Here's a fascinating story written by the writers' coach Roy Peter Clark on the subject of propaganda and the current U.S. presidential campaign.

Yes propaganda, that loaded word we often associate with other brutal regimes and philosophies in different countries and even different times. Clark argues cogently that subtle, and maybe not so subtle, methods of persusion are as alive and well in a democracy as a dictatorship.

Clark, vice-president of the Poynter Institute, rakes out a 1937 leaflet from an organisation called the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, and ticks off the seven points of recognisable propaganda outlined by the group and updates it with reference to the recent tightly-scripted Democratic and Republican conventions.

The parallels are thought-provoking and seemingly obvious yet the point of Clark's article is that, while no journalist likes to admit to being taken in by such techniques, the press corps reports faithfully the tricks being played, with no reference to the underhand methods of persuasion being played on the voters.

No politician, Republican or Democrat, would admit he or she is in the propaganda business. And no journalist I know would admit to being an enabler of the propaganda efforts of a particular political party. Like it or not, every scripted moment of every convention, every syllable of every campaign speech, is an act of political propaganda.[source]

While on the subject of spin, a new website launched this week claims to be the antidote to biased articles. Spinspotter says it monitors and exposes news spin and bias, misuse of sources, and suspect factual support. With both conservative and liberals on the company's board the website claims its anti-spin software tool is a new experience in reading the news.

Can't endorse it I'm afraid as I haven't worked it out yet, but certainly sounds interesting.

Image above: The culmination of the tightly-scripted 2008 Democratic Convention. The Obama and Biden families awash in a sea of red, white and blue. Credit: Dtgwu2005.