http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=54779
U.S. Department of Defense
News
American Forces Press Service
New Public Affairs Chief Sets Out to Transform Communications Processes
By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, June 15, 2009 – When Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates tapped Price Floyd to run the Defense Department’s public affairs operation, he gave him two basic marching orders: improve the way the department communicates -- especially to young people -- and solicit feedback in the process.
So one week into the job as principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, Floyd is taking a fresh look at traditional public affairs and strategic communications practices with an eye toward making them more responsive, more relevant, more inclusive and more transparent.
Gone will be the days, he said, when the department released information and conveyed messages hoping they’d reach receptive ears and eyes and convince skeptical audiences at home and abroad. The new goal will be better-targeted communications that reach groups not necessarily linked into traditional media outlets, and mechanisms that not only accept, but also solicit, feedback.
Floyd said it’s evident in his discussions with Gates that he’s “focused like a laser beam” on communicating better with the department’s audiences.
“And he wants to hear feedback,” Floyd said. “He wants to know what people think about our policies and initiatives.”
Gates has made no secret of his dissatisfaction with the way the U.S. government, including the Defense Department, communicates with its own members, the American public and the world.
“Public relations was invented in the United States, yet we are miserable at communicating to the rest of the world what we are about as a society and a culture, about freedom and democracy, about our policies and our goals,” he said during a November 2007 Landon Lecture speech at Kansas State University. “It is just plain embarrassing that al-Qaida is better at communicating its message on the Internet than America.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_propaganda
Nazi propaganda
Propaganda, the coordinated attempt to influence public opinion through the use of media, was skillfully used by the Nazi Party in the years leading up to and during Adolf Hitler's leadership of Germany (1933–1945). Nazi propaganda provided a crucial instrument for acquiring and maintaining power, and for the implementation of their policies, including the pursuit of total war and the extermination of millions of people in the Holocaust.
Chronology
In opposition (1919-33)
Nazi leader Adolf Hitler devoted two chapters of his 1925/26 work Mein Kampf, itself a propaganda tool, to the study and practice of propaganda. He claimed to have learnt the value of propaganda as a World War I infantryman exposed to very effective British and ineffectual German propaganda. The argument that Germany lost the war largely because of British propaganda efforts, expounded at length in Mein Kampf, reflected then-common German nationalist claims. Although untrue – German propaganda during World War I was mostly more advanced than that of the British – it became the official truth of Nazi Germany thanks to its reception by Hitler.
Mein Kampf contains the blueprint of later Nazi propaganda efforts. Assessing his audience, Hitler writes in chapter IV:
"Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. (...) All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. (...) The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. (...) The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood."
As to the methods to be employed, he explains:
"Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favourable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to its own side. (...) The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. (...) Every change that is made in the subject of a propagandist message must always emphasize the same conclusion. The leading slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula."
Hitler put these ideas into practice with the reestablishment of the Völkischer Beobachter, a daily newspaper published by the Nazi Party (NSDAP) from February 1925 on, whose circulation reached 26,175 in 1929. It was joined in 1926 by Joseph Goebbels's Der Angriff, another unabashedly and crudely propagandistic paper.
During most of the Nazis' time in opposition, their means of propaganda remained limited. With little access to mass media, the party continued to rely heavily on Hitler and a few others speaking at public meetings until 1929. In April 1930, Hitler appointed Goebbels head of party propaganda. Goebbels, a former journalist and Nazi party officer in Berlin, soon proved his skills. Among his first successes was the organization of riotous demonstrations that succeeded in having the American anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front banned in Germany.
In power (1933-39)
Before World War II, Nazi propaganda strategy stressed several themes. Their goals were to create external enemies (countries that allegedly inflicted the Treaty of Versailles on Germany) and internal enemies (Jews). Hitler and Nazi propagandists played on the anti-Semitism and resentment present in Germany. The Jews were blamed for things such as robbing the German people of their hard work while themselves avoiding physical labour.
At war (1939-45)
Until the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad on February 4, 1943, German propaganda emphasized the prowess of German arms and the humanity German soldiers had shown to the peoples of occupied territories. Pilots of the Allied bombing fleets were depicted as cowardly murderers, and Americans in particular as gangsters in the style of Al Capone. At the same time, German propaganda sought to alienate Americans and British from each other, and both these Western nations from the Soviets. One of the primary sources for propaganda was the Wehrmachtbericht, a daily radio broadcast that described the military situation on all fronts.
After Stalingrad, the main theme changed to Germany as the sole defender of what they called "Western European culture" against the "Bolshevist hordes". The introduction of the V-1 and V-2 "vengeance weapons" was emphasized to convince Britons of the hopelessness of defeating Germany.
http://www.twiztv.com/scripts/battlestar
1-01 - 33 (Pilot) 10/18/04
http://www.twiztv.com/scripts/battlestar/season1/galactica-101.htm
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA [ RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 ]
1X01 - 33
Galactica - Viper in Hangar
Crashdown: Boomer, heard the latest?: these Cylons look like us now. Primary fuel?
Boomer: Primary fuel 2-8-9-3 K.R.G.
Crashdown: A marine told one of the pilots that we marooned some guy back on Ragnar because the X.O. thought that he was a cyclon.
Boomer: You know what?: I don't give a frak. Red light on the number-four thruster. Go make a visual I.D., see if it's blocked.
Crashdown: Right.
Tyrol: A little rough on the new E.C.O. Don't you think?
Boomer: He's not my E.C.O. He's some refugee from Triton that I've been saddled with, and I didn't ask you.
Tyrol: Helo's gone, Sharon.
Boomer: I didn't ask you that, either!
