Media and Propaganda in an Age of Disinformation
A newly published book, edited by Barbie Zelizer, Raymond Williams Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, and Nelson Ribeiro, Professor of Communication Studies at Universidade Católica Portuguesa — “Media and Propaganda in an Age of Disinformation”— explores propaganda across borders, topics and timelines.
The book emerges from the Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication, a week-long workshop
that allows early-career researchers from around the world to explore pressing topics in media and communication with senior scholars. Zelizer, director of Annenberg’s Center for Media at Risk, has collaborated with Ribeiro, Vice-Rector at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, for the last five years to hold these workshops.
Each chapter in the book started as a keynote given at the Lisbon Winter School, Zelizer explains. There is a chapter by Ciara Greene called “From Fake News to False Memories: Tracing the Consequences of Exposure to Misinformation,” and David Welch’s keynote turned into the chapter “Know Your Enemy: Propaganda and Stereotypes of the “Other” From World War I to the Present.” In addition to the book, the International Journal of Communication featured a special section of articles in 2024 drawn from select presentations about media and propaganda by the Winter School’s early-career researchers.
Q: In your chapter, “Is Propaganda by Any Other Name Still Propaganda?” you write that there is a tendency, particularly in democratic regimes, not to call propaganda campaigns “propaganda.” Why do you think that is?
We see unmistakable currents for thinking about propaganda that limit its use in democracies. Though early thinkers about propaganda — like Lasswell, Lippmann or Bernays — argued it had good and bad sides that made it relevant to all kinds of political regimes, the binary thinking of the Cold War shifted use of the term “propaganda” to address autocracies and the term “information” to describe what happens in democracies.
This idea, that autocracies propagandize while democracies persuade, has been strengthened ever since. It’s particularly prevalent today, where a combination of privatization, polarization and digitization hides the similarities between current information disorder and traditional notions of propaganda. Identifying information disorder as propaganda risks impairing the very foundation on which democracy rests. So we tend to steer clear of it.
Q: What can history tell us about propaganda in the contemporary digital media environment?
History shows us that the distinction we draw between “good” and “bad” regimes, especially when we associate them with propaganda’s “absence” and “presence,” simply doesn’t hold. They are more similar than we recognize. Not only is the boundary less clear and stable than we would like to believe, but it is a cautionary sign for how we read today’s information disorder around us. For if we don’t link current information chaos to its historical antecedents more fully, we’ll struggle to slow its spread.
Q: What do you find when comparing propaganda in democratic and autocratic regimes?
The fact that propaganda gets externalized to autocratic regimes and invisibilized in democracies makes it harder to secure a clear picture of what it looks like comparatively. The traditional practices of top-down and state-controlled nefarious relays still exist.
But so do current practices that may seem to be more about persuasion than propaganda. These practices substitute privatization for state activity, lateral and multi-directional polarization for top-down control and digital technology for legacy media. They suggest that we need to do a better job of identifying propaganda that works differently from the traditional model and to be clearer about how notions like disinformation, misinformation and fake news are all very much varying forms of propaganda.
We need a more capacious understanding of current propagandistic practices if we are ever to regain a more healthy information environment.
