of Cicero, likely emphasized the sense of a religious crusade. See Maria Teresa Prendergast and Thomas A. Prendergast, “The Invention of Propaganda: A Critical Commentary on and Translation of Inscrutabili Divinae Providentiae Arcano,” in The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, ed. Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 19–27. Thanks also to Dr. Katie Clark for raising the parallel in an online conversation.
21 Baker, “Flying Writings,” Flugschriften 1.
22 Barbara Basbanes Richter, “Benjamin Franklin and the Pamphlet Wars,” National Endowment for the Humanities, March 17, 2020, https://www.neh.gov/article/benjamin-franklin-and-pamphlet-wars.
23 While historians debate the extent to which the papers were influential in their time, they were written and published in large part to urge New Yorkers specifically to support ratification. See “Full Text of the Federalist Papers,” Research Guides, Library of Congress, September 5, 2023, https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text.
24 Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2009, https://archives.cjr.org/reconstruction/the_reconstruction_of_american.php.
25 There are various types of state media. According to the State Media Matrix created by Marius Dragomir and Astrid Söderström, on one side of the spectrum, “state-controlled media” is fully state funded, and the government controls editorial decisions and the organizational structure of the media company. On the other end of the spectrum, independent public media are created for the public interest with government backing but are editorially independent and do not rely on government funding. Between these poles, the State Media Matrix names five other hybrid models, which are either independent (operating without government interference in editorial decisions) or captured (where messaging is controlled by the government). Based on their levels of government funding and control, these are given different names: captured public or state-managed media, captured private media, independent state-funded and state-managed media, independent state-funded media, and independent state-managed media. See Marius Dragomir and Astrid Söderström, The State of State Media: A Global Analysis of the Editorial Independence of State Media and an Introduction of a New State Media Typology, CEU Democracy Institute: Center for Media, Data and Society, 2021, https://cmds.ceu.edu/sites/cmcs.ceu.hu/files/attachment/article/2091/thestateofstatemedia.pdf.
26 George Creel, Rebel at Large: Recollections of Fifty Crowded Years (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1947), 158.
27 Bernays, Propaganda, 37.
28 See George Creel, How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information That Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe (New York: Harper and Brother’s Publishers, 1920).
29 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), 20.
30 Since the late 1960s, American confidence in the government has been declining. According to researchers, this is due to a number of factors, including the belief that government leaders are incompetent or unethical. Additionally, as economic inequality and political polarization have increased over the decades, this has led to a sense of unfairness and distrust of members of the opposing party or social group.
A PEW study finds that since the late 1960s, Americans’ trust in the government has been plummeting from 77 percent of people trusting the federal government “to do the right thing nearly always or most of the time” to around 25 percent in 1979. After brief rebounds in trust at certain moments in the 1980s and 1990s and after 9/11, trust began to fall again and has been at around 20 percent through the 2010s and early 2020s. See “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2022,” Pew Research Center, June 6, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust-in-government-1958-2022.
Trust in media has also declined as news sources have proliferated. Since the advent of talk radio and the twenty-four-hour cable news cycle, opinion has blended into objective news coverage in ways that are sometimes different for audiences to disentangle, leading to perceptions of bias. Scholars also point to the decline of local news and the rise of politicized critiques of the media, particularly from the right, as fueling a distrust of journalists.
31 Zines had originated within science fiction fandoms in the 1930s but proliferated in the 1950s and 1960s as members of counterculture communities, including those horrified by the Vietnam War, sought a way to network and communicate with each other. Laura Van Leuven, “A Brief History of Zines,” Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog, October 25, 2017, https://blogs.lib.unc.edu/rbc/2017/10/25/a-brief-history-of-zines.
32 Mark Hampton, “The Fourth Estate Ideal in Journalism History,” in The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism, ed. Stuart Allan, 1st ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 3.
33 Notably, the Bush administration claimed that war with Iraq was justified because the country possessed weapons of mass destruction and were seeking to buy large quantities of yellowcake uranium to produce more nuclear warheads. Less than a year after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, however, it was announced that no weapons of mass destruction had been found. The only yellowcake uranium discovered in Iraq had been there since before 1991. See Wright Bryan and Douglas Hopper, “Iraq WMD Timeline: How the Mystery Unraveled,” NPR, November 15, 2005, https://www.npr.org/2005/11/15/4996218/iraq-wmd-timeline-how-the-mystery-unraveled. Also see Julian Borger, “There Were No Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq,” The Guardian, October 7, 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/oct/07/usa.iraq1.
34 Lasswell’s original formulation is “Who, Says What, in Which Channel, to Whom, with What Effect?” See Harold Lasswell, “The Structure and Function of Communication in Society,” in The Communication of Ideas: A Series of Addresses (New York: Institute for Religious and Social Studies, 1948), 37.
35 Elihu Katz and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications (New York: Free Press, 1955), 16.
36 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968).
37 Katz and Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence, 32.
38 Ibid., 1.
39 Ibid., 32.
40 This term, used somewhat interchangeably with Magic Bullet model in communication theory, has been apocryphally attributed to Harold Lasswell’s writings on propaganda per “Hypodermic Needle Model,” Wikipedia, last modified March 29, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypodermic_needle_model.
41 Katz and Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence, 33.
42 Jon Askonas, “Life in an Alternate Reality Game,” New Atlantis, no. 68 (Spring 2022): 6–28, published online as “Reality Is Just a Game Now,” New