I always find it fun to look at the etymology of words. The word propaganda has it's roots in Latin--propagare, meaning to spread or disseminate. In Spanish, the word propaganda can be used to describe advertisements.
Journalism today seems to be less about dissecting a story and looking at it from different angles, and more about using a story to bolster some kind of narrative, often political. I'm not sure what has caused this shift, but I would imagine it has something to do with financial incentives combined with the rate at which stories can be produced and disseminated.
Not sure how we fix this and get back to popular news being more boring and less tabloid, like Reuters or Wall Street Journal (news column, not opinion). I imagine it will require education starting at an early age, teaching people how to consume media with a critical eye, and engage in discourse in a civil manner. With hope, this will create a financial incentive for journalists to publish more objective stories.
I have always consider ads propaganda. One of the main purposes of propaganda is to influence or persuade an audience. Throw in how little information is in most ads or if they do provide any information it's often biased toward the product or company making the ad. The ads goal is to influence your purchasing behavior or persuade to buy what ever it is. They often use the same techniques to achieve this influence as what most people call propaganda. In my eyes they are the same. I guess you could call most ads corporate propaganda.
As for why the news media became a brainwashing medium instead of a platform for distributing news, I think a lot of it has to do with the power of the internet to bring in Outsider opinions into the brains of normal people.. in order to counteract this power of the internet, the media has to increase their own propaganda rate, and likewise the rest of the establishment has to do the same
Journalism today seems to be less about dissecting a story and looking at it from different angles, and more about using a story to bolster some kind of narrative, often political. I'm not sure what has caused this shift, but I would imagine it has something to do with financial incentives combined with the rate at which stories can be produced and disseminated.
Not sure how we fix this and get back to popular news being more boring and less tabloid, like Reuters or Wall Street Journal (news column, not opinion). I imagine it will require education starting at an early age, teaching people how to consume media with a critical eye, and engage in discourse in a civil manner. With hope, this will create a financial incentive for journalists to publish more objective stories.