Bringing Propaganda Back into News Media Studies

Abstract

With the ascendance of liberal democracy, propaganda activities have vastly increased. The main aim of propaganda has been to protect state-corporate power from the threat of public understanding and participation. Because of its societal importance for public opinion formation, the news media constitutes an obvious channel for the dissemination of propaganda. However, contemporary communication, media and journalism studies have mostly neglected to critically assess the news media’s role in producing and distributing propaganda. In fact, despite of the news media’s integration into the state-corporate nexus, the term propaganda is rarely used in academic treatises on the news media. Furthermore, only a small number of scholars have engaged in elaborating a systematic understanding of the manifold propaganda techniques that are currently applied in liberal democracies. To fill these research gaps, this article maps out various concepts of propaganda and relates them to the process and content of the news media. On the basis of theoretical and empirical studies, the article demonstrates how different forms of propaganda can manifest in news media content. Based on an integration with, as well as a development of, existing literature, the essay aims to build a tool box that can be applied and refined in future studies in order to detect propaganda in news media texts.

Storytelling: representaciones mediáticas de las memorias en Colombia

“…Se intuye, así, un ejercicio de propaganda en los storytelling, en la medida en que el discurso se usa para controlar y usufructuar la acción física, sociopolítica y económica en contextos en lo que se promete incentivar o coaccionar como condición de adecuación social. La propaganda mediática se formula como un dispositivo que garantiza la producción de una aparente coherencia social que es operada sistemáticamente para defender los intereses de las organizaciones mediáticas y sus vínculos con instituciones o con grupos socioeconómicos (Zollmann, 2017).…”

Detection of Propaganda Using Logistic Regression

“…Researchers have identified many standard techniques (Koob, 2015;Zollmann, 2019) used in propaganda, such as slogans, name calling and loaded language, which often include the emphatic content in the title format(every word begins with capital letter) or every letter of the word is capitalized in the double quote. Therefore, our model includes a feature that reflects this aspect.…”

Falling on Deaf Ears? An Analysis of Youth Political Claims in the European Mainstream Press

“…Drawing on Walter Lippmann’s (1922) concept of “manufacturing consent,” Herman and Chomsky (1988) analyzed the way in which the mainstream media constituted themselves as tools of establishment propaganda. The advent of the Internet meant that their work had to be reedited and recontextualized (Goss, 2013; Mullen, 2009; Mullen & Klaehn, 2010; Pedro, 2009; Zollmann, 2017), so that the bases of their critical reflection continue to be applicable today. It is particularly useful to look back at their five filters of editorial bias: the business structure, the dependence on advertising, the nature of the information sources, the external forms of control over content, and the antagonistic logic with which reality is framed.…”