Media and Propaganda in an Age of Disinformation

A critical and timely collection that argues for the centrality of propaganda in discussions about the contemporary media landscape and its informational ecosystems.

This book explores how “propaganda,” a foundational concept within media and communication studies, has recently been replaced by alternative terms (disinformation, misinformation, and fake news) that fail to capture the continuities and disruptions of ongoing strategic attempts to (mis)guide public opinion. Edited by Nelson Ribeiro and Barbie Zelizer, the collection highlights how these concepts must be understood as part of a long legacy of propaganda and not just as new phenomena that have emerged in the context of the digital media environment. Chapters explore the strategies and effects of propaganda through a variety of globally diverse case studies, featuring both democracies and autocratic regimes, and highlight how only by understanding propagandistic forms and strategies can we fully begin to understand how public opinion is being molded today by those who resort to deception and falsehood to gain or keep hold of power.

An important resource for students and scholars of media and communication studies and those who are studying and/or researching media and propaganda, media and power, disinformation, fake news, and political communication.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license

Nelson Ribeiro is Professor of Communication Studies and Dean of the Faculty of Human Sciences at the Catholic University of Portugal. Among other publications, he is the author of “Broadcasting Agency in the Portuguese Empire: Disrupting the Dominant Discourse through Media Tactics,” in Media Tactics in the Long Twentieth Century (2024), co-author of The Wireless World: Global Histories of International Radio Broadcasting (2022), and co-editor of Digital Roots: Historicizing Media and Communication Concepts of the Digital Age (2021).

Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Media at Risk at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, USA. A former journalist, Zelizer is known for her work on journalism, culture, memory, and images, particularly in times of crisis. She has authored 15 books, including the award-winning About To Die: How News Images Move the Public (2010) and Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye (1998). Her upcoming book is entitled How the Cold War Broke the News (2025).