propaganda
/prɒpəˈɡandə
/noun
1 [mass noun] Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view: he was charged with distributing enemy propaganda...
- Of course, an evil regime will attempt to use our views for its propaganda.
- Most blogs are a form of personal propaganda, stating views in an authoritative tone.
- He then went on to use this view as propaganda to control people and make them feel what he was doing was right.
Synonyms
information, promotion, advertising, advertisement, publicity, advocacy;
spin, newspeak, agitprop, disinformation, counter-information, brainwashing, indoctrination, the big lie
informal info, hype, plugging
1.1The dissemination of propaganda as a political strategy: the party’s leaders believed that a long period of education and propaganda would be necessary...
- This stands, as we shall see, in a long tradition of propaganda by deed.
- The miners were no angels but the media was blatantly and cynically used as a propaganda machine for the government.
- The third method is to set up a system of accountability for propaganda work.
2 (Propaganda) A committee of cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church responsible for foreign missions, founded in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV.
Origin
Italian, from modern Latin congregatio de propaganda fide 'congregation for propagation of the faith' (see sense 2). sense 1 dates from the early 20th century.
Today propaganda has negative connotations, with implications of bias and deception, but these date only from the mid 19th century. In 1622 Pope Gregory XV set up the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the ‘Congregation for Propagation of the Faith’ responsible for spreading the word of Christianity by missions around the world. Propagate, from the same Latin word, was already well established, having arrived in the 16th century.