Media’s Role in Propaganda: From Historical Conflicts to Modern Politics

Every war has two fronts – one fought with weapons, the other with words. From the poster campaigns of World War I to the algorithm-driven disinformation of contemporary elections, media has never been a neutral bystander in political life. It is, and has always been, a powerful instrument through which governments, parties, and ideological movements attempt to shape what people believe, fear, and support. Understanding how propaganda works – and why it works – is essential for anyone trying to make sense of public discourse in the 21st century.

Defining propaganda: More than just lies 🔗

The word “propaganda” carries a distinctly negative connotation today, but its origins were more neutral. Derived from the Latin propagare – “to spread” – the term was first used institutionally by the Catholic Church in the 17th century to describe the spreading of the faith. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, propaganda is the systematic effort to influence public opinion through facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or outright lies, conveyed predominantly through mass media. What distinguishes propaganda from ordinary persuasion is deliberateness – a propagandist selects, distorts, or omits information with a specific goal in mind.

Scholars Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell define it precisely as the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior in order to achieve a response that serves the propagandist’s goals. This definition is crucial because it separates propaganda from education, which seeks to encourage critical, multi-sided thinking, and from journalism at its best, which aims to inform rather than indoctrinate.

Historical roots: How media became a propaganda machine 🔗

The relationship between media and propaganda deepened significantly with the rise of mass communication technologies. Each new medium – the printing press, the newspaper, radio, film, television – was rapidly adopted as a tool of political persuasion.

World War I: The birth of modern propaganda 🔗

World War I marked a turning point. With massive conscript armies requiring public support at an unprecedented scale, governments turned to the mass press to mobilize opinion in favour of the war. Harold Lasswell’s landmark 1927 study, Propaganda Techniques in the World War, identified core strategies that are still recognizable today: demonizing the enemy, framing wars as defensive, exaggerating atrocities, and tailoring messages to different audience groups based on their interests.

Nazi Germany: Propaganda as state machinery 🔗

No historical case illustrates the power of media-driven propaganda more starkly than Nazi Germany. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum documents how the Nazis used sophisticated advertising techniques and the most current technology of the time – newspapers, radio, film, and public spectacles – to win mass support first in a democracy, and then to facilitate persecution and genocide. Once in power, Adolf Hitler created a dedicated Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, which controlled all media output and systematically incited hatred against Jewish people, creating a climate of indifference to their destruction.

Importantly, research comparing U.S. and German wartime propaganda reveals a striking similarity in methods despite vastly different political systems. While American campaigns primarily aimed to build patriotism and war support, they also crossed ethical lines – most notably in anti-Japanese propaganda that exploited racial stereotyping. Both democratic and authoritarian governments, it turns out, are capable of manipulating public sentiment when national interests are at stake.

The Cold War and the propaganda of “information” 🔗

After World War II, the binary of the Cold War reshaped how propaganda was understood. Annenberg School for Communication professor Barbie Zelizer notes that the term “propaganda” became reserved for authoritarian regimes, while what democracies did was labeled “information” or “public diplomacy.” This ideological distinction persists today and, Zelizer argues, makes it much harder to identify manipulative practices within democratic systems – because we’ve been conditioned not to call them propaganda.

Core propaganda techniques: How messages are engineered 🔗

Propaganda relies on a well-documented set of psychological and rhetorical techniques. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, established in 1937 by American academics who feared propaganda was becoming a threat to democracy, identified several of these techniques that remain in use nearly a century later.

Name-calling attaches negative labels to opponents without examining evidence – labeling a political group “traitors” or “enemies of the people.” Glittering generalities uses emotionally resonant but vague terms like “freedom,” “justice,” and “national pride” to inspire agreement without requiring any concrete evidence. Transfer associates a respected symbol (like a national flag) or a reviled one (like an enemy’s face) with a political figure or cause to trigger an emotional response. The bandwagon technique creates a sense of social consensus – the message being that “everyone agrees” with a position, pressuring individuals to conform. Card stacking presents only the facts that support a desired viewpoint, leaving out any contradictory evidence entirely.

A particularly insidious technique is repetition. As propaganda scholars have long noted, a simple idea repeated consistently enough begins to feel like settled truth – especially when the propagandist controls or dominates the media environment. This principle underpins everything from wartime sloganeering to modern political messaging strategies.

Modern political propaganda: From broadcast to algorithm 🔗

The digital age has not eliminated propaganda – it has industrialized it. Media scholars now identify “media manipulation” as an umbrella term for the wide variety of psychological tactics that use mass media to directly shape public opinion. These include carefully selected images, emotionally engineered language, and content designed to provoke strong reactions – particularly outrage and fear – which social media algorithms amplify because they drive engagement.

Computational propaganda and state-sponsored disinformation 🔗

The Oxford Internet Institute’s research is particularly alarming in this regard. Their 2020 report found that organised social media manipulation campaigns were present in all 81 countries surveyed, with evidence that disinformation had become the norm rather than the exception – deployed in more than 93% of countries as part of political communication. Governments and political parties were found to be investing heavily in private-sector “cyber troops” who use fake accounts, bots, and coordinated inauthentic behavior to flood the digital information space.

The scale is striking: according to the Oxford Internet Institute’s earlier report, 47 countries used state-sponsored trolls to attack political opponents or activists in 2019, up from 27 countries in 2018. Foreign influence operations over platforms like Facebook and Twitter were attributed to cyber troop activity in at least seven countries, including China, India, Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

Disinformation, misinformation, and the blurring of truth 🔗

It is worth distinguishing between related but distinct terms. Cambridge University Press scholarship on social media and democracy defines misinformation as false content that may spread inadvertently, while disinformation is its deliberate, intent-driven subset – false content designed to deceive. Propaganda, meanwhile, can be entirely factually accurate but still manipulative when it is used to disparage opposing viewpoints or suppress alternative perspectives.

Modern warfare has made these distinctions even more complex. Research published in Political Psychology examining the Israel-Gaza conflict found that wartime conditions significantly increase susceptibility to propaganda: people find it far harder to distinguish war-specific fake news from genuine reporting, precisely when accurate information is most critical for democratic oversight of government conduct.

The “firehose of falsehood” model 🔗

The RAND Corporation coined the term “Firehose of Falsehood” to describe a strategy used notably by Russian state media, in which a large volume of messages is broadcast rapidly across multiple channels – without any concern for consistency or truth. The goal is not to convince audiences of a single narrative, but to overwhelm them with competing claims until they can no longer distinguish fact from fiction, and disengage from civic life entirely.

Propaganda and democratic erosion: The ethical stakes 🔗

Propaganda is not merely an academic problem. GovFacts outlines six core ways it damages democracy: it involves deception and selective presentation of reality; it manipulates emotions to bypass rational thought; it undermines citizen autonomy; it erodes trust in institutions; it creates divisive “us vs. them” narratives; and ultimately distorts public discourse to prevent informed citizenship.

A related but often underappreciated concern comes from the academic study of propaganda itself. The Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review has argued that contemporary misinformation scholarship suffers from a lack of historical depth – treating “fake news” and “disinformation” as new digital-age problems without adequately connecting them to the long history of propaganda research. This gap, scholars argue, makes it harder to develop effective remedies.

The propaganda model proposed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their book Manufacturing Consent offers another lens entirely. It argues that commercial mass media serve as propaganda systems not through direct state control, but through structural filters: ownership concentration, dependence on advertising revenue, reliance on official sources, and the ideological preferences of media corporations. Under this view, even ostensibly free media can systematically narrow the range of ideas in public circulation.

Building resistance: Media literacy as a democratic tool 🔗

Recognition of propaganda’s threat has renewed global interest in media literacy – the ability to critically analyze, evaluate, and contextualize media content. The European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) describes media literacy as a lifelong process, not a one-time skill – essential for citizens to assess information credibility, identify sources they can trust, and participate meaningfully in democracy.

The evidence for its effectiveness is growing. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that a digital media literacy intervention improved the ability of participants to distinguish mainstream from false news headlines by 26.5% in the United States and 17.5% in India – significant gains from relatively brief interventions.

Yet awareness remains uneven. A 2024 Boston University and Ipsos survey found that nearly three in four Americans (72%) consider media literacy skills important in the face of intentionally misleading information, and 70% expressed interest in learning to identify AI-generated misinformation. However, only 42% knew how to access quality media literacy training online – pointing to a significant gap between perceived need and actual access.

The Council of Europe has positioned media literacy as a core democratic competence, embedded within its Reference Framework for Democratic Culture. It emphasizes that the ability to critically engage with propaganda and disinformation is not just a safeguarding skill but a fundamental requirement for active, informed citizenship – and that schools are the most important site for building this capacity at scale.

What do you think? As propaganda techniques grow more sophisticated and harder to detect – from deepfake videos to AI-generated news articles – is media literacy education alone sufficient to protect democratic public discourse? And when governments in democracies use manipulative messaging during crises, where exactly is the line between legitimate public communication and propaganda?

References

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