ABSTRACT
Mass media seen as the fourth estate of the realm has play a vital role in gathering, processing and dissemination of information to the audience. It has become the oldest tools used for propaganda. Since 19th century, the government or politicians make used of this medium to get to their target audience. The purpose of this study is to examine the affect of the mass media as propaganda and political persuasion tools for Nigerian politics. The study used content analysis as a research tool to examine how the Nigerian media used propaganda techniques to the audience in issues regarding Nigerian leadership. Propaganda is deliberately not objective and is usually part of a larger psychological campaign to influence people toward a specific opinion. Therefore, the mass media has become one of the vital instruments used by the politicians to reach their target audience. The hypodermic needle theory and persuasion theory as the theoretical framework of this study shows the media influence on public perception. The study then concludes news fakes and fallacies used by politician as tool in general election and election process. The study them recommend that the media should follow the ethics of the profession and enhance objectivity in order to ensure that politicians do not misuse them to get what they want.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of The Study
Mass media, as a system for spreading a relaying information and massages to the public, plays a role in amusing, entertaining and informing individuals with roles and values that situate than in social structure. Media as a communication tool has a great impact on society. From the traditional simplex communication tools such as Television, Radio, newspaper, and Magazines, to the most current bidirectional communication tool, the internet, media has a great influence on society. Media is a powerful tool that can influence a country’s policies, shape public opinion, and even set the standard for societal norms.
Through this power that the media have, politicians tends to use media outfit to reach their target audience with propaganda messages. A working definition of propaganda is spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause or a person. While propaganda has been around for almost a thousand years, only recently (last 100 years) with the advent of technologies that allow us to spread information to a mass group has it evolved to a scientific process capable of influencing a whole nation of people. While propaganda is most evident in times of war as in the poster, it is constantly being used as a political and social means in even less obvious ways of influence people’s attitudes. This is currently evident with all the election commercial on Television, when the candidate are using propaganda techniques to elevate themselves above their competitors.
Propagandist uses the media available to spread its messages, and gain the peoples trust, believes, solidarity, etc. indeed propaganda is so powerful because everyone is susceptible to it. This is true as explained by Robert Cialdini, an expert in influence, because people exit in a rapidly moving and complex world.
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