Fighting an Armed Doctrine: The Struggle to Modernize German Propaganda During World War I (1914–1918)

During the First World War (1914–1918), all belligerent governments realized that propaganda proficiency was critical to selling their causes and stirring up support for the war. Yet German propagandists in particular struggled to master mass media, manage their messages, and build audience trust during the Great War in their goal to control domestic and foreign public opinion. Although previous scholarship has agreed that the German propaganda machine failed, little has been said about how Germany recognized these failures early on and sought to remedy them through increasingly modern propaganda strategies—even if those strategies were ultimately no match for the public’s growing distrust of official information. This monograph examines how it was that more institutions, more manpower, new publicity initiatives, copying tactics from enemies, crowdsourcing ideas, and eventually focusing on visuals and film did little to boost morale at home or improve Germany’s reputation abroad. The findings rest on a historical analysis of military dispatches, federal policy documents, letters, news stories, propaganda materials, and memoirs located in German and U.S. archives. Although many of the methods and tactics these early propagandists used would fail, others would become part of the universal toolbox governments still rely on to influence people’s views and spread information.

Congressional Concerns Over Partisanship and a Lack of Professional Independence: Critical Junctures and the Evolution of U.S. Government Information Agencies

The nomination by Pres. Donald J. Trump of Michael Pack as the Chief Executive Officer of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the agency that oversees the Voice of America (VOA) and other civilian international broadcasters, was politically controversial. Democratic senators feared that if confirmed, Pack would pursue a partisan political agenda through the broadcasters because he was a known associate of President Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon. This study shows that fears that a president could use government agencies to advance a partisan political agenda emerged long ago when the government first started establishing information agencies, such as the Committee on Public Information (CPI) and the Office of War Information (OWI). Such fears are likely to continue.

The Lost Doctrine: Suggestion Theory in Early Media Effects Research

This monograph examines the history of the “suggestion doctrine,” a theory of communicative influence that arose in social psychology at the turn of the 20th century and was applied to the study of media effects before World War II. During that period, suggestion theory was one of the foremost psychological explanations of opinion change and a dominant theory of media influence. Despite its long prominence in early social science and media studies, the doctrine has been largely ignored in contemporary histories of mass communication research. Although writers debate the origins and nature of early media effects scholarship, few of the contending parties address the role of the suggestion doctrine, and those who do offer but a passing reference. My purpose here, therefore, is to recover an important but forgotten part of the intellectual history of the field.