war propaganda research paper

Studying War Propaganda

First Online: 20 March 2024

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Anton Oleinik 2

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The chapter ‘Studying War Propaganda’ discusses war propaganda in depth. It shows that although the public interest in understanding propaganda peaked during WWI and WWII, propaganda started most recently to attract scholars’ attention again during the past 10–15 years. Since the development of content analysis has studies of war propaganda at its origins, this chapter offers an overview of elements of this research method. Qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods (dictionary-based) content analyses are briefly introduced and compared. Although content analysis does not allow for establishing causal relations between variables, it is compatible with abduction, aiming to provide a range of plausible explanations, none of which is definite.

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Gerasimov assumed the command of the Russian forces in Ukraine on 11 January 2023.

David Fan ( 1988 ) used paragraph as a unit of analysis whereas Soroka and Wlezien ( 2022 , p. 45) used sentences.

Natives of Buryatia and other Russia’s regions with weak ethnic ties with Ukraine played an important role at all stages of the war.

* refers to any letters or their combination. Similar ‘wildcards’ were used when operationalizing other categories of the dictionary, too.

The author was careful to work with texts only in the languages he is fluent in.

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Oleinik, A. (2024). Studying War Propaganda. In: A Comparative Analysis of Political and Media Discourses about Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51154-7_3

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War Propaganda in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition

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This handbook includes 23 essays by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, divided into three sections: (1) Histories and Nationalities, (2) Institutions and Practices, and (3) Theories and Methodologies. In addition to dealing with the thorny question of definition, the handbook takes up an expansive set of assumptions and a full range of approaches that move propaganda beyond political campaigns and warfare to examine a wide array of cultural contexts and practices.

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Special Issue: Propaganda

This essay was published as part of the Special Issue “Propaganda Analysis Revisited”, guest-edited by Dr. A. J. Bauer (Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism and Creative Media, University of Alabama) and Dr. Anthony Nadler (Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Media Studies, Ursinus College).

Propaganda, misinformation, and histories of media techniques

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This essay argues that the recent scholarship on misinformation and fake news suffers from a lack of historical contextualization. The fact that misinformation scholarship has, by and large, failed to engage with the history of propaganda and with how propaganda has been studied by media and communication researchers is an empirical detriment to it, and serves to make the solutions and remedies to misinformation harder to articulate because the actual problem they are trying to solve is unclear.

School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds, UK

Introduction

Propaganda has a history and so does research on it. In other words, the mechanisms and methods through which media scholars have sought to understand propaganda—or misinformation, or disinformation, or fake news, or whatever you would like to call it—are themselves historically embedded and carry with them underlying notions of power and causality. To summarize the already quite truncated argument below, the larger conceptual frameworks for understanding information that is understood as “pernicious” in some way can be grouped into four large categories: studies of propaganda, the analysis of ideology and its relationship to culture, notions of conspiracy theory, and finally, concepts of misinformation and its impact. The fact that misinformation scholarship generally proceeds without acknowledging these theoretical frameworks is an empirical detriment to it and serves to make the solutions and remedies to misinformation harder to articulate because the actual problem to be solved is unclear.

The following pages discuss each of these frameworks—propaganda, ideology, conspiracy, and misinformation—before returning to the stakes and implications of these arguments for future research on pernicious media content.

Propaganda and applied research

The most salient aspect of propaganda research is the fact that it is powerful in terms of resources while at the same time it is often intellectually derided, or at least regularly dismissed. Although there has been a left-wing tradition of propaganda research housed uneasily within the academy (Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Seldes & Seldes, 1943), this is not the primary way in which journalism or media messaging has been understood in many journalism schools or mainstream communications departments. This relates, of course, to the institutionalization of journalism and communication studies within the academic enterprise. Within this paradox, we see the greater paradox of communication research as both an applied and a disciplinary field. Propaganda is taken quite seriously by governments, the military, and the foreign service apparatus (Simpson, 1994); at the same time, it has occupied a tenuous conceptual place in most media studies and communications departments, with the dominant intellectual traditions embracing either a “limited effects” notion of what communication “does” or else more concerned with the more slippery concept of ideology (and on that, see more below). There is little doubt that the practical study of the power of messages and the field of communication research grew up together. Summarizing an initially revisionist line of research that has now become accepted within the historiography of the field, Nietzel notes that “from the very beginning, communication research was at least in part designed as an applied science, intended to deliver systematic knowledge that could be used for the business of government to the political authorities.” He adds, however, that

“this context also had its limits, for by the end of the decade, communication research had become established at American universities and lost much of its dependence on state funds. Furthermore, it had become increasingly clear that communication scientists could not necessarily deliver knowledge to the political authorities that could serve as a pattern for political acting (Simpson, 1994 pp. 88–89). From then on, politics and communication science parted ways. Many of the approaches and techniques which seemed innovative and even revolutionary in the 1940s and early 1950s, promising a magic key to managing propaganda activities and controlling public opinion, became routine fields of work, and institutions like the USIA carried out much of this kind of research themselves.” (Nietzel, 2016, p. 66)

It is important to note that this parting of ways did not mean that no one in the United States and the Soviet Union was studying propaganda. American government records document that, in inflation-adjusted terms, total funding for the United States Information Agency (USIA) rose from $1.2 billion in 1955 to $1.7 billion in 1999, shortly before its functions were absorbed into the United States Department of State. And this was dwarfed by Soviet spending, which spent more money jamming Western Radio transmissions alone than the United States did in its entire propaganda budget. Media effects research in the form of propaganda studies was a big and well-funded business. It was simply not treated as such within the traditional academy (Zollman, 2019). It is also important to note that this does not mean that no one in academia studies propaganda or the effect of government messages on willing or unwilling recipients, particularly in fields like health communication (also quite well-funded). These more academic studies, however, were tempered by the generally accepted fact that there existed no decontextualized, universal laws of communication that could render media messages easily useable by interested actors.

Ideology, economics, and false consciousness

If academics have been less interested than governments and health scientists in analyzing the role played by propaganda in the formation of public opinion, what has the academy worried about instead when it comes to the study of pernicious messages and their role in public life? Open dominant, deeply contested line of study has revolved around the concept of ideology. As defined by Raymond Williams in his wonderful Keywords , ideology refers to an interlocking set of ideas, beliefs, concepts, or philosophical principles that are naturalized, taken for granted, or regarded as self-evident by various segments of society. Three controversial and interrelated principles then follow. First, ideology—particularly in its Marxist version—carries with it the implication that these ideas are somehow deceptive or disassociated from what actually exists. “Ideology is then abstract and false thought, in a sense directly related to the original conservative use but with the alternative—knowledge of real material conditions and relationships—differently stated” (Williams, 1976). Second, in all versions of Marxism, ideology is related to economic conditions in some fashion, with material reality, the economics of a situation, usually dominant and helping give birth to ideological precepts. In common Marxist terminology, this is usually described as the relationship between the base (economics and material conditions) and the superstructure (the realm of concepts, culture, and ideas). Third and finally, it is possible that different segments of society will have different ideologies, differences that are based in part on their position within the class structure of that society.

Western Marxism in general (Anderson, 1976) and Antonio Gramsci in particular helped take these concepts and put them on the agenda of media and communications scholars by attaching more importance to “the superstructure” (and within it, media messages and cultural industries) than was the case in earlier Marxist thought. Journalism and “the media” thus play a major role in creating and maintaining ideology and thus perpetuating the deception that underlies ideological operations. In the study of the relationship between the media and ideology, “pernicious messages” obviously mean something different than they do in research on propaganda—a more structural, subtle, reinforcing, invisible, and materially dependent set of messages than is usually the case in propaganda analysis. Perhaps most importantly, little research on media and communication understands ideology in terms of “discrete falsehoods and erroneous belief,” preferring to focus on processes of deep structural misrecognition that serves dominant economic interests (Corner, 2001, p. 526). This obviously marks a difference in emphasis as compared to most propaganda research.

Much like in the study of propaganda, real-world developments have also had an impact on the academic analysis of media ideology. The collapse of communism in the 1980s and 1990s and the rise of neoliberal governance obviously has played a major role in these changes. Although only one amongst a great many debates about the status of ideology in a post-Marxist communications context, the exchange between Corner (2001, 2016) and Downey (2008; Downey et al., 2014) is useful for understanding how scholars have dealt with the relationship between large macro-economic and geopolitical changes in the world and fashions of research within the academy. Regardless of whether concepts of ideology are likely to return to fashion, any analysis of misinformation that is consonant with this tradition must keep in mind the relationship between class and culture, the outstanding and open question of “false consciousness,” and the key scholarly insight that ideological analysis is less concerned with false messages than it is with questions of structural misrecognition and the implications this might have for the maintenance of hegemony.

Postmodern conspiracy

Theorizing pernicious media content as a “conspiracy” theory is less common than either of the two perspectives discussed above. Certainly, conspiratorial media as an explanatory factor for political pathology has something of a post-Marxist (and indeed, postmodern) aura. Nevertheless, there was a period in the 1990s and early 2000s when some of the most interesting notions of conspiracy theories were analyzed in academic work, and it seems hard to deny that much of this literature would be relevant to the current emergence of the “QAnon” cult, the misinformation that is said to drive it, and other even more exotic notions of elites conspiring against the public.

Frederic Jameson has penned remarks on conspiracy theory that represent the starting point for much current writing on the conspiratorial mindset, although an earlier and interrelated vein of scholarship can be found in the work of American writers such as Hofstadter (1964) and Rogin (1986). “Conspiracy is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age,” Jameson writes, “it is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system” (Jameson, 1991). If “postmodernism,” in Jameson’s terms, is marked by a skepticism toward metanarratives, then conspiracy theory is the only narrative system available to explain the various deformations of the capitalist system. As Horn and Rabinach put it:

“The broad interest taken by cultural studies in popular conspiracy theories mostly adopted Jameson’s view and regards them as the wrong answers to the right questions. Showing the symptoms of disorientation and loss of social transparency, conspiracy theorists are seen as the disenfranchised “poor in spirit,” who, for lack of a real understanding of the world they live in, come up with paranoid systems of world explanation.” (Horn & Rabinach, 2008)

Other thinkers, many of them operating from a perch within media studies and communications departments, have tried to take conspiracy theories more seriously (Bratich, 2008; Fenster, 2008; Pratt, 2003; Melley, 2008). The key question for all of these thinkers lies within the debate discussed in the previous section, the degree to which “real material interests” lie behind systems of ideological mystification and whether audiences themselves bear any responsibility for their own predicament. In general, writers sympathetic to Jameson have tended to maintain a Marxist perspective in which conspiracy represents a pastiche of hegemonic overthrow, thus rendering it just another form of ideological false consciousness. Theorists less taken with Marxist categories see conspiracy as an entirely rational (though incorrect) response to conditions of late modernity or even as potentially liberatory. Writers emphasizing that pernicious media content tends to fuel a conspiratorial mindset often emphasize the mediated aspects of information rather than the economics that lie behind these mediations. Both ideological analysis and academic writings on conspiracy theory argue that there is a gap between “what seems to be going on” and “what is actually going on,” and that this gap is maintained and widened by pernicious media messages. Research on ideology tends to see the purpose of pernicious media content as having an ultimately material source that is rooted in “real interests,” while research on conspiracies plays down these class aspects and questions whether any real interests exist that go beyond the exercise of political power.

The needs of informationally ill communities

The current thinking in misinformation studies owes something to all these approaches. But it owes an even more profound debt to two perspectives on information and journalism that emerged in the early 2000s, both of which are indebted to an “ecosystemic” perspective on information flows. One perspective sees information organizations and their audiences as approximating a natural ecosystem, in which different media providers contribute equally to the health of an information environment, which then leads to healthy citizens. The second perspective analyzes the flows of messages as they travel across an information environment, with messages becoming reshaped and distorted as they travel across an information network.

Both of these perspectives owe a debt to the notion of the “informational citizen” that was popular around the turn of the century and that is best represented by the 2009 Knight Foundation report The Information Needs of Communities (Knight Foundation, 2009). This report pioneered the idea that communities were informational communities whose political health depended in large part on the quality of information these communities ingested. Additional reports by The Knight Foundation, the Pew Foundation, and this author (Anderson, 2010) looked at how messages circulated across these communities, and how their transformation impacted community health.

It is a short step from these ecosystemic notions to a view of misinformation that sees it as a pollutant or even a virus (Anderson, 2020), one whose presence in a community turns it toward sickness or even political derangement. My argument here is that the current misinformation perspective owes less to its predecessors (with one key exception that I will discuss below) and more to concepts of information that were common at the turn of the century. The major difference between the concept of misinformation and earlier notions of informationally healthy citizens lies in the fact that the normative standard by which health is understood within information studies is crypto-normative. Where writings about journalism and ecosystemic health were openly liberal in nature and embraced notions of a rational, autonomous citizenry who just needed the right inputs in order to produce the right outputs, misinformation studies has a tendency to embrace liberal behavioralism without embracing a liberal political theory. What the political theory of misinformation studies is, in the end, deeply unclear.

I wrote earlier that misinformation studies owed more to notions of journalism from the turn of the century than it did to earlier traditions of theorizing. There is one exception to this, however. Misinformation studies, like propaganda analysis, is a radically de-structured notion of what information does. Buried within analysis of pernicious information there is

“A powerful cultural contradiction—the need to understand and explain social influence versus a rigid intolerance of the sociological and Marxist perspectives that could provide the theoretical basis for such an understanding. Brainwashing, after all, is ultimately a theory of ideology in the crude Marxian sense of “false consciousness.” Yet the concept of brainwashing was the brainchild of thinkers profoundly hostile to Marxism not only to its economic assumptions but also to its emphasis on structural, rather than individual, causality.” (Melley, 2008, p. 149)

For misinformation studies to grow in such a way that allows it to take its place among important academic theories of media and communication, several things must be done. The field needs to be more conscious of its own history, particularly its historical conceptual predecessors. It needs to more deeply interrogate its informational-agentic concept of what pernicious media content does, and perhaps find room in its arsenal for Marxist notions of hegemony or poststructuralist concepts of conspiracy. Finally, it needs to more openly advance its normative agenda, and indeed, take a normative position on what a good information environment would look like from the point of view of political theory. If this environment is a liberal one, so be it. But this position needs to be stated clearly.

Of course, misinformation studies need not worry about its academic bona fides at all. As the opening pages of this Commentary have shown, propaganda research was only briefly taken seriously as an important academic field. This did not stop it from being funded by the U.S. government to the tune of 1.5 billion dollars a year. While it is unlikely that media research will ever see that kind of investment again, at least by an American government, let’s not forget that geopolitical Great Power conflict has not disappeared in the four years that Donald Trump was the American president. Powerful state forces in Western society will have their own needs, and their own demands, for misinformation research. It is up to the scholarly community to decide how they will react to these temptations.

Mainstream Media
/ Propaganda

Cite this Essay

Anderson, C. W. (2021). Propaganda, misinformation, and histories of media techniques. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-64

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Nietzel, B. (2016). Propaganda, psychological warfare and communication research in the USA and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. History of the Human Sciences , 29 (4 – 5), 59–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695116667881

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This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.

Skip to Main Content of WWII

Rosie the riveter and benny the bungler: wwii propaganda at work.

During World War II, the US government waged a constant battle for the hearts and minds of the public. “Rosie the Riveter” and many other wartime propaganda posters remain relevant 75 years later.

During World War II, the US government waged a constant battle for the hearts and minds of the public. Persuading Americans to support the war effort became a wartime industry, just as important as producing bullets and planes. The Office of War Information (OWI) was formed in 1942 to oversee the propaganda initiative, scripting and distributing the government’s messages. Artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals were recruited to work on this creative “factory floor.” They produced posters, pamphlets, newsreels, radio shows, and movies-all designed to create a public that was 100 percent behind the war effort.

Posters were an important part of the OWI’s output. They were mass produced and distributed around the country and hung in train stations, post offices, schools, churches, factories, and grocery stores. Posters were produced to encourage and inspire Americans, but also to warn, scold, and scare Americans as well. They used psychological tactics, guilt, and emotions to appeal to the patriotism and loyalty of the public. Posters addressed things like safety, urging Americans to wear white when walking during blackouts so they would not be hit by a car and to be careful at work so they were not injured, both slowing production and wasting valuable hospital resources. A figure called “Axidunce” was very careless and helped the Axis foes by causing accidents. He was assisted by “Benny the Bungler.” Responsible, healthy living was encouraged, particularly because of the effects of vice on production. If you stayed out all night drinking, you would be hungover at work or would call in sick and the country was counting on you to help win the war.

Posters addressed the need for secrecy and stressed that blabbermouths could be murderers because talking about where your boyfriend was stationed or about what you were making at the factory too loudly could be overheard by enemy spies and lead to disaster. Americans were urged to avoid waste of food, clothes, rubber, water, and gasoline. They were instructed to grow their own food, can and preserve, and also to stretch their rations— all for the sake of the soldiers. They were asked to contribute to the war funds by buying bonds. Americans were asked to band together, to work for Victory, and to remember Pearl Harbor.

There were so many messages out there and many of them have endured in public memory. They have been dusted off and used over and over for various causes. Some have become iconic like “Loose Lips Might Sink Ships” or one of the most widely recognized posters from World War II, “Rosie the Riveter.” The concept and icon of “Rosie the Riveter” continues to be adapted and used as a symbol for power and a testament to the spirit of the American woman. The poster by J. Howard Miller had several predecessors, a song “Rosie the Riveter” who was “Making history, working for victory,” and a Saturday Evening Post cover illustration by Norman Rockwell. Miller’s “Rosie” was commissioned as part of a series intended to raise morale at Westinghouse Electric, which was making helmet liners. “Rosie” falls outside of the OWI’s domain, as Miller was hired by Westinghouse’s War Production Coordinating Committee. The poster was intended to be displayed at the factory for only two weeks, from February 15 to February 28, 1943.

“Rosie the Riveter” and many other wartime propaganda posters remain relevant 75 years later. They have endured and evolved. Their messages continue to be called upon, adopted, and adapted. When you need a little motivation look back at World War II, give the muscles a flex, and think, “We Can Do It!”

For more on propaganda, see our teacher resources on From the Collection to the Classroom.

Museum Store

Rosie the Riveter was a popular icon of World War II and represented American women doing their part for the War effort. Visit the Museum Store to browse through Rosie the Riveter themed gifts and accessories.

Kimberly Guise holds a BA in German and Judaic Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She also studied at the Universität Freiburg in Germany and holds a masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS) from Louisiana State University. Kim is fluent in German, reads Yiddish, and specializes in the American prisoner-of-war experience in World War II.

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A Comparative analysis of War Propaganda

Words stronger than guns.

Alex Han Chadwick International
Gregory Slosek Chadwick International School

This paper analyzes propaganda leaflets in different wars. The importance of propaganda and its use and creation in different wars indicates its significance in terms of success. Every war has used certain different tactics and strategies in wars to win and influence the people through their war strategies and different types of leaflets. Following wars are discussed with their powerful propaganda during the war. For instance, the Korean war propaganda leaflets, German propaganda leaflets, Franco-Prussian War 1870 propaganda leaflets, Vietnam war 1954-75 propaganda, World War I Propaganda, and Spanish American War Propaganda. Propaganda has been used in these wars through different method either through leaflets, posters, music, through women, or yellow journalism etc. diverse impact of different propagandas were witnessed on the civilians and soldiers in these wars. That means that propaganda has remain an important element of war and has its strong crucial role in the winning war.

Author Biography

Gregory slosek, chadwick international school, references or bibliography.

Blasberg, Christian. 2018. The evolution of propaganda in modern conflicts: the USA and public opinion in three war case studies. LUISS.

Brydon, Steven R. 2021. American Propaganda from the Spanish-American War to Iraq: War Stories. Maryland: Laxington .

Carrillo, Juan Rene. 2014. https://scholarworks.utep.edu . january 1. Accessed november 20, 2021. https://scholarworks.utep.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2596&context=open_etd .

Chandler, Robert W. 2020 . War of Ideas: The U.s. Propaganda Campaign in Vietnam. Taylor & Francis Group, .

Hoh, Anchi. 2017 . https://blogs.loc.gov . September 26. Accessed november 19, 2021. https://blogs.loc.gov/international-collections/2017/09/korean-war-propaganda-leaflet-collection-at-the-library-of-congress/ .

Kennedy, Lesley. 2019. https://www.history.com . August 19. Accessed November 20, 2021. https://www.history.com/news/spanish-american-war-yellow-journalism-hearst-pulitzer .

Kim, Jin K. 1993. https://library.ndsu.edu . July 7. Accessed November 20, 2021. https://library.ndsu.edu/ndsuarchives/sites/default/files/Themes-in-Korean-War.pdf .

Kingsbury, Celia M. 2010. For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front. London: University of Nebraska.

Lasswell, Harold D. 1927. Propaganda Technique in the world war I. London: MIT.

Moch, Jonathan. 2011. "Women in Niazi propaganda." WESTERN OREGON UNIVERSITY 1- 29.

Reinthaler, Anja. 2014. https://blog.bridgemanimages.com . june 20. Accessed November 20, 2021. https://blog.bridgemanimages.com/blog/i-want-you-propaganda-during-world-war-i .

RTH, history. 2021. https://realtimehistory.net . october 07. Accessed november 20, 2021. https://realtimehistory.net/blogs/news/rise-of-guerrilla-warfare-daring-balloon-escapes-the-franco-prussian-war-early-october-1870 .

Stout, Michael J. 2011. "the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda during World War II." Eastern Michigan University.

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Propaganda in world war ii.

World War II witnessed the greatest propaganda campaigns in history. Often referred to as the “Fourth Arm” after the army, navy, and air force, propaganda was conducted by all belligerents and was essentially designed to sustain domestic civilian morale during a long war at home while undermining enemy civilian and military confidence in the ability to achieve victory. Although propaganda was becoming a characteristic of peacetime politics in the first half of the twentieth century, it was still seen largely as a weapon of war, especially in democracies.

Dictatorships in the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany more readily embraced its peacetime use as a form of coercion of mass populations instead of the individualistic democratic predisposition toward persuasion and consensus-building. These different ideologies eventually went to war against each other in 1939, in a conflict that began with a cavalry charge in Poland and ended, six years later, with atomic explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It became a war of national survival – total war – in which propaganda was used by all sides as a psychological weapon to supplement, reinforce, or counter the destructive power of military force. Ultimately, however, World War II was won by military power – which prompts the question of what role propaganda actually played in determining the final outcome.

Total War, Total Propaganda

Propaganda was highly organized from the outset, although most sides found it difficult to centralize its various functions. The Nazi Propaganda Ministry had several rival voices from within the “divide and rule” bureaucracy created by Adolf Hitler (Welch 1994). The British set up a Ministry of Information that stumbled its way through the early wartime years (including the “Phony War” or “Bore War”) fighting other Whitehall departments like the Foreign Office and Service Ministries. It eventually settled down after 1941 when Brendan Bracken was appointed minister and a Political Warfare Executive was created to conduct overseas propaganda (Taylor 1999). Once the Americans entered the war in late 1941, sufficient lessons had been learned to separate out domestic and overseas propaganda functions through the Office of War Information and the Office of Special Services. For all sides, fighting the war was the major priority, but who was responsible for publicly chronicling or interpreting its progress – image rather than reality – was also important.

The idea of a home front or of a “nation at arms,” of mobilizing entire populations for sustained conflict, first emerged during the 1914–1918 war. It came into sharper focus in the 1930s with the arrival of the bombing aircraft and its indiscriminate impact on the civilian populations of cities, first witnessed during the Sino–Japanese War (1931–1933 and from 1937 onward) and especially the Spanish Civil War (1936 –1939) through newsreel footage of the bombing of Guernica. The mass bombing of cities between 1939 and 1945 was to substantially narrow the gap between soldier and civilian both physically and psychologically; all were now combatants in a people’s war where the home front became as much the front line as far away battlefields. In such an environment, morale became a critical factor and one that might determine the eventual outcome. That environment was also media-rich compared to wars of the past – traditional print media were now supplemented by the arrival of broadcast radio and sound cinema. Although television was technically available, all belligerents decided largely to suspend its development for the duration and use the facilities for radio or jamming purposes.

Propaganda was also a weapon that could be deployed against the enemy when no other means of attacking them were available, especially in the form of electronic broadcasting. This was true of Britain following its retreat at Dunkirk in 1940. Until Britain could launch a “strategic” bombing offensive against the all-conquering Nazis, the BBC played a major role in sustaining resistance movements, challenging the Nazi version of events as they unfolded and sowing seeds of doubt throughout occupied Europe about the eventual outcome. Radio broadcasts were supplemented by the dropping of millions of leaflets.

At home, the British came to blend self-knowing mockery with propaganda through the popular BBC radio show ITMA (“it’s that man again”), whose host, Tommy Handley, lampooned the Ministry of Information (MoI) as the “Ministry of Aggravation.” George Orwell, who was to satirize the MoI as the “Ministry of Truth” in his postwar novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , was himself an effective wartime broadcaster, along with J. B. Priestley, whose “postscript” broadcasts from the summer of 1940 were credited with the biggest regular listening broadcasts in the world. The BBC decided not to jam German broadcasts to Britain led by William Joyce (“Lord Haw Haw”) on the grounds that only news and not views should be censored, although the views about plucky Londoners “taking it” during the 1940 Blitz espoused by such North American broadcasters as Quentin Reynolds and Edward R. Murrow did much to persuade American listeners which side they should sympathize with (Cull 1995).

Propaganda flourishes most effectively in the wake of victories. Until 1943, despite a decade-long existence for Josef Goebbels’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, the Nazi propaganda machine never really shifted into top gear because it had no real need to (Balfour 1979). Hitler, who had devoted two chapters of his Mein Kampf to the subject, had regarded propaganda as an essential instrument of achieving, and sustaining, political power. Nazi propaganda, however, did not export successfully – except among those who wanted to believe it. For the first years of the war, Nazi propaganda flourished in the wake of military success. But after defeat at Stalingrad, Goebbels rallied the nation to “total war” with slogans such as “victory or death.” This theme was partly prompted by the Allied call for “unconditional surrender” made following the Casablanca Conference of 1942 – the first real Anglo-American declaration of war aims following the USA’s entry into the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The British had survived their “finest hour” in the Battle of Britain of 1940 – just. They had even managed to transform the military humiliation of Dunkirk into a patriotic rallying cry – the “Dunkirk Spirit” – that is still evoked by nationalists today. In 1942, Prime Minister Winston Churchill secured one of his greatest achievements by persuading the American president, Franklin Roosevelt, to deploy the sheer weight of American military power against the Germans and Italians in a “Europe first” strategy rather than go for full-out revenge against the Japanese.

Propaganda Media

This was a significant development in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, and the American film industry was mobilized to reinforce the policy decisions. Hollywood movies brought the distant war beyond the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to the only home front that did not have to endure bombing. Hollywood professionals like Frank Capra were likewise enlisted to make “indoctrination films” explaining to recruits from Iowa why they should fight Germans rather than just the Japanese. Capra’s Why We Fight series of seven films became compulsory viewing for all US armed forces personnel. The major theme of these films was that Japan, Germany, and Italy had formed an “axis” that had conspired to turn the “free world” into a “slave world” and, if they were not stopped, the “four freedoms” espoused by Roosevelt (freedom of speech and religion and freedom from want and fear), and adapted in 1941 to the Atlantic Charter with Churchill, would see the triumph of the “man-machine” over the individual.

Movies were so thoroughly infused with wartime propaganda themes that it was difficult for audiences to stand back and say “That is just a propaganda film.” So all-pervading was Propaganda in World War II propaganda that the experience of being propagandized could almost be defined as having lived at the time. Propaganda not only manifested itself in films and radio broadcasts, it also took the form of posters, picture postcards, china plates and ornaments, biscuit tins, cigarette cards, songs, and music. It proved capable of almost infinite applications, as with the British (and later American) “V for victory” campaign.

The effectiveness of much propaganda depended not only upon events at the fighting fronts but also upon media access to them. It took the British more than a year for the military authorities to appreciate the need for war reporters and camera men to be allowed to accompany the troops. Operational security issues and a military predisposition toward censorship overrode any propaganda benefits. For the Nazis, it was the reverse. Their front line propaganda company units were able to capture spectacular images of the German army’s initial successes in Belgium and France, which were duly incorporated into the official newsreels. Once the Americans entered the war, they allowed camera crews to accompany bombing raids over Germany, and William Wyler’s documentary The Memphis Belle (1943) was testimony to the success of such decisions. The American influence on the British became evident with the later wartime release of major documentaries such as Desert Victory (1943) and the Anglo-American collaboration The True Glory (1945).

Almost without exception, propagandists on all sides, including journalists, saw themselves as patriotic members of the war effort (Collier 1989). Propaganda was a pejorative word; it was something that the enemy did “to us” or that “we” did “to them.” The democracies had Ministries or Offices of War Information that told “the truth” whereas the dictatorships engaged in the “big lie.” Although this was itself part of the propaganda war, it does highlight differences of approach toward the manipulation of opinion. Democracies understood that, in a long war of national survival, a “strategy of truth” was required to sustain credibility in a war between “good” and “evil.” Goebbels famously remarked that if you repeated something over and over again – whether it was true or not – people would believe it. One of the tragedies of World War II was that when stories began to emerge from 1943 onward of the death camps built for the “final solution” they were dismissed by many people as being “atrocity propaganda” such as that used to demonize the Germans during World War I.

The war in the Pacific also saw major propaganda campaigns that were strikingly racist in tone. The Japanese saw themselves as the superior race in their drive for a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. “Tokyo Rose” (in fact several female broadcasters) tried to undermine the morale of Allied troops as island after island fell with high American casualties. Hollywood films depicted the “yellow peril” as “buck-toothed” fanatics who would rather commit suicide than be captured. The American troops, especially segregated black soldiers, were depicted by Axis propaganda as decadent, cowardly, and racially inferior. The Nazi depiction of Soviet peasant soldiers as “Untermenschen” (“subhumans”) was only countered by military defeats after Stalingrad. And, of course, Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda in such films as The Eternal Jew (1940) exploited historical stereotypes as a method of inducing support for, or acquiescence in, the final solution. Even in Britain, the popularity of concepts like “Vansittartism” (the doctrine that the German people are innately belligerent) evoked comments that “the only good German is a dead German,” while, at one point, the Americans devised the Morgenthau Plan, which Proxemics would have seen the postwar pastoralization of German society. So deeply rooted were some of these prejudices that they survived long after the war had ended.

Intelligence historians have been able to make a good case that the Enigma machine that cracked the “Ultra secret” probably helped the allies to knock two years off the war. Propaganda historians can make no equivalent claims. If anything, propaganda most likely lengthened the war through instilling hatred of the enemy and bolstering domestic support for the war effort. We need only recall the 14-year-old boys defending the streets of Berlin as the Russians advanced on the city in 1945.

References:

Balfour, M. (1979). Propaganda in war 1939–45 . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Collier, R. (1989). The warcos: The war correspondent in World War II . London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Cull, N. J. (1995). Selling war: The British propaganda campaign against American “neutrality” in World War II . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, P. M. (1999). British propaganda in the twentieth century: Selling democracy . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Welch, D. (1994). The Third Reich: Politics and propaganda . London: Routledge.

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WWI Primary and Secondary Sources: Print and Online: Primary Sources

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Primary Sources continued
Personal Narratives, Speeches, Papers
Databases and Secondary Sources
Research terms for Searching in Franklin Catalog and other Databases

Penn's World War I Digital Collections

Penn's World War I Pamphlet Collection Penn has digitized over 400 pamphlets from its print collections dating from and relating to World War I. These pamphlets are now findable in Franklin via the series title: World War I Pamphlet Collection with live links to the facsimiles available through Hathi Trust and to Penn's Print at Penn. Access all pamphlets via the libraries Franklin catalog whether from Print at Penn or the Hathi Trust.

Connect to pamphlets via the Hathi Trust Digital Library

Connect to pamphlets via Print at Penn .

Penn Libraries World War I Printed Media and Art Collection This collections contains over one thousand prints, propaganda posters, postcards, trench newspapers, maps, broadsides and original artworks dating from 1914 to 1931 and offers an enormous range of perspectives on the First World War.

First World War Primary Source Databases

Map From " The First World War " database collections

The First World War This First World War portal includes primary source materials for the study of the Great War, complemented by a range of secondary features. The collection is divided into three modules: Personal Experiences, Propaganda and Recruitment, and Visual Perspectives and Narratives.
Women, War and Society, 1914-1918 The First World War had a revolutionary and permanent impact on the personal, social and professional lives of all women. Their essential contribution to the war in Europe is fully documented in this definitive collection of primary source materials from the Imperial War Museum, London. Documents include charity and international relief reports, pamphlets, photographs, press cuttings, magazines, posters, correspondence, minutes, records, diaries, memoranda, statistics, circulars, regulations and invitation, all fully-searchable with interpretative essays from leading scholars.
World War I and Revolution in Russia This collection documents the Russian entrance into World War I and culminates in reporting on the Revolution in Russia in 1917 and 1918. The documents consist primarily of correspondence between the British Foreign Office, various British missions and consulates in the Russian Empire and the Tsarist government and later the Provisional Government.
Archives Unbound Browse "categories" or conduct keyword searches to find other primary source collections relevant to WW I. Interface can be very slow and might not work if you are using Firefox off campus.
Prisoners of the First World War: ICRC Historical Archives 5 Million index cards with prisoner of war data provided by the countries at war. As of September 2014, 90% of the card have been loaded. Arrangement is by nationality rather than alphabetical by prisoner.
World War I Document Archive This archive of primary documents from World War One has been assembled by volunteers of the World War I Military History List (WWI-L). International in focus, the archive intends to present in one location primary documents concerning the Great War.
Times Digital Archive The Times of London 1785-2008. See a separate link for the Sunday Times
Sunday Times Digital Archive The Sunday Times of London, 1855-2006
New York Times Historical 1851-2010 A different perspective on world events
German History in Documents and Images A comprehensive collection of primary source materials each of which documents Germany's political, social, and cultural history from 1500 to the present. It comprises original German texts, all of which are accompanied by new English translations, and a wide range of visual imagery. Use the timeline to select the time period 1890-1918.
HathiTrust Digital Library Hathitrust.org brings together digitized public domain resources from libraries across the country. This is a good source for finding pamphlets, journals, magazines, and publications from the time before, during, and after the war.

Correspondence from the British Foreign Office

Image of a 1917 letter from the British Foreign Office reporting Lenin's escape from Russia.

From World War I and the Revolution in Russia, 1914-1918"

World War I Posters

Summons to Comradeship: World War I and World War II Posters This link takes you to Artstor and nearly 6,000 images for posters at the University of Minnesota. May require Pennkey sign in.
World War I Posters from the University of Illinois This collection of 66 images is made available through the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

Journals and Newspapers

Search various newspaper archives, including the Illustrated London News,Economist, The Sunday Times, The Times, The Telegraph, and the International Herald Tribune Historical Archives.

Limit by "Source Type" to search historical newspapers and periodicals. Proquest Historical Newspapers includes the New York Times Historical Archive

Times of London Digital Archive (See Gale Primary Sources above--for a combined search with some options for visualizations)
Economist Historical Archive (See Gale Primary Sources above--for a combined search with some options for visualizations)
The Times History of the War Print volumes. Libra 940.3 T483. Coverage of the war issued in weekly installments from 1914 to 1918. 22 volumes. Volumes at Libra and available through HathiTrust
The Times Documentary History of the War . Print volumes. Library 940.92 T483.6. Divided into the diplomatic, naval, miltary and overseas histories.11 volumes. All 11 volumes are available through HathiTrust.
Belgium under German rule : the deportations . Print volume. Kislak Center Folio D615 .B48 1917 -. From the London Times , 1917.

Foreign Relations Papers

The following are resources available in Van Pelt Library. Clicking on the links will take you to the item's catalog record in Franklin.

U.S. Foreign Relations

Foreign Relations of the United States : Official documentary history of foreign policy decisions from the U.S. State Department's Office of the Historian.

British Foreign Relations

British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914 : 11 volumes. Available through Hein Online, Hathitrust and Libra
British and Foreign State Papers , 1812-1968 : 170 volumes all available through HeinOnline
British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print. Series H, The First World War, 1914-1918 : 12 volumes. Available through a variety of print and online editions.

Russian Foreign Relations

Russia in War and Revolution, 1914-1922: A Documentary History

French Foreign Relations

Les Origines de la Guerre et la Politique Extérieure de l'Allemagne au Début du XXe Siècle d'Après les Documents Diplomatiques
Documents Diplomatiques français (1871-1914) 41 volumes. Most volumes available through Hathitrust

German Foreign Relations

German War Planning, 1891-1914: Sources and Interpretations

WWI Histories

French WWI poster courtesy of the Library of Congress.

War Records

War Trade Board journal

Official rulings and announcements of the War Trade Board and its Bureaus, from 1917-1919.

23 volumes.

History of the Great War, based on official documents, by direction of the Historical section of the Committee of Imperial defence : medical services

Covers such topics as casualties and statistics, surgery, diseases and pathology.

The medical department of the United States Army in the World War

Large, multi-volume series covering all aspects of medical services during World War I.

15 volumes.

World War records; First Division, A.E.F., Regular

Records on military regiments, including operations, field orders and training.

25 volumes.

Diplomatic documents relating to the outbreak of the European war

Correspondences and primary sources at the outbreak of the war.

La Paix de Versailles

Conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, in French.

12 Volumes. Online through Gallica and in print at Van Pelt

United States Army in the World War, 1917-1919

A series on the organization, policies, training and operations. Also contains reports.

17 volumes.

Economic and Social History of the World War Series

This series published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Division of Economics and History, provides a detailed account of the expense and consequences of the war to all countries involved. Listed below are the series and their call number. volumes may be in storage at Libra or in Van Pelt. Try the following search to bring up all volumes: economic and social history of the world war and author carnegie. If you have difficulty finding the volumes you are looking for, please ask for assistance. (Print and Hathitrust)

Subsets of the series:

World War I Document Archive

An online resource to support use of primary documents, the World War I Archive is an electronic repository of primary documents from World War One, which has been assembled by volunteers of the World War I Military History List (WWI-L). International in focus, the archive intends to present in one location primary documents concerning the Great War. It includes biographical material, convention and treaty documents, links to other WW I sites, documents available through H-net, and other resources.

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Last Updated: Jun 25, 2023 3:29 PM
URL: https://guides.library.upenn.edu/WorldWarI

Better Siri is coming: what Apple’s research says about its AI plans

Apple hasn’t talked too much about ai so far — but it’s been working on stuff. a lot of stuff..

By David Pierce , editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

Share this story

It would be easy to think that Apple is late to the game on AI. Since late 2022, when ChatGPT took the world by storm, most of Apple’s competitors have fallen over themselves to catch up. While Apple has certainly talked about AI and even released some products with AI in mind, it seemed to be dipping a toe in rather than diving in headfirst.

But over the last few months, rumors and reports have suggested that Apple has, in fact, just been biding its time, waiting to make its move. There have been reports in recent weeks that Apple is talking to both OpenAI and Google about powering some of its AI features, and the company has also been working on its own model, called Ajax .

If you look through Apple’s published AI research, a picture starts to develop of how Apple’s approach to AI might come to life. Now, obviously, making product assumptions based on research papers is a deeply inexact science — the line from research to store shelves is windy and full of potholes. But you can at least get a sense of what the company is thinking about — and how its AI features might work when Apple starts to talk about them at its annual developer conference, WWDC, in June.

Smaller, more efficient models

I suspect you and I are hoping for the same thing here: Better Siri. And it looks very much like Better Siri is coming! There’s an assumption in a lot of Apple’s research (and in a lot of the tech industry, the world, and everywhere) that large language models will immediately make virtual assistants better and smarter. For Apple, getting to Better Siri means making those models as fast as possible — and making sure they’re everywhere.

In iOS 18, Apple plans to have all its AI features running on an on-device, fully offline model, Bloomberg recently reported . It’s tough to build a good multipurpose model even when you have a network of data centers and thousands of state-of-the-art GPUs — it’s drastically harder to do it with only the guts inside your smartphone. So Apple’s having to get creative.

In a paper called “ LLM in a flash: Efficient Large Language Model Inference with Limited Memory ” (all these papers have really boring titles but are really interesting, I promise!), researchers devised a system for storing a model’s data, which is usually stored on your device’s RAM, on the SSD instead. “We have demonstrated the ability to run LLMs up to twice the size of available DRAM [on the SSD],” the researchers wrote, “achieving an acceleration in inference speed by 4-5x compared to traditional loading methods in CPU, and 20-25x in GPU.” By taking advantage of the most inexpensive and available storage on your device, they found, the models can run faster and more efficiently.

Apple’s researchers also created a system called EELBERT that can essentially compress an LLM into a much smaller size without making it meaningfully worse. Their compressed take on Google’s Bert model was 15 times smaller — only 1.2 megabytes — and saw only a 4 percent reduction in quality. It did come with some latency tradeoffs, though.

In general, Apple is pushing to solve a core tension in the model world: the bigger a model gets, the better and more useful it can be, but also the more unwieldy, power-hungry, and slow it can become. Like so many others, the company is trying to find the right balance between all those things while also looking for a way to have it all.

Siri, but good

A lot of what we talk about when we talk about AI products is virtual assistants — assistants that know things, that can remind us of things, that can answer questions, and get stuff done on our behalf. So it’s not exactly shocking that a lot of Apple’s AI research boils down to a single question: what if Siri was really, really, really good?

A group of Apple researchers has been working on a way to use Siri without needing to use a wake word at all; instead of listening for “Hey Siri” or “Siri,” the device might be able to simply intuit whether you’re talking to it. “This problem is significantly more challenging than voice trigger detection,” the researchers did acknowledge, “since there might not be a leading trigger phrase that marks the beginning of a voice command.” That might be why another group of researchers developed a system to more accurately detect wake words . Another paper trained a model to better understand rare words, which are often not well understood by assistants.

In both cases, the appeal of an LLM is that it can, in theory, process much more information much more quickly. In the wake-word paper, for instance, the researchers found that by not trying to discard all unnecessary sound but, instead, feeding it all to the model and letting it process what does and doesn’t matter, the wake word worked far more reliably.

Once Siri hears you, Apple’s doing a bunch of work to make sure it understands and communicates better. In one paper, it developed a system called STEER (which stands for Semantic Turn Extension-Expansion Recognition, so we’ll go with STEER) that aims to improve your back-and-forth communication with an assistant by trying to figure out when you’re asking a follow-up question and when you’re asking a new one. In another, it uses LLMs to better understand “ambiguous queries” to figure out what you mean no matter how you say it. “In uncertain circumstances,” they wrote, “intelligent conversational agents may need to take the initiative to reduce their uncertainty by asking good questions proactively, thereby solving problems more effectively.” Another paper aims to help with that, too: researchers used LLMs to make assistants less verbose and more understandable when they’re generating answers.

A series of images depicting collaborative AI editing of a photo.

AI in health, image editors, in your Memojis

Whenever Apple does talk publicly about AI, it tends to focus less on raw technological might and more on the day-to-day stuff AI can actually do for you. So, while there’s a lot of focus on Siri — especially as Apple looks to compete with devices like the Humane AI Pin, the Rabbit R1, and Google’s ongoing smashing of Gemini into all of Android — there are plenty of other ways Apple seems to see AI being useful.

One obvious place for Apple to focus is on health: LLMs could, in theory, help wade through the oceans of biometric data collected by your various devices and help you make sense of it all. So, Apple has been researching how to collect and collate all of your motion data, how to use gait recognition and your headphones to identify you, and how to track and understand your heart rate data. Apple also created and released “the largest multi-device multi-location sensor-based human activity dataset” available after collecting data from 50 participants with multiple on-body sensors.

Apple also seems to imagine AI as a creative tool. For one paper, researchers interviewed a bunch of animators, designers, and engineers and built a system called Keyframer that “enable[s] users to iteratively construct and refine generated designs.” Instead of typing in a prompt and getting an image, then typing another prompt to get another image, you start with a prompt but then get a toolkit to tweak and refine parts of the image to your liking. You could imagine this kind of back-and-forth artistic process showing up anywhere from the Memoji creator to some of Apple’s more professional artistic tools.

In another paper , Apple describes a tool called MGIE that lets you edit an image just by describing the edits you want to make. (“Make the sky more blue,” “make my face less weird,” “add some rocks,” that sort of thing.) “Instead of brief but ambiguous guidance, MGIE derives explicit visual-aware intention and leads to reasonable image editing,” the researchers wrote. Its initial experiments weren’t perfect, but they were impressive.

We might even get some AI in Apple Music: for a paper called “ Resource-constrained Stereo Singing Voice Cancellation ,” researchers explored ways to separate voices from instruments in songs — which could come in handy if Apple wants to give people tools to, say, remix songs the way you can on TikTok or Instagram.

An image showing the Ferret-UI AI system from Apple.

Over time, I’d bet this is the kind of stuff you’ll see Apple lean into, especially on iOS. Some of it Apple will build into its own apps; some it will offer to third-party developers as APIs. (The recent Journaling Suggestions feature is probably a good guide to how that might work.) Apple has always trumpeted its hardware capabilities, particularly compared to your average Android device; pairing all that horsepower with on-device, privacy-focused AI could be a big differentiator.

But if you want to see the biggest, most ambitious AI thing going at Apple, you need to know about Ferret . Ferret is a multi-modal large language model that can take instructions, focus on something specific you’ve circled or otherwise selected, and understand the world around it. It’s designed for the now-normal AI use case of asking a device about the world around you, but it might also be able to understand what’s on your screen. In the Ferret paper, researchers show that it could help you navigate apps, answer questions about App Store ratings, describe what you’re looking at, and more. This has really exciting implications for accessibility but could also completely change the way you use your phone — and your Vision Pro and / or smart glasses someday.

We’re getting way ahead of ourselves here, but you can imagine how this would work with some of the other stuff Apple is working on. A Siri that can understand what you want, paired with a device that can see and understand everything that’s happening on your display, is a phone that can literally use itself. Apple wouldn’t need deep integrations with everything; it could simply run the apps and tap the right buttons automatically.

Again, all this is just research, and for all of it to work well starting this spring would be a legitimately unheard-of technical achievement. (I mean, you’ve tried chatbots — you know they’re not great.) But I’d bet you anything we’re going to get some big AI announcements at WWDC. Apple CEO Tim Cook even teased as much in February, and basically promised it on this week’s earnings call. And two things are very clear: Apple is very much in the AI race, and it might amount to a total overhaul of the iPhone. Heck, you might even start willingly using Siri! And that would be quite the accomplishment.

The MSI Claw is an embarrassment

Sugar’s big twist was more than a gimmick, new teslas might lose steam, replacing the oled ipad pro’s battery is easier than ever, behold ayaneo’s sophisticated takes on the game boy and game boy micro.

More from Apple

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On The Vergecast: AI gadgets, iPads, and antitrust

IMAGES

Propaganda Research Paper
Analyzing world war_i_propaganda_posters-1
Essay websites: Propaganda essay
World War 1 Propaganda Posters Used By The U.S. Government
World War I: Propaganda Essay Example
The Theory of Political Propaganda

VIDEO

Propaganda in USSR during WW2
US War Propaganda Has Been Effective #politics #politicsnews #polyticks
How Russian propaganda rewrites history
Propaganda and War: Iraq and Beyond
Unveiling the Secrets of WWII Propaganda: How Posters Changed History
10 Basic Principles of War Propaganda, how they are used in Russian media

COMMENTS

(PDF) War Propaganda
battle for public opinion is as important during a war as the. engagement of soldiers on the front ( Hiebert, 2003: p. 243). Tools and Techniques of Propaganda during the Great War. Propaganda may ...
Studies of World War Propaganda, 1914-33
STUDIES OF WORLD WAR PROPAGANDA, 1914-33. T HE WORLD WAR was a decisive period of revolutionary change in which many contemporary problems either originated or assumed. complex forms. One significant problem of this historic period was the. con-flict of ideas between two spiritual and cultural worlds.
World War Two Propaganda: Analyzing and Comparing German and American
The juxtaposition of the. U.S. and German propaganda strategies during World War Two serves as an instructive tableau, compelling us to critically examine not only historical events but also the enduring dynamics of. persuasion, power, and the intricate interplay between governance and public opinion.
PDF A Brief History of Propaganda During Conflict:
This Research Paper also tracks the evolution of the terminology associated with propaganda in war and how the complex interaction of organisational, political, ideological, socio-historical and conceptual factors has shaped that lexicon. Far from mere semantics, these lexicological transitions and diversification reflects both ...
Pre-war experimental evidence that Putin's propaganda elicited strong
The Putin regime used extensive and aggressive propaganda to win public support for the war. But can this propaganda really convince ordinary people? ... Our results also have several broader implications for research on public opinion on war, ... All other data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the ...
Studying War Propaganda
Content analysis is a research method well suited for studying the power triad of propaganda, especially war propaganda. The origins of content analysis go back to WWII (Lasswell and Leites 1949 ). By content analysing war coverage in the United States, researchers identified mass media that propagated information furthering Nazi Germany's cause.
Propaganda, psychological warfare and communication research in the USA
In both countries, communication scientists conducted their research with its benefits for propaganda practitioners and waging the Cold War in mind. It has been suggested that after an initial period of close cooperation between politics and communication science, early expectations of the potential of systematic research for controlling the ...
(PDF) War Propaganda in International Encyclopedia of the Social
Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. War Propaganda in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition ... War propaganda is both a contributor, and a response, to war and conflict and scholarship on war propaganda demonstrates both these impulses: it has attempted to advance the success ...
The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies
Abstract. This handbook includes 23 essays by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, divided into three sections: (1) Histories and Nationalities, (2) Institutions and Practices, and (3) Theories and Methodologies. In addition to dealing with the thorny question of definition, the handbook takes up an expansive set of assumptions and a ...
Hollywood War Films Propaganda: Framing Iraq and Afghanistan Wars
This research utilized framing theory to examine how the movies American Sniper, The Hurt Locker and Lone Survivor have been used to glorify the U.S. soldiers and demonize the Iraqis and Afghanis. Quantitative content analysis was conducted on the three war films produced by the U.S after the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Propaganda Analysis Revisited
Propaganda Analysis Revisited. This special issue is designed to place our contemporary post-truth impasse in historical perspective. Drawing comparisons to the Propaganda Analysis research paradigm of the Interwar years, this essay and issue call attention to historical similarities between patterns in mass communication research then and now.
The New History of War Reporting: A Historiographical Perspective on
Essays. The New History of War Reporting: A Historiographical Perspective on the Role of the Media and War ... (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); Michael Balfour, Propaganda in War 1939-1945: Organisations, Policies and Publics in Britain and Germany (London: ... Dr. Alexander G. Lovelace's research focuses on World War II ...
Propaganda, misinformation, and histories of media techniques
Introduction. Propaganda has a history and so does research on it. In other words, the mechanisms and methods through which media scholars have sought to understand propaganda—or misinformation, or disinformation, or fake news, or whatever you would like to call it—are themselves historically embedded and carry with them underlying notions of power and causality.
Rosie the Riveter and Benny the Bungler: WWII Propaganda at Work
Persuading Americans to support the war effort became a wartime industry, just as important as producing bullets and planes. The Office of War Information (OWI) was formed in 1942 to oversee the propaganda initiative, scripting and distributing the government's messages.
A Comparative analysis of War Propaganda
Abstract. This paper analyzes propaganda leaflets in different wars. The importance of propaganda and its use and creation in different wars indicates its significance in terms of success. Every war has used certain different tactics and strategies in wars to win and influence the people through their war strategies and different types of leaflets.
Daniel Lerner, Cold War Propaganda and Us ...
INTRODUCTION In scholarly works celebrating the genesis and growth of U.S. communication research, the two most notable being that of Rogers (1) and Everette & Wartella, (2) readers would commonly find considerable pages dedicated to the lives and works of pioneering researchers such as Wilbur Schramm, Harold Lasswell and Robert Merton, but would find only passing references made to Daniel ...
Propaganda in World War II
World War II witnessed the greatest propaganda campaigns in history. Often referred to as the "Fourth Arm" after the army, navy, and air force, propaganda was conducted by all belligerents and was essentially designed to sustain domestic civilian morale during a long war at home while undermining enemy civilian and military confidence in ...
Primary Sources
The First World War. This First World War portal includes primary source materials for the study of the Great War, complemented by a range of secondary features. The collection is divided into three modules: Personal Experiences, Propaganda and Recruitment, and Visual Perspectives and Narratives. Women, War and Society, 1914-1918.
KS2 History: How propaganda was used during World War Two
We hear from an eye-witness called Gladys, who talks about seeing propaganda posters during World War Two. The 'Did You Know' section looks at how propaganda was used in response to the rescue ...
Apple's AI research suggests features are coming for Siri, artists, and
For the last few years, Apple has been looking into ways to use AI to improve Siri, give tools to artists, improve health data, and more. Much of that could come at WWDC 2024.