Exploring Propaganda Scholarship in the 1930s and Today

A little-known chapter of Columbia University history was the subject of a day-long conference on November 15. Communications scholars and historians gathered to examine the study of propaganda in the 1930s and compare it to efforts today to fight online mis/disinformation. With the recent election of Donald Trump as president, and Republican discussions of the “Censorship Industrial Complex,”  disinformation researchers are braced for more subpoenas and funding cuts so the look back at Columbia’s own history was particularly salient.

In the period after World War I and with the rise of fascism and communism, scholars tried to understand why people supported extreme ideologies. Educating the public about the power of propaganda and enabling people to examine their own impulses seemed like a solution and Columbia University Teachers College was the home of one of the first efforts to teach media literacy techniques. These efforts to combat what was seen as a rising tide of dangerous propaganda were short-lived as the U.S. entered World War II and began creating its own propaganda. The founder of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis and other colleagues were investigated by the precursor to the House Unamerican Activities Committee.

The Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) was founded in 1937 at the suggestion of former journalist Clyde Miller with a $10,000 grant from Filene's department store owner and philanthropist Marshall Field. Sociologists Robert Lynd and Alfred McClung Lee, historian Charles Beard and Princeton University psychologist Hadley Cantril, known for his research of the audience response to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, were also involved in the IPA.

The conference, organized by the Technology, Media, and Communications Specialization at the School of International and Public Affairs with support from Columbia World Projects, began with discussions of the early days of the IPA. Elisabeth Fondren, an associate professor of journalism at St John’s University pointed out that the IPA got off to a good start, designing popular taxonomies such as the ABCs of propaganda analysis, publishing books, teaching materials, and a newsletter for use in schools that featured case studies and discussion questions. Each issue of the newsletter analyzed a different topic, such as false rumors about immigration or Nazi propaganda or coverage of the famous Little Steel Strike and how it was covered by the press.

 Many of the techniques pioneered by the IPA are still in use today, noted Renee Hobbs, a prominent media literacy expert.

The IPA broadened into multicultural education, helping pioneer the Springfield Plan, which was one of several reasons the institute was attacked by conservative groups and newspaper columnists. “Miller became its chief publicist, and as the notoriety of the program grew, a Hollywood film was made about the program and hundreds of educators from throughout the U.S. and Canada flocked to the Springfield, Massachusetts, schools to see the program in action. Variants of the plan took root in other cities. The program was derailed in the late 1940s when it fell prey to attacks in the conservative Catholic press in the wake of the Cold War ‘red baiting’ of progressive scholars and activists,” Boston College’s Lauri Johnson said.

Backlash was not just confined to multicultural education. Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb noted that during the era of government using propaganda to promise its war efforts, it began shutting down Black newspapers.

Participants looked at the backlash against the IPA in part because of the current targeting of disinformation researchers but also its effect on scholarship and communications regulation, said Victor Pickard, professor of media policy at the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania.

“The effects of redbaiting on the direction of media scholarship provides some crucial context for understanding what happened to the IPA and other media reform efforts in the 1940s. The IPA was essentially defunded and Clyde Miller was pushed out of the academy due to his activism. There were many examples of various kinds of intellectual repression—including industry and foundation funding of less critical scholarship…. Such subtle forms of redbaiting steered the field of communication in particular ways, and we’re still experiencing the legacy of those ideological struggles,” Pickard noted.

Despite the shuttering of the IPA, many of its ideas were taken up by the media literacy movement that exists today. Some of those ideas—especially about the need for personal reflection and understanding of how personal experience shapes one’s ideas—form the foundation of media literacy programs taught today.

The panelists noted that social media and virality has changed the information ecosystem and discussed the post-truth world we live in now. The University of Alabama’s AJ Bauer said that scholars can’t hide behind a veneer of neutrality, as Miller and his colleagues tried to do. Rather it’s important to be “open with where we stand ideologically, politically, and then engage on the questions of facts and what we think are good and bad.”

The group also agreed that in today’s polarized world, media literacy efforts while essential are not enough to solve the problems of the world we live in. Regulation of big tech is needed, too.

Anya Schiffrin is the director of the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and a senior lecturer who teaches on global media, innovation, and human rights. Thanks to the people who helped organize the conference Tom Asher and Anna Marchese at Columbia World Projects and SIPA’s Laura Danikowski Mercado and Adali Frias Deniz.