Prerequisites
What You Need Before You Begin
This textbook has no formal prerequisites. It is designed for students in any discipline who are encountering the study of propaganda and media literacy for the first time.
That said, students who arrive with certain background knowledge will move through the material more quickly. The following is an honest account of what will help.
Helpful Background (Not Required)
High school–level history: Several chapters assume familiarity with World War I, World War II, and the Cold War at a general level. You do not need specialist knowledge — the relevant historical context is built into each chapter — but students who have never encountered these periods may find Chapters 19–21 require more background reading. Appendix D (Historical Timeline) is designed to help.
Basic critical reading skills: The ability to distinguish between a claim and the evidence supporting it, and between an author's stated position and the implications of what they are arguing. These skills are developed throughout the book, not assumed at advanced level.
General familiarity with current events: Several chapters in Parts 3, 4, and 7 discuss recent social media platforms, online political movements, and digital media environments. Students who use social media regularly will have direct experience with the phenomena being analyzed. Students who do not should review the case studies in Chapters 16–17 before engaging with the later chapters.
What You Will Develop Here
This book deliberately builds from the ground up. By the end of Part 1, you will have:
- A working definition of propaganda that distinguishes it from related concepts
- A framework for analyzing how persuasion works psychologically
- Tools for identifying framing and rhetorical structure in any text
- An understanding of which cognitive biases make audiences susceptible
- A method for dissecting any propaganda message into its component parts
- A sense of the historical and democratic stakes
By the end of the book, you will have a complete analytical toolkit and a finished practical project (the Inoculation Campaign) demonstrating that you can use it.
A Note on the Word "Propaganda"
Before you begin, it is worth noting that the word "propaganda" itself is politically loaded. Many students arrive in this course convinced that propaganda is something that governments they oppose do, while governments and institutions they support engage in legitimate communication. This is almost never accurate. One of the explicit goals of this textbook is to apply the same analytical framework consistently across political contexts, institutions, and historical periods.
If you find yourself more comfortable identifying propaganda in institutions you dislike than in institutions you support, that reaction is itself a subject worth examining. Chapter 4 will give you a vocabulary for why it happens.