Politics And Propaganda

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

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.

Public opinion is an important factor affecting the political decision-making process. In almost every community, the ones in power—no matter what type of political system is established—want to be aware of the ideas and opinions of the rules regarding policies that they have implemented. The factors that take part in the determination of public opinion must be explored further. Political Propaganda, Advertising, and Public Relations: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential reference source that discusses public opinion on policies as well as political communication activities. Featuring research on topics such as campaign management, branding, and political marketing, this book is ideally designed for campaign managers, social media mangers, government officials, advertisers, media consultants, public relations specialists, researchers, politicians, academicians, and students seeking coverage on current technological trends and political communication.

Social media platforms do not just circulate political ideas, they support manipulative disinformation campaigns. While some of these disinformation campaigns are carried out directly by individuals, most are waged by software, commonly known as bots, programmed to perform simple, repetitive, robotic tasks. Some social media bots collect and distribute legitimate information, while others communicate with and harass people, manipulate trending algorithms, and inundate systems with spam. Campaigns made up of bots, fake accounts, and trolls can be coordinated by one person, or a small group of people, to give the illusion of large-scale consensus. Some political regimes use political bots to silence opponents and to push official state messaging, to sway the vote during elections, and to defame critics, human rights defenders, civil society groups, and journalists. This book argues that such automation and platform manipulation, amounts to a new political communications mechanism that Samuel Woolley and Philip N. Noward call "computational propaganda." This differs from older styles of propaganda in that it uses algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks while it actively learns from and mimicks real people so as to manipulate public opinion across a diverse range of platforms and device networks. This book includes cases of computational propaganda from nine countries (both democratic and authoritarian) and four continents (North and South America, Europe, and Asia), covering propaganda efforts over a wide array of social media platforms and usage in different types of political processes (elections, referenda, and during political crises).

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.

How propaganda undermines democracy and why we need to pay attention Our democracy today is fraught with political campaigns, lobbyists, liberal media, and Fox News commentators, all using language to influence the way we think and reason about public issues. Even so, many of us believe that propaganda and manipulation aren't problems for us—not in the way they were for the totalitarian societies of the mid-twentieth century. In How Propaganda Works, Jason Stanley demonstrates that more attention needs to be paid. He examines how propaganda operates subtly, how it undermines democracy—particularly the ideals of democratic deliberation and equality—and how it has damaged democracies of the past. Focusing on the shortcomings of liberal democratic states, Stanley provides a historically grounded introduction to democratic political theory as a window into the misuse of democratic vocabulary for propaganda's selfish purposes. He lays out historical examples, such as the restructuring of the US public school system at the turn of the twentieth century, to explore how the language of democracy is sometimes used to mask an undemocratic reality. Drawing from a range of sources, including feminist theory, critical race theory, epistemology, formal semantics, educational theory, and social and cognitive psychology, he explains how the manipulative and hypocritical declaration of flawed beliefs and ideologies arises from and perpetuates inequalities in society, such as the racial injustices that commonly occur in the United States. How Propaganda Works shows that an understanding of propaganda and its mechanisms is essential for the preservation and protection of liberal democracies everywhere.

Originally published in 1994, this important book traces the rise of film propaganda in the 20th Century, discussing specifically how film can be used to manipulate public perception and opinions. Two distinct areas are covered: war propaganda, including feature and documentary films regarding warfare; and civilian propaganda, including films that address a variety of political subjects. Although the focus is American film and American politics, this book offers insights for all those interested in the affect of film on the minds of citizens of any country or state.