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In this fresh and provocative book, Anthony DiMaggio uses the war in Iraq and the United States confrontations with Iran as his touchstones to probe the sometimes fine line between news and propaganda. Using Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony and drawing upon the seminal works of Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, and Robert McChesney, DiMaggio combines a rigorousempirical analysis and clear, lucid prose to enlighten readers about issues essential to the struggle for a critical media and a functioning democracy. If, as DiMaggio shows, our newspapers and television news programs play a decisive role in determining what we think, and if, as he demonstrates convincingly, what the media give us is largely propaganda that supports an oppressive and undemocratic status quo, then it is incumbent upon us to make sure that they are responsive to the majority and not just the powerful and privileged few.

\"In the Internet age, the press have mastered the art of monetizing anger, paranoia, and distrust. Taibbi, who has spent much of his career covering elections in which this kind of manipulative activity is most egregious, provides a rich taxonomic survey of American political journalism's dirty tricks.\"--Provided by publisher.

There is considerable concern about the role that social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, play in promoting misperceptions during political campaigns. These technologies are widely used, and inaccurate information flowing across them has a high profile. This research uses three-wave panel surveys conducted with representative samples of Americans during both the 2012 and 2016 U.S. Presidential elections to assess whether use of social media for political information promoted endorsement of falsehoods about major party candidates or important campaign issues. Fixed effects regression helps ensure that observed effects are not due to individual differences. Results indicate that social media use had a small but significant influence on misperceptions about President Obama in the 2012 election, and that this effect was most pronounced among strong partisans. Social media had no effect on belief accuracy about the Republican candidate in that election. The 2016 survey focused on campaign issues. There is no evidence that social media use influenced belief accuracy about these topics in aggregate, but Facebook users were unique. Social media use by this group reduced issue misperceptions relative to those who only used other social media. These results demonstrate that social media can alter citizens' willingness to endorse falsehoods during an election, but that the effects are often small.

\"Cinema and the Wealth of Nations explores how media principally in the form of cinema was used during the interwar years by elite institutions to establish and sustain forms of liberal political economy beneficial to their interests. It examines the media produced and circulated by institutions such as states, corporations, and investment banks, as well as the emergence of a corporate media industry and system supported by state policy and integral to the establishment of a new consumer system. Lee Grieveson sketches a genealogy of the use of media to encode liberal political and economic power across the period that saw the United States eclipse Britain as the globally hegemonic power and the related inauguration of new forms of liberal economic globalization. But this is not a distant history. Cinema and the Wealth of Nations examines a foundational conjuncture in the establishment of media forms and a media system instrumental in, and structural to, the emergence and expansion of a world system that has been--and continues to be--brutally violent, unequal, and destructive.\"--Provided by publisher.

Militainment, Inc. offers provocative, sometimes disturbing insight into the ways that war is presented and viewed as entertainment—or \"militainment\"—in contemporary American popular culture. War has been the subject of entertainment for centuries, but Roger Stahl argues that a new interactive mode of militarized entertainment is recruiting its audience as virtual-citizen soldiers. The author examines a wide range of historical and contemporary media examples to demonstrate the ways that war now invites audiences to enter the spectacle as an interactive participant through a variety of channels—from news coverage to online video games to reality television. Simply put, rather than presenting war as something to be watched, the new interactive militainment presents war as something to be played and experienced vicariously. Stahl examines the challenges that this new mode of militarized entertainment poses for democracy, and explores the controversies and resistant practices that it has inspired. This volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between war and media, and it sheds surprising light on the connections between virtual battlefields and the international conflicts unfolding in Iraq and Afghanistan today. Roger Stahl is Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia. His work has appeared in publications such as Rhetoric and Public Affairs , The Quarterly Journal of Speech , and Critical Studies in Media Communication . He wrote, produced, and narrated the 2007 documentary film Militainment, Inc.: Militarism and Pop Culture , which is distributed by the Media Education Foundation. \"Roger Stahl is a one-man bomb squad, painstakingly disentangling the complex cultural circuitry that wires our entertainment consumption habits to U.S. military hardware. This richly sourced, vividly illustrated page-turner will recast your next cinema, stadium, or virtual world visit in a startling new light.\" —Gordon Mitchell , University of Pittsburgh and author of Strategic Deception: Rhetoric, Science and Politics in Missile Defense Advocacy \"While many have written about militarism, and many more have written about the entertainment industry, I do not know of a book that ties the two together in such an insightful argument. 'Militainment, Inc' is a smart and engaging book about how US citizens relate to and engage with US military actions and how the increasing integration of militarism and the entertainment industries limits democratic commentary. I can't imagine anything more timely.\" —Susan Jeffords , University of Washington and author of Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War \"Roger Stahl has systematically researched U.S. popular culture and recent military history and has provided a highly illuminating study of how recent wars have been produced as media spectacles and processed by audiences as entertainment, hence the term Militainment . Providing illuminating studies of the media, sport, video games, TV reality shows, and other forms of militainment, Stahl’s book should be read by everyone concerned with the intersection of war and entertainment in the contemporary era.\" —Douglas Kellner , UCLA and author of the forthcoming Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush/Cheney Era \"From the thrills of virtual war worlds to macabre fascinations with deadly killing fields, Roger Stahl tracks a culture where war and its horrors are transformed into a landscape of entertainment. This new geography of Militainment is mapped with great skill in an original work that is essential reading for those who would like to see beyond the battlefield to a world of peace and stability.\" —Robin Andersen , author of A Century of Media, A Century of War , winner of the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award 2007

Founded as a counterweight to the Communist broadcasters in East Germany, Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) became one of the most successful public information operations conducted against the Soviet Bloc. Cold War on the Airwaves examines the Berlin-based organization's history and influence on the political worldview of the people--and government--on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Nicholas Schlosser draws on broadcast transcripts, internal memoranda, listener letters, and surveys by the U.S. Information Agency to profile RIAS. Its mission: to undermine the German Democratic Republic with propaganda that, ironically, gained in potency by obeying the rules of objective journalism. Throughout, Schlosser examines the friction inherent in such a contradictory project and propaganda's role in shaping political culture. He also portrays how RIAS's primarily German staff influenced its outlook and how the organization both competed against its rivals in the GDR and pushed communist officials to alter their methods in order to keep listeners. From the occupation of Berlin through the airlift to the construction of the Berlin Wall, Cold War on the Airwaves offers an absorbing view of how public diplomacy played out at a flashpoint of East-West tension.

\"American society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation--the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth--and it comes at us from all sides: opportunists on the far right, Russian misinformed social media influencers, among others. It's endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and in our Capitol. Advances in technology including rapid developments in artificial intelligence threaten to make the problems even worse by amplifying false claims and manufacturing credibility. In Attack from Within, scholar and MSNBC legal expert Barbara McQuade shows us how to identify the ways disinformation is seeping into all facets of our society and how we can fight against it with practical solutions to strengthen the public, media, and truth-based politics. Disinformation is designed to evoke a strong emotional response to push us toward more extreme views, unable to find common ground with others. The false claims that led to the breathtaking attack on our Capitol in 2020 may have been only a dress rehearsal. Attack from Within shows us how to prevent it from happening again, thus preserving our country's hard-won democracy\"-- Provided by publisher.

Operation Just Cause, the United States' incursion into Panama, was the culmination of a gradually escalating confrontation between the United States and the Noriega dominated government of Panama that extended from June, 1987 until early January, 1990. Applying diverse methodological approaches, this volume examines the various ways representative examples of the global media covered the developing crisis and the eventual US incursion into Panama. The volume: - sets the stage for this analysis by delineating the chronological development of the escalating confrontation, as well as by examining the confrontation from the perspective of the US government - analyzes the crisis from the perspective of the US, Soviet, Canadian, French, Portuguese, Arab, and the People's Republic of China media - exposes the challenges for public affairs officers operating within the context of the global media response to international crises, and provides an assessment of the implications of the crisis for inter-American and international relations. This analysis and evaluation of a variety of global media perspectives on the escalating US-Panamanian confrontation will serve to better illuminate and further enrich our understanding of a major international event - indeed, one of the final events of the Cold War era. Howard M. Hensel, Air War College, USA and Nelson Michaud, École nationale d'administration publique, Canada