<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

In this introductory article, we discuss the rise of the “classical” theories of propaganda, starting with an historical exposé of the concept, which traces its roots and trajectory through the field of academic analysis. Propaganda is then discussed in relation to other adjacent concepts such as soft power, public diplomacy, nation branding, fake news, and so on. In a third section, the concept of propaganda is discussed in relation to the present datafied world, marked by various forms of crises – of democracy and of the environment, for example. In the last section, the articles included in this themed issue are presented and related to the preceding historical and conceptual discussion.
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The return of propaganda: Historical legacies and contemporary conceptualisations

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The unexpected change in the way media researchers frame the Internet – from a utopia of free speech in the 1990s to a nightmare of spreading propaganda and disinformation in the 2010s – is reminiscent of the founding period of the field in 1880–1920. It was then that, because of the birth of the modern cultural-industrial media system that was put into large-scale propaganda use by governments and other social actors, the foundations of propaganda studies were laid. This is why the work of Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) acquired new actuality. In <italic>Psychology of Crowds,</italic> first published in 1895, Le Bon suggested an explanation for why some people resort to propaganda and why others believe in it. This paper tracks the development of this research tradition from Le Bon to Walter Lippmann, Theodor W. Adorno, and – following the interlude of cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s – the present day. In conclusion, a methodology for explaining the evolution of media studies is advanced, using qualitative-normative propaganda analysis as an illustration.
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Media studies, Le Bon’s psychology of crowds, and qualitative-normative research on propaganda, 1880–2020

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If Plato’s allegory of information trouble occurred within a torchlit cave, the scale and scope of technical developments in information and communication technologies have not superseded his perennial concerns. Drawing from the sociology of knowledge and objectivity in news, in this article, I examine a set of cases of contested information within American communication. Beyond reductionist approaches to objectivity and falsehood in information, these cases bring to light political and cultural contestation over the presentation, omission, and selection of information, as well as value in speculative information. Taken together, these highlight the need for a framework to cover a range of informational issues. The proposed meta-classification of information’s Other opens an analytical space not only to account for today’s alleged information disorder, but also to address long-standing concerns with information order.
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Guarding information’s Other: Theorising beyond information and communications technologies for disinformation

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The aim of this contribution is to elaborate on propaganda to better define the term in its constituent parts and to build a conceptual model that can also serve as a programme of study. To this end, I develop a definition of propaganda as the enforcement of ideological goals to manage public opinion. Next, I discuss the complex relationship between truth and propaganda positioned alongside mis- and disinformation and argue true information can be, and often is, used as propaganda. I argue the contextual environment can play an equal role to the message itself in the process of distribution, dissemination, and reproduction of propaganda, particularly in light of the technological developments of Web 3.0. I discuss the crucial role of repetition and stereotypes, alongside “hot” and “banal” propaganda in either long- or short-term use. Lastly, I discuss the relationship between propaganda and its audiences from a cyclical perspective, considering them in their reception and participating role in a propaganda campaign and the consequences of intended and unintended audiences.
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Propaganda and the Web 3.0: Truth and ideology in the digital age

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This article focuses on the transformation of Soviet Cold War propaganda into the contemporary Russian information operations, bringing together two distinct periods characterised with the rise of new and sophisticated techniques. By comparing propaganda instructions in KGB manuals and the practices of the propagandists behind the 2014–2020 Secondary Infektion campaign, we find out what of the “analogue” Cold War propaganda remains in the present-day computational propaganda and how exactly Soviet propaganda techniques evolved into the new mediascape. This highlights both strong continuities of methods and techniques and certain discontinuities. Our analysis also contributes to the understanding of the very concept of propaganda, singling out such aspects as covertness, negativity, and inauthenticity as especially ingrained features of the Russian style of propaganda that are also regrettably often overlooked in generic definitions.
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The transformation of propaganda: The continuities and discontinuities of information operations, from Soviet to Russian active measures

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This study examines the social, political, and fantasmatic logics involved in the production of contemporary discourses about Scandinavia as a symbolic site and imagined place of sexual and moral decay and as a gender dysphoric dystopia by actors in the global anti-gender movement. Empirically, we draw on a rich digital archive of multi-modal media texts from an ongoing research project on anti-gender movements in Russia and Germany – two countries which provide particularly poignant examples of sites in which this mode of anti-gender propaganda is currently on the rise. In the analysis, we explore the discursive workings of a particularly prominent node in the material – that of the vulnerable child – and show how this figure is construed and instrumentalised to add urgency and fuel outrage among domestic audiences in Russia and Germany.
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Raping turtles and kidnapping children: Fantasmatic logics of Scandinavia in Russian and German anti-gender discourse

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Over the last decade, strategic attacks on news media institutions and journalists have become an increasingly common feature of populist political communication. The purpose of this article is to identify various strategies that politicians use to criticise the news media and illuminate how the use and circulation of these strategies vary between party types. The article builds on a content analysis of the Twitter feeds of all members of parliament with an active account during the 2018 Swedish election campaign. Results show that political media criticism in Sweden is strongly associated with political personalisation, and it is almost exclusively a right-wing phenomenon, though not restricted specifically to populist parties. Public service media rather than newspapers or commercial broadcasters constitute the prime target for political media criticism in Sweden, illustrating the need to take media systemic aspects in to account when analysing media criticism as a propaganda strategy in political communication.
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Media criticism as a propaganda strategy in political communication

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Combatting disinformation and propaganda has become an increasingly common task in Nordic newsrooms. The independent fact-checking organisations are currently joining forces with journalists in keeping the public informed. To better understand what these organisations do and how they do it, this study investigates the fact-checkers’ challenges and interrelations with traditional journalistic institutions, media literacy organisations, and associated national policymaker institutions in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The study is based on 18 in-depth interviews, and the findings show that fact-checking journalism is considered an important counterpart to traditional news media. However, there are many challenges in countering disinformation in the Nordics – both socioeconomical and policy related – that should be considered when discussing how to maintain and improve on the resilience against disinformation and propaganda in the Nordic media welfare states. The study aims to bring some of these challenges to the fore.
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Fact-checkers and the news media: A Nordic perspective on propaganda

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Michael Moore’s documentaries have been central to the development of the contemporary political documentary and have served as an instrument of political activism or, as some argue, even propaganda. Delving into the underlying mechanisms, in this article, I examine the ways in which documentary subjects are persuasively deployed in Moore’s documentaries. An analysis combining close reading, qualitative content analysis, and rhetorical analysis points to key rhetorical categories of documentary subjects. These subjects’ embodiment of six main rhetorical categories displays a correlation with Aristotle’s cornerstones of rhetoric: ethos, logos, and pathos. Further, the categories demonstrate how moral emotions are utilised in constructing the ethos of documentary subjects. In addition, the article addresses the significance of identification in Moore’s persuasive rhetoric. This research participates in deconstructing the mechanics of persuasive mediated communication and contributes to outlining a theory of audiovisual rhetoric.
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Persuasion through people: The rhetorical categories of documentary subjects in Michael Moore’s films

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This essay studies the propaganda language of contemporary – or late – fossil capital. Whereas the traditional understanding of propaganda focuses on the dissemination of information (or disinformation) in order to promote a political cause or ideology, I argue that the main form and vehicle of propaganda for late fossil capital is the massive use of terms and tropes, together with particular rhetorical devices, for example, the interpellation of the individual consumer as responsible for mitigating climate change. The essay studies the language of fossil capital based primarily on marketing material by fossil fuel companies, in the US and other Western countries, such as advertising and advertorials, current and archived websites, social media, corporate sustainability reports, as well as material produced by industry organisation such as the American Petroleum Institute and the Heartland Institute. A large part of the material is taken from two North American legal complaints, <italic>Connecticut v. Exxon Mobil Corporation</italic> (2020) and <italic>City of New York v. Exxon Mobil Corp. et al.</italic> (2021).
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The language of late fossil capital

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This article contributes to the growing field of critical studies about the visual politics of the green transition by highlighting the role of communication and the creative industries in promoting “green” ideologies. “The Swedish Mine” advocacy advertising campaign, launched in 2021, is presented as a case study to illustrate how lifestyle advertising genres are used to leverage the emotional engagement of progressive, mining-sceptical urban audiences to increase the social acceptance of intensified mining despite increasing climate awareness. Using visual culture studies, feminist, and critical race theory approaches to analyse the campaign materials, I explore how the campaign aestheticises “green” industrial progress by tokenising multiculturalism, fetishising consumption, and romancing national identity. As a counterpoint, I examine how social media reactions and activist responses illustrate tensions between mining acceptance and mining resistance in Swedish society. I conclude by positioning the campaign rhetoric in various forms of climate propaganda and highlighting the limits of the engineering of public consent for a “green” transition when such attempts use emotions as sites of “cognitive extraction” to cover technological and capitalist imperatives that ultimately promote Sweden as a leading mining nation.
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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

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 5 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023) The Return of Propaganda

Volume 4 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022) Media Events in the Age of Global, Digital Media

Volume 3 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021) Media and the Climate Crisis

Volume 2 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020) What is Nordic in the Nordic Media Studies?

Volume 1 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019) Disrupting Media Infrastructures

Nordic Journal of Media Studies

About the journal  Established in 2019, Nordic Journal of Media Studies is published once a year, and each volume focuses on a particular theme of media research. The journal is published by Nordicom, a centre for Nordic media and communication research at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers. The journal is supported by the Nordic Board for Periodicals in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOP-HS).　  Nordic Journal of Media Studies follows a double-blind peer review process where all submitted manuscripts are made anonymous and judged by at least two independent and external anonymous scholars appropriate for the subject. Reviewers are asked to state their recommendation about whether the article should be published when submitting their review. Reviewers are also encouraged to provide comments that are for editors only, including concerns about misconduct or problems adequately assessing all parts of the manuscript. Reviewers are requested to disclose any potential conflict of interest. The comments provided by the reviewers inform the decision of the editorial team to publish or refuse the submission. Each issue is edited by different members of the editorial team, which may include invited external guest editors.  Aims &amp; scope  Nordic Journal of Media Studies is a peer reviewed international publication dedicated to media research. The journal is a meeting place for Nordic, European, and global perspectives on media studies.　  The editors stress the importance of innovative and interdisciplinary research, and welcome contributions on both contemporary developments and historical topics. The journal is open for theoretical contributions and empirical research, and combinations thereof. The editors also welcome critical approaches to media studies addressing questions of power, inequality, participation, and voice.　　　  Nordic Journal of Media Studies focuses on the interplay between the media and their cultural and social contexts. We are interested in the media as industries and institutions of modern society, but also in how they are woven into the fabric of everyday life as mobile and interactive technologies.　  The emergence of new social networks, changes in political communication, intensified datafication and surveillance of human interaction, and new dynamics between media, popular culture, as well as commercial markets, are important aspects of the changing relationship between the media, culture, and society.  Publications ethics and publication malpractice statement  Nordic Journal of Media Studies applies several editorial policies that all editors, reviewers, and authors are expected to adhere to throughout the publication process. These policies are based on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines. In instances where these editorial policies are breached, COPE guidelines will be followed.    Visit COPE's website to learn more  Visit the publisher to read the editorial policies  

Volume 5 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023) - The Return of Propaganda