The Fake News Panic of a Century Ago: The Discovery of Propaganda and the Coercion of Consent looks at how the sharing of public information has changed over time-and especially at the dramatic transformation that took place in the media world in the early decades of the 20th century. Just as the term "fake news" has recently exploded into public consciousness, so did the concept of propaganda a century ago. The book describes two major developments that contributed to the "discovery" of propaganda in the decades just before and after the First World War. The first was a shift in the landscape of human psychology, emphasizing the role of the irrational impulses in human behavior and renewing age old fears of the herd mentality and the rise of the emotional mob. The second was a social upheaval, as the stability of trustworthy local communities faded and distant powers and faraway voices began to dominate public discourse. Many thoughtful observers feared that growing power of some voices meant that public consent could actually be coerced-eroding the basic concept of democratic government. Others persisted in trusting the basic rationality of public opinion. Still others struggled to find ways in which responsible leaders could guide the public without manipulating it. This book explores the writings of six well-known American leaders of the time-influential representatives of the political, business, journalistic and academic worlds-who wrestled seriously with the implications of these developments. The text underscores how their commentaries of a century ago can offer helpful insight into what has been happening in our contemporary world. The Fake News Panic of a Century Ago is an excellent supplementary resource for courses in social and intellectual history, media studies, and political theory.

Staging West German Democracy examines how political "founding discourses" of the nascent Federal Republic (FRG) were reflected, reinforced, and actively manufactured by the Federal government in conjunction with the West German, state-controlled newsreel system, the Deutsche Wochenschau. By looking at the institutional history of the Deutsche Wochenschau and its close relationship to the Federal Press Office, Jan Uelzmann traces the Adenauer administration's project of maintaining a "government channel" in an increasingly diverse, de-centralized, and democratic West German media landscape. Staging West German Democracy reconstructs the company's integral role in the planning, production, and dissemination of pro-government PR, and through detailed analyses reveals the films to celebrate the FRG as an economically successful and internationally connected democracy under Adenauer's leadership. Apart from providing election propaganda for Adenauer's CDU party, these films provided an important stabilizing factor for the FRG's project of explaining and promoting democracy to its citizens, and of defining its public image against the backdrops of the Third Reich past and a competing, contemporary incarnation of German nationhood, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In this regard, Staging West German Democracy adds in important ways to our understanding of the media's role in the West German nation building process.