This is a Progressive Blogger Union entry.

The basic definition of propaganda is simply information for the purpose of advocacy. Neutral in the dictionaries, in common use it has picked up the connotation of deceptive information, or dishonest advocacy, and as such is often a word used to describe information merely put out by people advocating a position with which one disagrees. When two sides have equal voice in a debate, the addition of spin isn't particularly significant, other than the morally corrosive effect of deciding to try to deliberately deceive an audience. When a government or corporation is involved, however, it is a much more serious matter; the sheer imbalance of power and communicative reach require that societies attempt to constrain deception, lest the entire society be reduced to making critical decisions based almost entirely on falsehoods.

There are some basic protections in place. In the case of corporate advertising, in theory the public should be protected by the FCC and the FTC, which have guidelines on truth in advertising that required that all claims must be 1) truthful, 2) non-misleading, and 3) substantiated. In practice, this is rarely enforced, and the real standard is mostly that the business not cause consumers to receive bills much larger than they were expecting, or receive products almost completely different from what they were expecting. Miss Cleo received massive fines not for claiming that she was psychic, but for misleading callers about how much they would be charged for calling her. (From one perspective, almost all advertising is fundamentally dishonest anyway: it is designed to induce someone to make a purchase decision on factors other than the merits of or need for the product, and generally by deceptive innuendo.)

One would expect that this protection would apply even more strongly to government officials or those running for office, who as public servants have a greater obligation to the public, but the reverse is actually true. Candidates have a legal right to lie to voters, and I don't recall any elected official in my lifetime ever being jailed for making false public statements, either. Presidents have Press Secretaries (a practice that started when President Herbert Hoover, not considered one of our better presidents, appointed George Akerson in 1929) for the primary purpose of "managing" the press, which is a fancy way of saying manipulating, deceiving, or otherwise subverting the traditional investigative role of the free press, converting them from watchdogs of the people into propaganda mouthpieces.

So, if the law fails to provide protection, then the only counter to bad speech is more speech. The difficulty lies in making oneself heard. Anyone can start up their own blog and reach an audience of a few thousand with minimal investment of time or money, but reaching more than that creates larger financial burdens to handle the bandwidth, storage, and backup needs, as well as a larger amount of time to provide useful (or at least entertaining entries) to draw in a larger readership, something that generally isn't possible over a single issue. Some have some success in simply buying a fast connection, and then convincing already established blogs to feature them to an already gathered audience.

For those with lots of money or excellent fundraising ability it is sometimes possible to compete in the playground of the mainstream media. Fortunately, the internet has somewhat revolutionized fundraising by greatly lowering the overhead involved, something that helped out the campaign of Howard Dean. Vote to Impeach also managed to raise enough money from online donations to run a full page advertisement in the New York Times, which some people have noted as a contributing factor in Ari Fleischer's resignation. The Union of Concerned Scientists is currently trying to raise money to run a counter-advertisement to the auto alliance advertisement in support of the lawsuit to block the new California pollution laws.

For entire groups with a lot of time and at least sufficient funding for basic hosting, it's possible to put together a website dedicated to nothing but noting and correcting misinformation in the mainstream press. Media Matters is one such, while Media Transparency is another, focused more on following the money, to find out who is funding which bits of propaganda. Yet others try to gather the protection of the law by means of petitions to the FCC about White House "Video News Releases", unattributed propaganda slipped to news stations to be distributed as news. This strikes me somewhat as petitioning to the fox in charge of the henhouse, but one can always hope they get lucky.

One entrepreneurial fellow is even trying to turn a profit: he's selling a device that blocks out notoriously inaccurate Fox News. He says he is doing it more to raise awareness than to make money, something he seems to have had some moderate success at, since along with his sales, he's gotten a few thousand e-mails, and some death threats.

Not for the faint-of-heart, entrepreneurship. One doesn't have to go that far to be helpful, of course. Simply spreading the word of counter-propaganda to those near you reaches at least a tiny audience, that may spread out a ways as people talk or gossip with each other.

They also serve who only sit and link.