Edging Toward a Paper

I'm prepared to give credit where it's due: the persuaders (some of them- Luntz especially) have a brilliant gig going. They are making money and swaying public opinion in a big way. Like Meredith, though, I think the public is a little smarter than they were portrayed in the video. However amazing a product looks in an ad, most consumers will do a little more research, ask for others' opinions at least, before buying. I think, therefore, that the advertising world, for all its persuasion, is not so dangerous a thing, and can only interest us, it cannot force us to buy anything. They cannot spoon feed us our opinions, no matter how hard they may try. By the advertising world, however, I mean the agencies trying to sell us products and services.
When it comes to politics, I think the persuaders become not only much more powerful in their ability to spoon feed, but also much more dangerous to the public mind. Especially when it comes to the persuaders employed by the ruling government, we see a language shift that takes a concept the public disdains and makes it into a very friendly sounding national plan that everyone is willing to accept. When the government has a significant say in what broadcasters announce on television and what reporters write in newspapers, the public has less access to an unbiased truth. The new lingo, as we have seen, is everywhere. And while Bernays made some attempt to defend his power as a persuader, Luntz boldly goes where no man has gone before and turns public opinion with not a hint of an excuse. I'm not sure where I'm going with all this yet, hopefully my paper will be a little narrower, but I feel that the persuaders involved in the rhetoric of politics need to be very careful of what they're feeding the public, and that the public needs to be very wary of what they see and read, and that an understanding of the semantics of rhetoric is very important at this time in history, and that the public's general lack of that knowledge is in fact allowing the persuaders to spoon feed Americans their opinions. Uh-oh....