Politics and Propaganda
Politics and Propaganda

Author: Nicholas J. O'Shaughnessy

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780719068539

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From the taunting videos of Osama Bin Laden to the partisan euphoria of the embedded journalist, from the visual rhetoric of the anti-globalisation movement to the empire of spin to the scalding polemics of American campaign advertising, propaganda is back. This book provides a full and detailed analysis of the phenomenon of propaganda, its meaning, content and urgent significance. It is one of the most original works ever published on the subject. While it applies a conceptual approach to the study of propaganda, the theoretics are grounded in practice. Insightful case studies on Symbolic Government, negative campaign advertising, single issue group polemic and corporate propaganda, culminate in a vivid narrative of the role of propaganda in driving the remorseless new conflict which began on September 11 2001. Contents Part One: Defining what and reasoning why 1. A question of meaning 2. Explaining propaganda Part Two: A conceptual arrangement 3. An essential trinity: rhetoric, symbolism and myth 4. Elements of propaganda: foundations; why we need enemies; enmity in action Part Three: case studies in propaganda 5. Privatising propaganda: the rise of the single issue 6. Evangelism and corporate propaganda 7. Propaganda and the symbolic state: a British experience 8. 9-11 and war 9. Weapons of mass deception: propaganda, the media and the Iraq war Afterword - The impact of propaganda Index Nicholas O'Shaughnessy is Professor of Marketing and Communication at the University of Keele

Network Propaganda
Network Propaganda

Author: Yochai Benkler

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-09-17

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 0190923644

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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or "Fake news" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a "post-truth" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives. Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analysing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment. The authors argue that longstanding institutional, political, and cultural patterns in American politics interacted with technological change since the 1970s to create a propaganda feedback loop in American conservative media. This dynamic has marginalized centre-right media and politicians, radicalized the right wing ecosystem, and rendered it susceptible to propaganda efforts, foreign and domestic. For readers outside the United States, the book offers a new perspective and methods for diagnosing the sources of, and potential solutions for, the perceived global crisis of democratic politics.

After the Propaganda State
After the Propaganda State

Author: Daniel C. Lynch

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 0804734615

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This book argues that a combination of property rights reform, administrative fragmentation, and technological advance has caused the post-Mao Chinese state to lose a significant degree of control over “thought work,” or the management of propagandistic communications flowing into and through Chinese society. The East Asian economic meltdown of the late 1990’s has reinforced the conviction, derived from Communism’s nearly worldwide collapse a decade earlier, that the only path to sustained prosperity combines an openness to trade and investment with market economies that are minimally impinged upon by state intervention. But, the author argues, the situations in China demonstrates that the political, social, and cultural costs of “reform and opening” are high. Notably, the construction of culture in China has fallen into the hands of lower-level government administrators, semiautonomous individuals and groups in society, and foreign-based public and private organizations. Contrary to the prevailing neo-liberal wisdom, however, this transformation has not generated a Habermasian public sphere and an autonomous civil society that will lead China inevitably toward democracy. Instead, the immediate result has been “public sphere praetorianism,” a condition in which the construction of culture becomes excessively market-oriented without being directed toward the achievement of public political goals. The case of China shows that under such conditions, a society is set adrift and rudderless, with its members unable or unwilling to channel their energies toward the resolution of pressing public concerns, and communication flows dissolve into a patternless mosaic. True, the flows are much less constrained by government than ever before—an important precondition for democratization. But the short-term effect is actually an enervating depoliticization—even narcotization—of society, while the state itself paradoxically continues to lose control.

Media Control
Media Control

Author: Noam Chomsky

Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Published: 2011-01-04

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 160980015X

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Noam Chomsky’s backpocket classic on wartime propaganda and opinion control begins by asserting two models of democracy—one in which the public actively participates, and one in which the public is manipulated and controlled. According to Chomsky, "propaganda is to democracy as the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state," and the mass media is the primary vehicle for delivering propaganda in the United States. From an examination of how Woodrow Wilson’s Creel Commission "succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population," to Bush Sr.'s war on Iraq, Chomsky examines how the mass media and public relations industries have been used as propaganda to generate public support for going to war. Chomsky further touches on how the modern public relations industry has been influenced by Walter Lippmann’s theory of "spectator democracy," in which the public is seen as a "bewildered herd" that needs to be directed, not empowered; and how the public relations industry in the United States focuses on "controlling the public mind," and not on informing it. Media Control is an invaluable primer on the secret workings of disinformation in democratic societies.

Selected Writings on Media, Propaganda, and Political Communication
Selected Writings on Media, Propaganda, and Political Communication

Author: Siegfried Kracauer

Publisher:

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 9780231158978

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This book brings together a broad selection of Siegfried Kracauer's work on media and political communication, much of it previously unavailable in English. It features writings spanning more than two decades, from the 1930s to the early Cold War period.

Propaganda, the Press and Conflict
Propaganda, the Press and Conflict

Author: David R. Willcox

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-09-19

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1134237626

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An incisive analysis of the use of the press for propaganda purposes during conflicts, using the first Gulf War and the intervention in Kosovo as case studies. As the contemporary analysis of propaganda during conflict has tended to focus considerably upon visual and instant media coverage, this book redresses the imbalance and contributes to the growing discourse on the role of the press in modern warfare. Through an innovative comparative analysis of press treatment of the two conflicts it reveals the existence of five consistent propaganda themes: portrayal of the leader figure, portrayal of the enemy, military threat, threat to international stability and technological warfare. As these themes construct a fluid model for the analysis and understanding of propaganda content in the press during conflicts involving British forces, they also provide the background against which the author can discuss general issues regarding propaganda. Amongst the issues which have become increasingly relevant to both recent academic debate and popular culture, the author tackles the role of the journalist in war coverage, the place of the press in a news market dominated by 'instant' visual media and the effectiveness of propaganda in specific cultural and political context. This book will appeal to advanced students and researchers in war studies, media studies/propaganda and psychology.

Affective Politics of Digital Media
Affective Politics of Digital Media

Author: Megan Boler

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-02

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1000169170

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This interdisciplinary, international collection examines how sophisticated digital practices and technologies exploit and capitalize on emotions, with particular focus on how social media are used to exacerbate social conflicts surrounding racism, misogyny, and nationalism. Radically expanding the study of media and political communications, this book bridges humanities and social sciences to explore affective information economies, and how emotions are being weaponized within mediatized political landscapes. The chapters cover a wide range of topics: how clickbait, "fake news," and right-wing actors deploy and weaponize emotion; new theoretical directions for understanding affect, algorithms, and public spheres; and how the wedding of big data and behavioral science enables new frontiers of propaganda, as seen in the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal. The collection includes original interviews with luminary media scholars and journalists. The book features contributions from established and emerging scholars of communications, media studies, affect theory, journalism, policy studies, gender studies, and critical race studies to address questions of concern to scholars, journalists, and students in these fields and beyond.

Social Media and Democracy
Social Media and Democracy

Author: Nathaniel Persily

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-09-03

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1108835554

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A state-of-the-art account of what we know and do not know about the effects of digital technology on democracy.

Manufacturing Consent
Manufacturing Consent

Author: Edward S. Herman

Publisher: Pantheon

Published: 2011-07-06

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 0307801624

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A "compelling indictment of the news media's role in covering up errors and deceptions" (The New York Times Book Review) due to the underlying economics of publishing—from famed scholars Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. With a new introduction. In this pathbreaking work, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order. Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance. Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

The Disinformation Age
The Disinformation Age

Author: W. Lance Bennett

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1108843050

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This book shows how disinformation spread by partisan organizations and media platforms undermines institutional legitimacy on which authoritative information depends.