The sounding board of worries about propaganda has often been the image or sense of social (and political) change and instability. This was the case during the first decades of twentieth century, when “propaganda” as a concept broke through to public discourse (Glander, 2000). The unpredictable power of the mass press, and the influence of emerging new media like film and radio, raised concern. Around the turn of the century, sociologists had coined a mental image about changing social order ushered in by industrialised modernity and the breaking of traditions. The populations of the Western democracies were considered uprooted from their earlier frames of social order and common sense, their attention and volatile loyalty seemingly up for grabs by manipulative communication. Against the imagination of masses of atomised individuals, the idea about the potential of propaganda made sense. Communication became a key social problem, an overdetermined object of hopes and anxieties: “There are abundant signs of interest in international propaganda since the War of 1914”, is the opening statement in Harold Lasswell’s (1927/1971)
Figure 1 illustrates how the word “propaganda” became increasingly popular in English-language literature, peaking during the two World Wars, and then slowly fading, although not disappearing entirely. This spectacular rise, relative fall, and possible “return” of the question about propaganda is a persistent key underlining theme in communication research.
With World War I, fears of propaganda grew and paved the way for a heightened interest in the persuasive power of the media. Besides Lasswell, other prominent researchers pondered the various aspects of influential media. Walter Lippman (1922/1946) focused on public opinion, while Edward Bernays (1928/2005) studied propaganda from a perspective that would subsequently develop into professional practices of public relations. During World War II and the following Cold War period, the study of mass communication
As the influence of particular campaigns and messaging strategies showed to be more complex, theorisations about “propaganda” shifted to broader, societal conceptualisations. This made sense, particularly given the fact that everyday life in Western democracies was at the same time increasingly shaped by mass culture and mass media. Jacques Ellul (1965/1973: 25), for instance, saw that the aim of propaganda was no longer to “transform an opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief”. The critical theory informed by the Frankfurt School also informed stinging critiques of the weak effects theory, arguing that affirmative, “administrative” research interests (and research funding) had compromised and led the discipline astray (Gitlin, 1978; see also Simpson, 1994; Lazarsfeld, 1941). The
This “pendulum” between claims for weak, individual, short term effects, and arguments for strong, systemic, and long-term influence of media seems to be a reoccurring feature of the debate inside communication research. It reflects the often-noted dynamics of hopes and fears that are linked to technological communication “revolutions”, with utopias of knowledge and participation, on the one hand, and dystopias about lies and manipulation, on the other. Concerns and questions about propaganda often “return” in such transitional moments. However, media developments are of course not the only cause of this oscillation of hope and fear. They become foci of attention partly because they serve as objects onto which social and political conjunctures are projected. As Figure 1 suggests, the rise of propaganda in the early twentieth century was linked to a global period of rapid social change and volatility. And while the link between wars and propaganda makes (simple and immediate) sense at the level of an existential struggle for a state or a nation, the connection can also be seen as a deeper one. Indeed, the early analyses of World War I (e.g., Bernays, 1928/2005; Bloch, 1921/2013; Laswell, 1927/1971; Lippmann, 1922/1946) were also exercises of thinking about communication and mobilisation of populations more broadly – as if the exceptional circumstances of war had provided new key lessons about “success” and failure of communication efforts in the new changing (modernised) world. For Harold Lasswell (1927/1971), the conclusions about war propaganda led to a theory of the
This new social condition, then, Most of that which was formerly could be done by violence and intimidation must now be done by argument and persuasion. Democracy has proclaimed the dictatorship of palaver, and technique of dictating to the dictator is named propaganda. (Lasswell, 1927: 631)
The rise of propaganda was, in his terms, “a reflex to the immensity, the rationality and the willfulness of the modern world” (Lasswell 1927/1971: 222). The rise of “communication professionals” (Carey, 1965; see also Peters, 1999: 10–32), then, can be seen against this instrumentalist and (at least latently functionalistic) background. Against this background, the abundance of communication expertise in societies since then is, in a sense, strong proof of the fact that “propaganda” – in the sense that Lasswell and others understood it – has not gone anywhere, but has rather been professionalised, legitimised, and often renamed.
As can be seen from Figure 1, propaganda as a term does not disappear entirely from general use after the height of its popularity during World War II. It also retains its place in academic discourse. Indeed, since the 1980s, there is a steady flow of literature that uses the concept. We can also note that one of the standard text-books of propaganda studies – Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell’s
Even if the concept of propaganda rose to heights after World War I, the concept has a much longer history and can be found as far back as the first century BC, for example, in Marcus Tullius Cicero’s “On Divination”, where it refers to the “propagation” of religious ideas (Cull 2019: 172, n17). However, most scholars, including Jowett and O’Donnell (1986/2019), situate its origins with Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, who in 1539 argued for “the defence and propagation of the faith”, thus bringing the concept of “propaganda fide” into the language of the church (Cull, 2019: 9–10). In 1622, Pope Gregory XV founded the
Related to the Russian Revolution, the concept was theorised by revolutionary thinkers such as Georgi Plekhanov, who discussed it in relation to the concept of agitation:
Agitation is also propaganda, but propaganda that takes place in particular circumstances, that is in circumstances in which even those who would not normally pay any attention are forced to listen to the propagandist’s words. Propaganda is agitation that is
In Plekhanov’s thinking, propaganda aims to form people’s opinions and attitudes, while agitation is forming people’s actions (see also Kremer & Martov, 1896/1983: 203). Agitation and propaganda were then put into practice as tools of mass mobilisation and paved the way for the rise of the “propaganda state” of the Soviet Union (Kenezj, 1985). The two concepts were combined in the practice of
These propaganda practices directly influenced the development of cinematic narration, but they can also be seen in the context of the interest at the time to think of propaganda in relation to other forms of communication, such as education, aiming to change people’s minds. In their classical study, Propaganda is the manipulation of symbols to control controversial attitudes; education is the manipulation of symbols (and of other means) to transmit accepted attitudes (and skills). (Lasswell & Blumenstock, 1939: 10)
Their point was that what is propaganda and what is not depends on context: In one context, it can be considered education, while in another, it is seen as indoctrination. Jacques Ellul, however, cautioned against taking this analogy too far, since there is a risk that propaganda becomes a useless concept that can include any effort to communicate ideas with the intention of influencing people’s attitudes, because then “everything is propaganda” (Ellul, 1965/1973: x-xi).
Thus, if propaganda was a descriptive term when it first came into use, pointing to the advocacy of a certain faith or opinion, or as a tool for mass mobilisation, it took on negative connotations in general discourse from World War I onwards. However, this also meant that attempts were made to find new descriptive terms for persuasive efforts – terms that were less negatively loaded.
One of the concepts that has been used to brush up the reputation of persuasive practices in the area within public affairs is
If public diplomacy is a practice, then
In the realm of business studies, one also seeks to avoid the terminology of propaganda for describing the ways in which commercial companies attempt to form the image of themselves and their commodities. Instead, the concept of
If global social and political upheaval is the necessary context for understanding the breakthrough of propaganda to the vocabulary more than a hundred years ago, the same applies to the recent decades of our time. World War I and the consequent rise of fragile and unstable democracies can be considered a reaction to the crisis of the European imperialist world order (see, e.g., Polanyi, 1948; Hobsbawn, 1994; Arrighi, 1994). In comparison, our context today is the trembling of the paradigm of neoliberal globalisation that seems to have reached its limits. At the very least, we are witnessing a moment of transformation and an ideological struggle around the ideas, identities, beliefs, and values that Western democracies – at least in their self-understanding – have lived by.
Clearly, in international politics, neoliberal capitalism is no longer the self-evidently dominant world-shaping power. But more profoundly, the
At the same time (with increasing ecological, economic, and social uncertainty), the communication
While this epochal shift in infrastructural realities poses qualitatively new questions, it can also serve to illustrate the need to stay connected to the rich history of communication research, political science, and social theory. For instance, it is not far-fetched to suggest that our current debates about echo chambers, filter bubbles, and political polarisation (e.g., Sunstein, 2018; Bruns, 2018; Bail, 2021) reveals familiar (intellectual) tendencies. One instinct of an academic is to raise abstract concerns (based on critical theory or conservative values, or often a mix of these); another is to dig into to empirical realities (and often find that things are more complex). Analyses of networked propaganda (Benkler et al., 2018) illustrate this well. The pendulum has swung between cautions about the strong effects of propaganda (communication or media or technological change) and reminders about how such questions must be situated in different social contexts. (In this issue, the work of Malmberg, Hyzen, and Nicolaï can be seen as part of this ongoing discussion.)
At the same time, the discursive struggles take new forms and are utilising new kinds of strategies. British-Ukrainian journalist Peter Pomerantsev (2019) has thus concluded that much of what we are witnessing today, especially the communication coming out of Russia, “is not propaganda”, but something else: a will to spread confusion, uncertainty of facts, polarisation, and the widespread belief that “nothing is true” (Pomerantsev, 2014). He does, however, not come up with an alternative concept for this practice.
We first began pondering this themed issue towards the end of 2021, thinking about framing our question with some of the recent popular buzz words and concerns of media studies, such as dis- and misinformation, fake news, and so on. The idea to pose the question about the “return” of propaganda was not to suggest that propaganda would necessarily offer a more analytically detailed lens to the current media landscape. Rather, we thought the
This themed issue opens with three articles that, in different ways, take stock of the relevance of propaganda research (tradition). Tarmo Malmberg’s article, “Media studies, Le Bon’s psychology of crowds, and qualitative-normative research on propaganda, 1880-2020”, provides a long-range perspective of the field of communication research. He argues that the recent shift in scholarly interpretation on the Internet – “from a utopia of free speech in the 1990s to a nightmare of spreading propaganda and disinformation in the 2010s” – is an invitation to look back to the intellectual context some hundred years ago. The foundations of propaganda studies were laid then, and mass media was put into large-scale propaganda use by governments and other social actors. Malmberg goes back to the work of Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) and tracks key themes on a long arch of this research tradition. Joseph Nicolaï, in his article, “Guarding information’s Other: Theorising beyond information and communications technologies for disinformation”, takes his point of departure from sociology of knowledge and provides a critical reading of some key turns in the twentieth-century study of information and propaganda. He provides an excursus of some episodes, or moments, through which the propaganda analysis (à la Lasswell) that emerged between the World Wars transformed into the doctrines of “free-flow of information” during the Cold War. Nicolaï discusses how a focus on “information” as the core of communication trouble seems to have been carried to present concerns and analysis of dis-, mis-, and malinformation and fake news. Nicolaï calls this tendency the “othering” of information, a process that tends to provide reductionist ahistorical approaches to information troubles. Instead, he argues that the current moment demands that we “not only locate the political and cultural contestations of information and informational omissions, but also to speculate on the emancipatory potential in the world to come”. Aaron Hyzen’s article, “Propaganda and the Web 3.0: Truth and ideology in the digital age”, elaborates the concept of propaganda and situates it to the contemporary media landscape. Hyzen suggests an analytical model that highlights four important aspects of digitalised management of public opinion: 1) the role of true information in propaganda, 2) the influence of different contexts on the distributed “message” on campaigns, 3) the importance of repetition, and 4) the part played by the “audiences” themselves in the cyclical flows of digital information. In addition to suggesting a model for unpacking the complexity of questions about contemporary propaganda, Hyzen’s model points to fundamental questions about the way datafied communication infrastructures enable propaganda practices to infiltrate the very formation of “opinions”.
After these theoretical reflections, the two following contributions carry the debate from theory and history to the realm of acute contemporary international political realities. Roman Horbyk, Yana Prymachenko, and Dariya Orlova also build a historical arc from the Cold War to the present in their article, “The transformation of propaganda: The continuities and discontinuities of information operations, from Soviet to Russian active measures”. Drawing from a uniquely interesting archive material from Kyiv, they juxtapose Soviet Union KGB manuals from the 1960s and 1970s with the recent effort of Russian propaganda, the Secondary Infektion campaign (2014-2020). Their analyses highlight the continuities and discontinuities between two distinct periods that were characterised by keen interest to develop new and sophisticated techniques of propaganda. Horbyk, Prymachenko, and Orlova’s analysis points to the strong legacy of KGB practices, but also underlines how new contexts of “deep mediatisation” has shaped the techniques. Maria Brock and Tina Askanius’s article, “Raping turtles and kidnapping children: Fantasmatic logics of Scandinavia in Russian and German anti-gender discourse”, also describes and analyses contemporary propaganda efforts. They examine the social, political, and fantasmatic logics behind the discourses about Scandinavian people and societies. Drawing from a project studying anti-gender movements in Russia and Germany, Brock and Askanius show how Scandinavian societies are presented as imagined places of sexual and moral decay and as a gender dysphoric dystopia by actors in the global anti-gender movement. They illustrate this through an analysis of a propagandist content about the vulnerability of children in Nordic societies, showing how such campaigns seek to fuel moral outrage among domestic audiences in Russia and Germany.
These are followed by three articles that in different ways analyse and tackle the widespread debate about political and populist communication challenges inside democratic societies. Mattias Ekman and Andreas Widholm’s contribution, “Media criticism as a propaganda strategy in political communication”, looks at strategic attacks on news media institutions and journalists as an increasingly common feature of contemporary mediated politics. Drawing from an analysis of the Twitter feeds of Swedish members of parliament, Ekman and Widholm identify the politicians’ strategies to criticise the news media, and they show that these tropes particularly circulate among right-wing politicians and target public service media in Sweden. Understanding the weaponising of media criticism as tool for political propaganda also raises the issue for media scholars: How are we to develop a critical analysis of mainstream media – a task that still remains crucial – when such ideas are actively repurposed for political propaganda? John Grönvall investigates the
The theme issue closes with two articles that highlight the global crisis of sustainability and strategic or manipulative communication strategies. Leif Dahlberg’s article, “The language of late fossil capital”, coins the term in the title to point to the ways in which the oil industry has been working to avoid and delay action in taking responsibility for global climate change. Dahlberg specifically focuses on the last few decades when fossil fuel industries have tried to claim that they at in the forefront of emissions mitigation efforts, providing “solutions” and helping individual citizens to cut down “their” carbon footprint. As these efforts have taken place while the industry has been fully and scientifically aware of the environmental effects of their business, such communication strategies amount to an historically unique scale of manipulation and distortion that has harmed the whole globe. Inspired by the example of German linguist Victor Klemperer’s 1947 study of the metamorphosis of the German language during the Third Reich, Dahlberg considers these massive campaigns as a (scaringly) successful attempt to corrupt our thinking about climate change at the level of everyday language. As a counter move, Dahlberg provides a detailed analysis of the rhetoric techniques of these campaigns by focusing on the evidence presented in ongoing legal court cases that are challenging the fossil industry and trying to bring fossil fuel companies to justice for their conscious manipulation of their public role. Isabel Löfgren zooms into the intersection between the green shift, and the Swedish mining industries’ public relations efforts in her article, “What would a Swedish mine be without a party? On metals, minerals, and love during the “green” transition: Climate propaganda in The Swedish Mine advertising campaign”. Her critical analysis of The Swedish Mine advertising campaign illustrates how the affective registers of progressive urban audiences are addressed to invite acceptance for mining. Löfgren shows and suggests “green” industrial progress is aesthetically advanced by tokenising multiculturalism, fetishising consumption, and romancing national identity – and people on social media and activists have responded to this. She argues that such forms of propaganda reach the limits of the engineering of public consent for a “green” transition when they begin using emotions as sites of “cognitive extraction” to cover technological and capitalist imperatives that ultimately promote Sweden as a leading mining nation.