Recent President elect Donald Trump utilized several media techniques to spread his message effectively and cost efficiently. Through his rampant use of Twitter, Trump was able to send carefully crafted messages to a mass amount of followers with no cost at all. His tweets were then picked up by large news outlets and discussed in front of large audiences. This method of spreading his message was extremely effective for Trump. Leading up to election day, it felt as if Trump was all anybody was talking about. Even though most of the time spent talking about him was criticism, the spotlight remained fixated nonetheless. This constant publicity may have ended up benefiting Trump to the point of winning the election. One of the key points discussed in the video is the concept of “politics of fear”. Used by Bernay’s regarding scaring people into believing that …show more content…
Trump continuously used the topic of immigration to instill fear among voters. He used terms such as “killing machine” and “will only get worse” as a way to inflict a sense of dread. This was only the first step however. After effectively creating a sense of fear, he then associated this fear with Hillary Clinton by stating that she would ignore the threat of immigration. Bernay’s thought of the public as generally stupid and susceptible to being controlled by appealing to their emotions. This tactic of fear mongering by Trump goes right in line with this strategy. By playing off of the emotion of fear, Trump was able to, for a lack of a better term, “brainwash” mass quantities of the public. I found Stanley’s description of propaganda to be extremely profound. He states that, “the falsity condition, properly understood, is