Lies, Rumors and Propaganda

Public Relations - Handling Rumors, Lies and Propaganda

Rumors and lies are typically organic and viral. Typically, there's no organized campaign with funding and muscle. Instead, it's usually fueled by water-cooler gossip, e-mail chains and other person-to-person contact. Propaganda is different. It's an organized effort to manipulate the public using mass media, including censorship,...

Public figures are as effective as their reputations are strong. Rumors, lies and propaganda eat away at reputations. Defending against these cancers takes patience, skill and strategy. First, you need to understand why people remember -- and repeat -- gossip and rumors. Part of the reason is that our brains are hard-wired to only keep the most...

It's hard to fight fire with fire, especially when you can't use the same evil techniques, manipulations and lies as the other side and you are typically David in a fight against Goliath, since propaganda is a tool of those in power and on top. Use leaks to undermine propaganda, subvert the propaganda itself and create your own ways to...

A rumor can persist when there's a vacuum, especially when it's referring to events that haven't happened yet. Lies are different. The facts are known. The tough thing is for a lot of people -- because of ideology, personal beliefs and other reasons -- don't care about proof and evidence and facts. They want to believe certain things, whether...

When confronted with a lie, it's not enough to simply lay out the facts. Given a strong enough motive, people will continue to believe a lie, no matter how many facts they're exposed to or how much you undercut their supposed proof. That's why you have to attack lies from different directions.

Hearing a rumor can make you not only think it might be true, and believe it -- hearing a rumor can actually implant false memories that it actually happened to you.

Rumors are inherently tough to squash because they have built-in defenses. Nobody can know the future. There's never any proof of another person's innermost thoughts, feeling and motivations. You can only guess about the future, and about the secrets other people keep. This is why rumors are born and persist.

A common mistake when confronting rumors is to repeat the damaging statement when defending it against it. You have to confront rumors carefully. Always stay calm, no matter how horrible the rumors are. Ignore common, everyday rumors. Let others defend you. Refute big rumors quickly, before they fester. You can't wound rumors -- you have to kill...

The biggest corporations in the world use rumors. Every day, rumors cause stock prices to rise and fall, competitors to start madly developing products -- or abandoning them. Public officials, political campaigns and advocacy groups traffic in rumors to hurt rivals, kill legislation or advance an agenda. Many big corporations and public figures...

Despite all the evidence that President Barack Obama was clearly born in Hawaii, roughly 25 percent of Americans, and 45 percent of Republicans, said they believed Obama was born in another country, according to a poll by The New York Times and CBS News. So how did Obama kill the persistent birther rumors?