The role of propaganda in influencing voter choices in the 2007 general elections in Kenya

Abstract

The deliberate use of information, images, and ideas to affect public opinion, propaganda is a policy tool deployed by all politicians and respective governments during political campaigns, although its effectiveness is widely debated by scholars. Whether in the problem of getting elected to office or in the problem of interpreting and popularizing new issues, or in the problem of making the day-to-day administration of public affairs a vital part of the community life, the use of propaganda, carefully adjusted to the mentality of the masses, is an essential adjunct of political life. All in all, it is rather obvious that people do not vote mechanically nor do they respond passively to the many psychological and other factors in the environment which interact to influence how people vote in any election.

This study therefore sought to investigate whether propaganda was used to manipulate information in the media to influence public opinion and voting behavior. Specifically it sought to examine to what extent the coverage of election campaigns included distortion or concealment of the truth, agitation propaganda that sought to change attitudes of voters, or integration propaganda that sought to reinforce already existing attitudes and lastly to determine to what extent the coverage of election campaigns was education and/or indoctrination. Growing insight into the significance of the media during election campaigns has led to election monitoring and subsequent election observation in the recent years. This has been supplemented with projects to monitor media campaigns reporting. A content analysis was carried out to examine communicative acts of news narrative and explicit propaganda linguistic indicators to factors such as: agitation propaganda that seeks to change; integration propaganda that seeks to reinforce already existing attitudes and education and/or indoctrination.

It was observed that articles are built using paragraphs, and paragraphs were categorized and coded under communicative acts as Reports, Announcements, Summaries and Quotations. The qualitative analysis of the case material has provided a background for discussing a new picture of news journalism as a relatively source-independent and communication-oriented rewriting of incoming news material. The inherent editorial priority principle is readily analogous to propaganda. News is essentially narrated; that is, constructed by a personally involved, individual journalist performing a role as an engaged narrator using a variation of communication acts and aiming at an understandable, reliable and interesting deliverance of the message. From this point of view, news is not just edited information; it is anonymously organized and rewritten on a base of common editorial priority principles.