Learn how the perception of truth has been weaponized in modern politics with this "insightful" account of propaganda in Russia and beyond during the age of disinformation (New York Times). When information is a weapon, every opinion is an act of war. We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where dark ads, psyops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, and Trump seek to shape our very reality. In this surreal atmosphere created to disorient us and undermine our sense of truth, we've lost not only our grip on peace and democracy -- but our very notion of what those words even mean. Peter Pomerantsev takes us to the front lines of the disinformation age, where he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, "behavioral change" salesmen, Jihadi fanboys, Identitarians, truth cops, and many others. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, Pomerantsev finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia -- but the answers he finds there are not what he expected. Blending reportage, family history, and intellectual adventure, This Is Not Propaganda explores how we can reimagine our politics and ourselves when reality seems to be coming apart.

Reflecting the remarkable changes in the world of propaganda due to the increasing use of social media, this updated Seventh Edition provides a systematic introduction to the increasingly complex world of propaganda. Viewing propaganda as a form of communication, the authors help you understand information and persuasion so you can understand the characteristics of propaganda and how it works as a communication process. Providing provocative case studies and fascinating examples of the use of propaganda from ancient times up through the present day, Propaganda and Persuasion provides an original model that helps you analyze the instances of propaganda and persuasion you encounter in everyday life. New to the Seventh Edition: New coverage of social media as a disseminator of propaganda offers you an up-to-date perspective. The book’s four case studies have been updated and strengthened to demonstrate their relevance not only to past and contemporary culture, but also to the study of propaganda campaigns. New coverage of how a propaganda case study can be structured to reveal the components of a campaign allows you to compare strengths and weaknesses across different types of campaigns and evaluate the relative success of various propaganda strategies. Updated research on persuasion and expanded coverage of collective memory as it appears in new memorials and monuments enhances the presentation. Current examples of propaganda, especially the ways it is disseminated via the Internet, deepen your understanding. New illustrations and photos add a unique visual dimension that helps you conceptualize methods of persuasion and propaganda.

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.

This fascinating new book plots five millennia of the most powerful of all tools of persuasion.

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.

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

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.