Honesty In Advertising

Bit of a backlog of blogging but this one is a timeless Israeli classic.

As I am an educationally subnormal and linguistically challenged PhD in my new home, I have the program guide for my TV set to English. I know, I know, 3 years on I really should be reading the program names in Hebrew by now.

Israel, much like the UK, does not allow unrestrained TV advertising by political parties. Instead parties that reach a certain size threshold are allotted a slot on TV. In the UK they call this a “Party Election Broadcast” and it’s generally run just before the news. In the UK, with probably only 3 or 4 parties qualifying these tend to run on successive nights.

In Israel, with 32 parties on the ballot, it appeared the method was to block an entire hour and stuff them all in one after the other.

Only it would appear that the translation of the name for this telivisual feast was “Election Propaganda”. Which was unexpectedly honest I thought.

election propaganda on TV1

propaganda |pr?p??gand?|

noun

1 [ mass noun ] information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view: he was charged with distributing enemy propaganda.

• the dissemination of propaganda as a political strategy: the party’s leaders believed that a long period of education and propaganda would be necessary.

2 ( Propaganda )a committee of cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church responsible for foreign missions, founded in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV.

ORIGIN Italian, from modern Latin congregatio de propaganda fide ‘congregation for propagation of the faith’ (see sense 2). Sense 1 dates from the early 20th cent.

 

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top