal to emotions and logic to change the perspective of many people. In the article “Propaganda”, Edward Bernays states, “An automaton cannot arouse the public interest”(110). This means that without an addition of feelings, or pathos, in propaganda movements, it does not and will not work. To make people pay attention and remember what the ad states it has to appeal to feeling and cause them to think about what they saw, read, or heard and how they can change the outcome such as in

an irish PSA. It shows a class of young kids going on a field trip and a man who is in a rush to get somewhere. The man goes over the speed limit in his car and ends up rolling off the road and crushing the whole class of kids. This tells people to not speed so they won’t kill people.
Some people, such as the author of the article, “ Anti-Smoking Campaign:Good Public Publicity or Heavy Handed Propaganda” believe that health and safety propaganda is not justifiable. “And that’s the problem: propaganda, even when it is based on firm facts and good science, has more to do with manipulation than it does with truthful communication”(Noё). I agree that propaganda is used to manipulate, in context of making people act and react. However, to make a statement that most people will listen to, it has to have this special feature. In many commercials, they exaggerate things to make the point very clear for the audience. In an anti-smoking propaganda commercial, it depicts a girl trying to buy a pack of cigarettes, but she does not have enough money. So instead of money, the clerk asks her for her skin as payment, so the girl rips off half of her face to pay the price of the cigarettes. The message from this commercial is that cigarettes make your face look horrible. If a couple of sentences were displayed on the television, it would not cause a reaction, however a gruesome commercial like the one explained will make people react and rethink their smoking habits.
I believe that health and safety propaganda is justifiable because almost all of them have statistics, doctors, and reason to support them. “The difference between propaganda and impartial reporting is that propaganda uses arguments, evidence, please to emotion, and option to influence an audience”(Oakes). However, Oakes also states, “It also demonstrates that a careful and impartial rendering of facts can be just as effective as an appeal to emotion”(Oakes). This shows that propaganda used either factually or not factually can be evenly as influential. The fact that it can be used to lie or to do good and have the same results is the weakness of propaganda. However, in health and safety there is not much to lie about because it is all science and can be proven to be true or false by many different intellectual people, such as doctors and engineers. One example of false heath propaganda is the anti-vaccine campaign. They show that vaccines can cause autism and many different health problems causing parents to not vaccinate their children. This has been proven wrong by doctors, but they still persist. Now, doctors and pharmacies have commercials and ads promoting vaccines such as the flu shot which can work even better than the false information that the anti-vaccine campaign is giving out.
Health and safety propaganda uses techniques to get the attention of people and to get them to listen.

In many different as and commercials they use scare tactics to prevent people from doing the horrible things in the picture or screen. The creators use scare tactics so that the people will be so frightened of becoming the thing on screen or have the mindset of changing that outcome in their own life. Without using scare tactics many commercials such as anti-smoking ads would have no effect on people watching because they would not be scared and try to protect themselves from the future of their health. This type of propaganda also uses plain folks to demonstrate that the people on the commercial are just like the people watching. Plain folks creates a connection between the actors and the audience. For example, an anti-abortion commercial aims to connect the actress portraying a mother to the actual mother of a child who has not made up her mind, or has towards abortion so that they will choose to not kill their

child.