Teaching about Propaganda: An Examination of the Historical Roots of Media Literacy

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81 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Media Literacy Education

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Literacy, Media, and Education Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy Rhetoric and Communication Studies

Abstract

Contemporary propaganda is ubiquitous in our culture today as public relations and marketing efforts have become core dimensions of the contemporary communication system, affecting all forms of personal, social and public expression. To examine the origins of teaching and learning about propaganda, we examine some instructional materials produced in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), which popularized an early form of media literacy that promoted critical analysis in responding to propaganda in mass communication, including in radio, film and newspapers. They developed study guides and distributed them widely, popularizing concepts from classical rhetoric and expressing them in an easy-to-remember way. In this paper, we compare the popular list of seven propaganda techniques (with terms like “glittering generalities” and “bandwagon”) to a less well-known list, the ABC’s of Propaganda Analysis. While the seven propaganda techniques, rooted in ancient rhetoric, have endured as the dominant approach to explore persuasion and propaganda in secondary English education, the ABC’s of Propaganda Analysis, with its focus on the practice of personal reflection and life history analysis, anticipates some of the core concepts and instructional practices of media literacy in the 21st century. Following from this insight, we see evidence of the value of social reflection practices for exploring propaganda in the context of formal and informal learning. Crowdsourcing may help create increased informational clarity for consumers because ambiguous, incomplete, blurry and biased information actually inspires us to have conversations, share ideas, and listen to each other as a means to find truth.

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2012The filter bubble: how the new personalized Web is changing what we read and how we think 2012The daily you: how the new advertising industry is defining your identity and your worth 1965Crystallizing Public Opinion 1999Origins of Mass Communications Research During the American Cold War: Educational Effects and Contemporary Implications

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2019Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Article 2020SemEval-2020 Task 11: Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles 2020Education for a “Post-Truth” World: New Directions for Research and Practice 2020Disagreeing about how to know: The instructional value of explorations into knowing 2021Media education and the limits of “literacy”: Ecological orientations to performative platforms 2020From goods-dominant logic to service-dominant logic? Service, service capitalism and service socialism 2020Peer Pedagogies on Digital Platforms 2021Multiliteracies for Combating Information Disorder and Fostering Civic Dialogue

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