Bringing Propaganda Back In: Rehabilitating a Concept for the Disinformation Age

• In Event: Gimme Some Truth: The Dynamics of Political Misinformation

Abstract

In 2019, NPR chose “disinformation” as its word of the year. The choice mirrored conclusions reached by many concerned with the evolving relationship between media, technology, and politics--that the next decade will be characterized by a struggle to understand and manage “information disorder.” The recent spike in interest in disinformation, of course, reflects revelations of coordinated attempts by Russian operatives to influence the 2016 US presidential election. This campaign featured a melange of interconnected actors and tactics, from paid trolls to bot networks to political advertisements, each aimed at shaping the perceptions, beliefs, and behavior of a target audience: American voters. In short, whether effective or not, this was an influence operation best described as a propaganda campaign (Jowett and O’Donnell 2018).

In this paper, I will argue for the need to rehabilitate the long-maligned and misinterpreted concept of propaganda, and to bring propaganda studies back into the fold of the political science discipline. The analysis proceeds in three parts.

First, I trace the emergence, decline, and recent resurgence of propaganda studies. From its origins in political science to its role in the formation of the communication discipline to its Cold War politicization (which resulted in its nearly singular application to the activities of US adversaries and authoritarian regimes) propaganda’s intellectual trajectory has been charted less by ontology or epistemology than by the normative and political imperatives of government and business. I argue that the analytic value of propaganda and its more limited cousin, disinformation, is concealed by normative blind spots that prevent us from analyzing modes of persuasive influence--from advertising to dissent--under the lens of propaganda.

Second, I argue that to understand and manage the destabilizing effects of information disorder, we must first situate disinformation within a field of techniques regularly deployed in service of mass-mediated persuasive influence. Analytic concepts such as dis- and malinformation (and their cognate side effect, misinformation) are at home in this field--and essential, as they suggest the importance of variables such as the veracity of claims and intent of source communicators. However, following Bennett and O’Rourke (1989), I argue that an analysis of propaganda must also consider
1. the presentation of the source or propagandist’s identity (authentic, revealed, hidden, deceptive, or false);
2. the mode of intellectual or personal engagement between source and audience (deliberative dialogue, rational dialogue, logical demonstration, or information dissemination);
3. and the balance of power between the source and the audience (equal/explicit, ambiguous, superior/explicit, or superior/implicit)

The relative capaciousness of such a propaganda concept enables the researcher to identify precisely what is and isn’t novel about the contemporary information environment, which is characterized, not simply by the distributed capacity to disseminate false or misleading information for political gain, but also by the capacity to conceal and to counterfeit identities online, the phenomenon of interactive communication between source and audience, and the democratization of the tools of propaganda, such that centralized political and economic actors such as states and corporations are no longer the sole actors in an increasingly asymmetric theater of information warfare.

Finally, I argue that, while the field of propaganda studies will continue to straddle multiple social science disciplines, there are ontological and epistemological justifications for rehabilitating a project of propaganda analysis within political science. If propaganda is, at its core, a mode of influence and control, then scholars whose primary objective is the analysis of power must take seriously its nature and effects.

Moreover, in light of severely restricted access to platform data via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the next era of social media research will need to lean much more heavily on sound theory and qualitative data. Connecting the burgeoning literature on disinformation studies to the vast, but disparate history of propaganda studies will be an important first step in theory building. But I also argue that qualitative political scientists--and comparativists, in particular--have long devised methods for drawing inferences in the absence of readily accessible data. In short, if political science is not the rightful home of propaganda studies, it may certainly be a trading post for a concept that travels well.

Author

• Michael L Miller, Social Science Research Council