Acknowledgments

This textbook builds on a century of scholarship in media studies, political communication, social psychology, history, and journalism. It would not exist without the researchers, journalists, and educators whose work it synthesizes.

Special acknowledgment is owed to the scholars whose foundational work structures this book's intellectual architecture: Harold Lasswell, whose 1927 Propaganda Technique in the World War established the field; Jacques Ellul, whose 1962 Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes remains indispensable; Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell, whose Propaganda and Persuasion (now in its seventh edition) set the standard for comprehensive academic treatment; Robert Cialdini, whose research on the mechanics of influence continues to illuminate how propaganda exploits normal cognitive processes; and Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, whose Merchants of Doubt documented the organized manufacture of scientific uncertainty with forensic precision.

The chapters on digital media and disinformation draw heavily on the empirical research of Sander van der Linden (inoculation theory), Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral (viral falsehood spread), Kate Starbird (crisis misinformation), and Renée DiResta (influence operations). The Senate Intelligence Committee's five-volume report on Russian active measures in U.S. elections remains the most comprehensive primary source on that subject and is cited extensively in Chapter 24.

The chapter on advertising and commercial persuasion depends on the archival work made possible by the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents — now housed at the University of California, San Francisco — which gave researchers access to millions of internal industry documents that the tobacco companies fought for decades to keep secret. That archive, and the scholars who have worked through it, made Chapter 15 and Chapter 26 possible.

The media literacy frameworks in Part 6 build on the work of the News Literacy Project, the Stanford History Education Group (whose "Civic Online Reasoning" curriculum demonstrated the value of lateral reading at scale), and UNESCO's Media and Information Literacy program.

This textbook is offered as a teaching resource under Creative Commons licensing because the problem of propaganda is too important to be locked behind paywalls. The editors invite instructors, researchers, and students to improve it, translate it, adapt it, and challenge it. That process — critical engagement, evidence-based revision, transparent disagreement — is the opposite of propaganda. It is what we are here to practice.