Mormons on both sides of the aisle look to Election Day — and beyond

In this April 16, 2012 file photo, Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and his wife Ann, are seen outside Fenway Park baseball stadium in Boston. Americans Mormons are considering the possibilities as one of their own â€” Mitt Romney â€” enters Election Day with a very real chance to become the first Mormon president of the United States.

Steven Senne, Associated Press

Summary

Americans Mormons are considering the possibilities as one of their own — Mitt Romney — enters Election Day with a very real chance to become the first Mormon president of the United States.

“I know a lot of Mormons who don’t like Romney’s politics, but they feel a sense of kinship or sympathy‘propaganda’ ‘information warfare’ or, the contemporary preferred term, ‘strategic communication’.

Bearing in mind that the unconscious responds to feelings, simply cloaking information in a feel of objectivity, impartiality and authority is enough to seduce the human information processing stream. As far as the unconscious is concerned, if it looks and sounds and feels like a fact, it probably is a fact.

In a chapter of the book Military Life: The Psychology of Serving in Peace and Combat, Steven Collins traces the history of psychological operations in the US. He describes the wartime use of radio, TV and newspapers in foreign countries as a means to “influence emotion, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately… behaviour.”

In one example, in 2003 a US psy-ops radio station in Iraq ran news coverage that was both