Propaganda and censorship are nothing new, but the art, science and motives have evolved tremendously in the past decade. Freedom of speech and democracy aren’t what they used to be. Artificial intelligence is making it tougher to sort through the facts and frauds.

Propaganda is a form of communication aimed towards influencing the attitude of a population toward some cause, position or movement. During the 20th century, there was plenty of public discourse about propaganda. Unfortunately, in recent years, the study of propaganda has diminished in many educational settings. Meanwhile, we’re surrounded by more messages than ever with near-constant exposure to advertising, news, and mobile media. With so many messages coming from so many forms and channels, it’s difficult to recognize the various forms of propaganda.

“Propaganda is a form of information that panders to our insecurities and anxieties,” Jacques Ellul

“Propaganda is indifferent to truth and truthfulness, knowledge and understanding; it is a form of strategic communication that uses any means to accomplish its ends,” Walter Cunningham.

“Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist,” said Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell.

Propaganda is a form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels,” Richard Alan Nelson

“Propaganda is intentionally-designed communication that invites us to respond emotionally, immediately, and in a either-or manner,” said Neil Postman.

Everyone participates in the process of persuasion. But the term propaganda is generally used when someone is aiming to reach a large group of people, not just a few.

As an activist, you may have created propaganda yourself. People who create propaganda have a specific goal and design a communication message that is intended to circulate among a large group of people and create a reaction. Propaganda involves reinforcing existing beliefs, changing perceptions, activating an emotional response or provoking a behavior.

Today, social media makes it easy for ordinary individuals to create and disseminate propaganda. Of course, communication is always oriented to a specific goal or purpose, as people use symbols to build relationships, convey information, entertain, inspire or teach. But the propagandist does not aim to encourage deliberation or reflection. The propagandist does not encourage independent judgment by presenting a variety of viewpoints and allowing the audience to determine which perspective is correct. Instead, the propagandist uses facts and information selectively, transmitting only those ideas that help accomplish the goal.

Propaganda is often driven by politics and government.

Today people might feel overwhelmed by all the media in our lives, which can lead to a “tuning-out” phenomenon where we are exposed to propaganda but do not actively recognize how it is influencing our emotions, attitudes, knowledge and behavior. Critical thinking about propaganda and understanding propaganda’s intent are crucial responsibilities of citizenship in the twenty-first century. Entering into a discussion about contemporary propaganda invites us to think about the power of communication and our responsibilities as authors and audiences. It raises questions about the use and potential impact of new media and technologies.

Propaganda is not the same as brainwashing or mind control. These terms refer to psychological tactics, sometimes used in warfare, that are designed to subvert an individual’s sense of control over their own thinking. Brainwashing usually requires isolation of the individual from his or her social group. By contrast, propaganda is often so ordinary that it becomes enmeshed with “common sense.”

Although propaganda sometimes involves deception, most forms of propaganda use well-verified, factual information. Propagandists may use partially true or incomplete information that comes from a source that looks authentic, but is controlled by sources that are disguised. These disguises come in many forms. Businesses often provide funding to sources (like researchers and other professional communicators) to create information and transmit messages that align directly with their interests and goals.

For example, in 2014, the government of Norway paid $5 million to a nonprofit organization to produce information designed to influence top officials in the White House. Online, the term sock puppet refers to the use of online sources that are specifically created to praise, defend or support a person or organization. When such efforts mislead the public, they can be called propaganda.

Propaganda plays on human emotions—fear, hope, anger, frustration, sympathy—to direct audiences toward the desired goal. In the deepest sense, propaganda is a mind game — the skillful propagandist exploits people’s fears and prejudices. Successful propagandists understand how to psychologically tailor messages to people’s emotions in order to create a sense of excitement and arousal that suppresses critical thinking.

Effective propaganda conveys messages, themes, and language that appeal directly, and many times exclusively, to specific and distinct groups within a population. Propagandists may appeal to you as a member of a family, or your racial or ethnic identity, or even your hobbies, your favorite celebrities, your beliefs and values, or even your personal aspirations and hopes for the future.

Propaganda may use accurate and truthful information, or half-truths, opinions, lies and falsehoods. Successful propaganda tells simple stories that are familiar and trusted, often using metaphors, imagery and repetition to make them seem natural or “true.”

Propaganda can serve as a form of political and social warfare to identify and vilify opponents. It can call into question the legitimacy, credibility, accuracy, and even the character of one’s opponents and their ideas.

Propaganda can be found in news and journalism, advertising and public relations, and education – and in all aspects of daily life. It is present in information from government, business, religious and non-profit organizations, and in many forms of entertainment including music, TV shows, movies, video games and social media, such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

• Journalism and Public Relations: Public relations is the term used for communication professionals who seek to shape perceptions and influence public opinion on behalf of a business client. In the U.S., there are four public relations professionals for every working journalist. PR people feed journalists based on their agenda. They may aim to get information and positive opinions about a business into the news media by using events, video news releases, blogging, newsletters, policy documents, and social media. In general, people are not aware of how public relations efforts have shaped the content of newspaper articles, blog posts or other online information.
• Advertising: There is a big difference between advertising and propaganda. Advertising supports sales and marketing goals. For example, McDonald’s spent $998 million to buy advertising placements in television, outdoor advertising, radio and magazines in 2013. Advertisers want to generate increased consumption of their commercial products and services by using a variety of forms of mass media and digital media to persuade readers, viewers, users or listeners. The public is generally aware of advertising and recognizes its purpose. Many forms of free mass media, including broadcast television, radio and search engines depend on selling advertising, which enables businesses to sell products and services.
• Government: Throughout the 20th century, the United States has generated war propaganda by defining battles as conflicts between good and evil. Propaganda is also used to help improve public health. You may be familiar with public service announcements (PSAs) that aim to alter your behavior. For example, when researchers found that college students overestimated how many of their peers were involved in binge drinking, they designed messages that showed that binge drinking is not as common as many people think. By reshaping perceptions of social norms, the campaign had a beneficial impact in helping lower the rate of binge drinking among college students.
• Education: From kindergarten to college, some forms of education are explicitly designed to lead people to accept a particular world view. Education can be a form of indoctrination when certain doctrines, ideas, information, values and beliefs are not permitted to be questioned. Propaganda enters the classroom in many ways. Many businesses and technology companies provide curriculum materials to educators which are explicitly designed to promote a particular point of view. For example, Monsanto and other biotechnology firms provide videos, lesson plans and other materials for science teachers. In Illinois, a state law mandates that schools promote a positive image for coal mining.
• Entertainment: Some stories are just entertainment, but many stories are also a form of propaganda. Stories offer ideas and information about good and evil, right and wrong, thus embedding values and ideology into narrative form. For example, as early as the 1930s, Warner Bros. movies offered stories that interpreted contemporary life by presenting a specific point of view on current events, often indirectly through the lens of history. In many American movies and video games, violence is depicted as justified and morally courageous, which is a value message that is generally not questioned in society. Another way that propaganda is embedded in entertainment is through native advertising or sponsored content, where a company’s view is presented as a form of entertainment. In 2014, the restaurant chain Chipotle launched an online comedy series about the agriculture industry on Hulu. Using comedy, the show reflected the company’s values about sustainable agriculture and the humane treatment of animals used for meat.
• Advocacy: People who are trying to improve society or create social change use propaganda to influence public opinion. Activists try to promote social, political, economic or environmental change through using communication activities and public events that attract attention and influence people’s knowledge, attitudes and opinions.

Fake news isn’t anything new. Neither is censorship. With social media engineering, however, the national conversation can now spin on a dime. Sometimes the information is accurate and sometimes it isn’t.

One day, NFL players are kneeling in defense of innocent, unarmed American citizens who have been killed by corrupt police officers and the departments that defend their own interests instead of the communities that they serve. The next day, the corrupt machine paints these brave citizens as traitors for exercising their First Amendment rights to defend their fellow Americans. Thousands of soldiers have died defending our constitution and our citizens. But athletes who fight the same battle domestically are demonized?

The fascists are framing their accusers of being unpatriotic and disrespectful to the flag and our veterans. Remember, this is the corrupt machine that kills veterans while they are denied care at the VA hospitals (no one has been prosecuted). This is the corrupt machine that has abandoned our veterans on the streets of America where they are homeless and suicidal. In fact, more than 20 of our war veterans commit suicide every day because they have been left behind. The corrupt machine has become more brazen than ever with one of the great propaganda ploys of all time. These wars to nowhere have blinded politicians, corporations and many individuals with wealth. Meanwhile, we all have been encouraged to lose sight of the truth and our compasses as our nation and our planet spin out of control.

Answers begin with the truth and it’s up to all of us to cut through the smoke and mirrors before it’s too late. Our nation is just a few months from bankruptcy at all times. Bankruptcy is the greatest threat to our constitution, nation and citizens. It’s obvious that we can’t trust all politicians to do the right thing.

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Political candidates obviously seek as much media coverage as possible, but it doesn’t end there. Elected officials are increasingly using media strategies to influence the outcomes of their initiatives and bills. The relationship between the media and government officials is coming under greater scrutiny by the day.

Social media is fanning the flames today. Some argue that media coverage is turning some legislators and regulators into publicity hounds to advance their own policy agendas, while other public officials can’t earn any media coverage. The disparity is obvious.

Scholars across politics and communications have wrangled with questions aimed at better understanding issue salience and attention. For media scholars, they found that mass attention across issues was a function the news media’s power to set the nation’s agenda by focusing attention on a few key public issues. Policy scholars often ignored the media’s role in their effort to understand how and why issues make it onto a limited political agenda. What we have is two disparate definitions describing, on the one hand, media effects on individuals’ issue priorities, and on the other, how the dynamics of attention perpetuate across the political system. We are left with two notions of agenda setting developed independently of one another to describe media and political systems that are anything but independent of one another.

Communications scholars have long understood the agenda setting potential of the news media, but have neglected to extend that understanding beyond its effects on mass public. The link between public opinion and policy is “awesome” and scholarship would benefit from exploring the implications for policy, media, and public opinion.

Both policy and communication studies would benefit from a broadened perspective of media influence. Political communication should consider the role of the mass media beyond just the formation of public opinion. The media as an institution is not effectively captured in a linear model of information signaling because the public agenda cannot be complete without an understanding of the policymaking agenda and the role of political elites. And policy scholars can no longer describe policy process without considering the media as a source of disproportionate allocation of attention and information. The positive and negative feedback cycles that spark or stabilize the political system are intimately connected to policy frames and signals produced by the media.

Studies of the media agenda can be traced back to Walter Lippman’s (1922) observation that the news media filter reality and provide the “pictures in our minds” concerning the course of public affairs and current events. While, for much of the 20th century, communications scholars operated under a “limited effects” media model, arguing in favor of the media’s inability to affect public perceptions, scholars soon came to realize that the priorities of the news media strongly shaped those of the mass public. This literature argues not only that the media influences public opinion, but also that the media also has the capacity to influence the direction of public opinion.

In their seminal study of media agenda setting, McCombs and Shaw (1972) compared the level of issue-related newspaper coverage in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with public responses to Gallup’s question about the most important problem facing the country. In effect, McCombs and Shaw explored the early stages of opinion formation and information acquisition, finding that the public’s perception of the most important problem facing the country closely reflected the patterns of issue coverage in newspapers.

Many subsequent studies have confirmed the hypothesis that the media has the capacity to set the public agenda. Comparative scholars of the media have found similar effects across the world.

Although scholars of political science and communication have long studied agenda setting dynamics by exploring patterns in attention, there has been a lack of connection between studies of the media and studies of public policy processes. In particular, “agenda setting” remains more or less a homonym between the two disciplines rather than a research topic with a common theoretical base.

Political scientists have studied agenda setting in the political system by exploring the formation and accessibility of the political agenda, as well as the causes of policy change and stability, often absent of a discussion of the media. Within political science, the public policy field’s analysis of the media provides a different perspective from that of communication scholars. Policy scholars suggest that media attention—similar to policy attention—is episodic, providing high levels of attention to some issues, but ignoring most.

Furthermore, studies indicate that the media is a major player in the policy cycle, inserting positive feedback (increased levels of coverage) and negative feedback (low levels of coverage, or no coverage) into the system, potentially corresponding with changes in the intensity of policy-making activity. This perspective argues in favor of pursuing studies of the relationship between the media and the policy process by focusing on exchanges of information between the two bodies, an information processing approach.

Communication scholars have focused on the impact of media coverage on the public agenda—how the public believes, feels, and acts. Scholars in this tradition have studied public opinion formation, evaluation, and engagement. They report finding that the media influences the national (public) agenda through its tendency to focus attention on a few key issues and thus determine the issues, and direction of the issues, that the public cares about. Scholars of political communication extend this inquiry to examine the extent to which the media’s agenda-setting capacity drives public attitudes, evaluations concerning the political system, and decision-making within the political process.

This research focuses on the quantity and content of media coverage on public perceptions of television advertising in campaigns, candidate evaluations, vote choice, political engagement, and more, finding that the media is a key player in deciding what, and sometimes how, the public thinks about political issues and whether or not one will engage in the political process.

By 1981, the field of political communication had matured enough to warrant comprehensive treatment in a handbook. The authors characterized the field as experiencing “a healthy, thriving, and burgeoning state.” One is struck by the much broader set of topics captured by the 1981 handbook compared to this compilation, and the lack of emphasis on the mass media as communication systems in the earlier volume. But the 1981 volume was far more diffuse and suggestive of possible research directions compared to the coherent summaries of strong bodies of research that characterize the present volume.

Today, the research is far more extensive; for example, the 1981 handbook included a single article, by Max McCombs, on the media and public opinion, whereas today there is a whole set of papers describing media effects on the public as well as a separate section on the effects of political campaigns. A similar contrast applies to the media-public policy nexus; the 1981 volume featured a single entry (by Cobb and Elder), while this collection includes five articles with a policy focus.

Cobb and Elder centered a major part of their discussion on policy subsystems, distinguishing between communication essential to subsystem maintenance and incremental policymaking and that associated with major mobilizations and policy changes—those associated with the idea of agenda-setting so ably set out by Cobb and Elder elsewhere. This dual role of the media in the policy process remains just as critical today.

Author Timothy E. Cook explores these relationships in his book Making Laws & Making News, 1989, The Brookings Institution. Cook examines the relationship between the media and elected officials, which influences the news, the legislative process, and the laws enacted. Instead of focusing on who reporters decide who and what to cover and how news is presented, Cook looks at the other side of the equation—the relationship between media strategies and legislative strategies. He discusses the structure of congressional press corps, local versus national media, print versus broadcast and reelection campaigns. The book won the 1990 Benjamin Franklin Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing. Cook concludes that making news and making laws are all part of the same process. Those elected officials who have mastered media relations usually enjoy public support for their favorite issues and initiatives.

Media as an Institution Within the Policy Process

Building on recent approaches that have begun to integrate media and policy studies, we argue that researchers must consider the role of the media as a political institution in studies of the political system, public opinion and policy process. Political institutions have norms that shape daily interactions with the policy process, and media outlets are one of many policy actors whose routines and organization lead to a regular presence in the political system. The media’s organizational process is characterized by institutional incentives, such as attending to elite actor and consumer demands. Just as daily subsystem interactions may affect the policy process, so too do the daily decisions that occur within the newsroom.

Media scholars have often studied the role of newsroom interactions and institutional norms on the production of news and its impact on citizens, but these institutional patterns have lasting effects for the policy process that remain largely unknown. Meanwhile, the media is increasingly recognized as an integral part of the feedback systems that characterize the policy process but meso- and micro-level studies of the effects of journalistic norms and practices require additional attention.

For instance, is the shift toward a more professionalized media and the responding growth of communications staff within Congress a critical factor in the types of issues that make it onto the policy agenda? Or do they impact the nature of those issues, as in the speed, timing, and context surrounding proposed measures? Shifts in digital media—a 24-hour news cycle, the Internet, blogs, and social media—have all changed the way politicians interact with the media and the public, but what does this shift mean for the policy process? A closer link between the routines of journalists and their role as a political institution must be integrated with studies of elite policy actors and their relationship to the policy process as a whole.

Media as a Mechanism for Disproportionate Information

Even more important than understanding the media as a formal institution within the policy process, we should begin to understand the effects of media actors’ interaction within that process. The media serves as part of a complex information-processing system that influences the public policy process throughout. Scholars have argued that the political preferences of journalists, economic pressures, and industry standards are major factors in the process of determining the quantity and content of news coverage. Since the quantity and content of news coverage have significant implications for the public policy process, these factors deserve extensive study when considering the role of the media as a potential disseminator of disproportionate information.

Despite standards of unbiased reporting, the political attitudes of journalists and editorial decision makers may be a major source of bias affecting the topics covered by the news (Hackett, 1984). Researchers have explored this relationship domestically and comparatively, finding a significant correlation between journalists’ personal beliefs and their respective news decisions in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Sweden. While this relationship is more significant among newspaper journalists than broadcast journalists, partisanship maintains a modest impact across all news decisions. Some studies have suggested that media coverage in the United States is characterized by a liberal bias; for example, Groseclose and Milyo study partisan bias in the media by comparing media citations of think tanks and other policy groups to the citations of similar think tanks and policy groups by Members of Congress, finding a strong liberal bias.

The patterns of news generation by journalists and editors combine to produce both positive and negative feedback cycles that characterize how and when elite attention is allocated among issues. Negative feedback is the process by which changes in the political system are “corrected” or “countered” by an opposing shift back toward equilibrium. In the context of news generation, negative feedback is produced by daily or routine media coverage that maintains the current allocation of attention across issues and the type of frames used to present the issue. Positive feedback mechanisms reinforce changes that may rapidly alter the political agenda, replacing the current policy image or definition with a completely new frame.

The media can shape public opinion, which shapes the public policy agenda.

The media has only recently been integrated into agenda setting studies as a major source of information, and as an integral institution in the political system. Writing in 2006, Bartholomew Sparrow noted that policy scholars typically fail to consider the potential role of the media. He went on to propose an agenda for research, suggesting that scholars should consider the media’s role as a public diplomat, its patterns of interpreting, normalizing, and disseminating political information, potential disconnects between political issues as presented by the media and as understood by the public, and how the media is able to maintain its impact (relationships with lobbying groups, key legislators, FCC, and the judiciary), both inside and outside of the United States. Sparrow’s contribution was to highlight a gap in the literature that continues to persist—scholars have been slow to consider the role of uncertainties facing the media in the policy process, and until recently, few had explored the role of the media as a wide-reaching political institution.

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