Propaganda

How organised persuasion works, from the First World War information ministries and the birth of public relations to totalitarian film, Cold War broadcasting and computational disinformation. An archive about the techniques, what they are, why they work, and how to see them.

A chronological documentary of 115 moments spanning 1919–2026 on Loreline.

Curated by Olivier · last updated 2026-08-22

1. 1919 - Soviet agit-trains. Footage of the Bolshevik agitation trains that carried painters, printing presses, poets and film crews into the countryside during the civil war years, with Dziga Vertov visible among them. The technique is delivery: for a largely illiterate rural audience the message had to arrive physically, as painted carriages, posters, leaflets and film shows put on from the train itself. It made the new state visible in places where it otherwise had no presence.
2. 1922 - Public Opinion, chapter one. A reading of the opening chapter of Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, 'The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads', published in 1922. Lippmann's argument is that everyone acts on a compressed mental picture assembled from limited reports, and that whoever controls those reports shapes the behaviour that follows. It is the founding text for the professional management of opinion, and the source of the phrase manufacture of consent.
3. 1935 - Triumph of the Will. Leni Riefenstahl's record of the 1934 Nuremberg party rally, presented here with an opening that explains how and why it was made. The rally itself was partly built for the camera, with pits, tracks and lighting planned in advance, so what looks like documentation is staged: the aeroplane descending through cloud, the low angles that make one man monumental, the massed ranks cut to music. It is included as the canonical study object it has become in film and history teaching, and everything it asserts about the regime is the regime's own claim about itself.
4. 1938 - Olympia: Festival of Nations. Leni Riefenstahl's record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, released in 1938 and financed by the Nazi state, opens with a prologue that dissolves classical statuary into living athletes. The persuasion is entirely formal: slow motion, low angles, tracking pits dug beside the track, and a montage that makes the athletic body monumental, so a regime buys the prestige of antiquity and of international sport without asserting a single political claim. It is kept here as a canonical study object in film history, and should be watched as the work of a state that was already persecuting the people it excluded from that image.
5. 1939 - British public information films, 1939. Crown Film Unit and Ministry of Information shorts from the first months of the war, held by the National Archives. The method is instruction disguised as neighbourly advice: blackout drill, gas masks and careless talk delivered in a conversational register that makes compliance feel like common sense. By making household routine into war work, the films recruited civilians without ever asking them for anything grand.
6. 1942 - Listen to Britain (1942). Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister's Crown Film Unit short, made for the Ministry of Information, which carries no narration at all. Its argument is assembled from sound: factory machinery, a lunchtime piano recital, dance halls, night trains and the drone overhead, cut together so the viewer concludes unprompted what is worth defending. It remains the strongest demonstration that the most effective wartime persuasion often makes no explicit claim.
7. 1942 - Why We Fight: Prelude to War. The first film in Frank Capra's series made for the United States War Department in 1942 to explain to newly enlisted soldiers what they were fighting. Capra's decisive move was to build the film largely out of captured enemy footage, including Riefenstahl's, so that the case against the Axis appears to be made by its own cameras. The simplified free-world and slave-world division that structures the film is its argument, not a description of the period.
8. 1942 - The Next of Kin (1942). An Ealing Studios feature made for the War Office, prepared here for American troops with an added intelligence-service introduction. It dramatises careless talk by following overheard fragments through to a costly failed raid, so the audience watches its own habits produce the casualties. Fiction is used as a disciplinary tool: the film punishes the viewer rather than lecturing them.
9. 1943 - No Exceptions (1943). A home-front short made by 20th Century Fox for the Office of War Information, aimed at women and built around a simulated air raid on an ordinary American town. The technique is displacement: it brings a distant war into the viewer's own street so that rationing, rule-following and small sacrifices become self-defence rather than duty. The threat it stages never came, but the compliance it asked for was real.
10. 1946 - Despotism (1946). An Encyclopaedia Britannica classroom film that hands pupils a set of yardsticks - respect, power, economic distribution and control of information - and invites them to measure their own community against them. It is unusual as period material because its subject is how domination is recognised rather than which side to support, which is why it reads as anti-fascist civics more than early Cold War messaging. The film is still a persuasive artefact: its calm scientific manner is itself the rhetoric.
11. 1951 - Duck and Cover (1951). The civil defence film made by Archer Productions and shown in American schools, in which Bert the Turtle teaches children to drop and shelter at the flash of a bomb. The technique is domestication of terror: a cartoon mascot, a jingle and a rehearsable drill turn an unmanageable threat into a routine a child can perform. Its real product was composure rather than survival, and it taught a generation to treat nuclear attack as a civic habit.
12. 1955 - American Cold War propaganda reel. An unedited archive reel of American Cold War material, uploaded by a footage library with a note that it does not endorse the views recorded. Raw reels like this show the register of the period before an editor shapes it: repeated slogans, threat imagery and prosperity footage cut for reuse across many films. The library's own disclaimer is a small model of how period propaganda should be presented.
13. 1955 - Communism and capitalism in a 1950s classroom film. An excerpt from an American classroom film contrasting communism with capitalism for schoolchildren. The persuasive work is done by the loaded pairing: one system illustrated with queues, uniforms and marching, the other with supermarkets, cars and family homes, so the verdict feels observed rather than argued. Nothing has to be asserted when the images have already sorted the world into two columns.
14. 1957 - Towers of Truth: Radio Free Europe (1957). A 1957 fundraising film for the Crusade for Freedom, narrated by Walter Cronkite, showing how donations supposedly built Radio Free Europe. Two techniques stack here: a trusted broadcaster lends his credibility to the appeal, and Hollywood actors restage life under communism so that dramatisation is received as documentary. The campaign's presentation as a spontaneous citizens' effort is itself part of the message.
15. 1958 - Inside the Atom. A sponsored educational film on atomic energy from the height of the American nuclear programme, explaining fission to a general audience in confident, friendly terms. The persuasion lies in the emphasis: the atom is presented as an industrial marvel and a national asset, with the weapons and the fallout kept at the edge of the frame. Films like this built public consent for the nuclear state as much as any civil defence drill.
16. 1958 - USIA analyses Soviet propaganda (1958). A United States Information Agency film recorded at the Pentagon, in which the agency's director uses charts and clips to break down Soviet propaganda for American military leaders. It is doubly interesting: an analysis of one state's messaging that is itself an artefact of the other state's information agency, made to justify the American effort. Watching a propaganda body teach propaganda literacy is the clearest illustration of the Cold War information contest.
17. 1962 - The Communist Threat (1962). A dramatised anti-communist film about a family trying to escape East Germany, made for Western audiences at the height of the Cold War with professional actors and a scripted plot. The technique is melodrama used as argument: a political system is judged through one family's peril, and fiction is delivered in the register of reportage so viewers process it as testimony. Its overwrought style is exactly what makes it a teaching object.
18. 2007-01-18 - Goebbels and the cult of the leader. A clip from The Goebbels Experiment, First Run Features' release of Lutz Hachmeister's documentary built from Goebbels' own diaries, in which he describes how Hitler's personal authority was pushed through the party's media machine. The technique is the personality cult: concentrating an entire programme into one figure so that loyalty replaces argument and opponents are addressed with intimidation rather than persuasion. Goebbels' assessments of his own work are claims made by a propagandist, not descriptions of fact.
19. 2008-11-02 - Capra's Why We Fight series. A short presentation on the US Army orientation series Frank Capra directed from 1942, made to explain the war to conscripts and to the public. Its method was to recut the enemy's own films under an authoritative narration and animated maps, so the argument appeared to come from evidence rather than from the government that commissioned it. The presenter's own framing is admiring, which is itself worth noticing.
20. 2008-11-16 - Second World War poster campaigns. A montage of American home-front posters from the Second World War, briefly framed as material meant to inspire, remind and frighten. Posters worked because they were unavoidable and needed no literacy: a single symbol, direct address to 'you', and a small domestic act tied to a distant battlefield. Read them as instruments of mobilisation rather than as records of what people actually believed.
21. 2009-07-31 - Chomsky on manufacturing consent. An excerpt from the 1992 documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, in which Chomsky sets out the propaganda model he developed with Edward Herman. The argument is that in societies without censorship, consent is produced by narrowing what counts as a reasonable opinion, so debate can be lively inside limits nobody has to enforce. The phrase itself is taken from Walter Lippmann's 1922 book Public Opinion.
22. 2012-11-26 - The science of persuasion. An animated summary of Robert Cialdini's six principles of influence - reciprocity, scarcity, authority, consistency, liking and consensus. It matters to a history of propaganda because state campaigns pull the same levers as advertising: obligation, the fear of missing out, the borrowed credibility of an expert, and the sense that everyone else already agrees. The video also promotes the authors' own assessment product, which is a small demonstration of its own subject.
23. 2012-12-18 - The British Council and post-war cultural influence. A BBC programme on Britain's use of language teaching, libraries, scholarships and broadcasting as instruments of influence after 1945. Cultural diplomacy works precisely because it does not look like persuasion: an English class or a concert carries an implicit argument about whose institutions are worth copying. It is the soft end of the same Cold War contest fought elsewhere with radio jamming and leaflets.
24. 2014-12-05 - Propaganda in the First World War. Professor Jo Fox of the British Library walks through the collection's First World War material to show how both sides built a picture of the enemy. She traces the standard devices - the demonised opponent, the appeal to duty, the recruiting poster's direct gaze - and explains why a war of this scale forced states to organise persuasion for the first time. Museum lecture with primary sources on screen.
25. 2014-12-05 - Atrocity propaganda in the First World War. Jo Fox examines atrocity stories as a distinct propaganda form, used to supply a moral reason for fighting by concentrating a whole war into a single alleged crime. The lecture shows why such stories travel: they are vivid, personal and hard to check, and their later exposure as exaggerated corroded public trust in official accounts for decades. Claims made by wartime propagandists are treated here as claims, not established facts.
26. 2015-02-25 - Riefenstahl on Hitler's oratory. An interview clip in which Leni Riefenstahl describes the effect Hitler's speaking had on a crowd. It is useful as evidence of how the regime's own image-makers understood mass emotion - the rally treated as a performance to be staged and shot rather than an event to be reported. Her recollections are self-serving testimony from the person who built the imagery, and should be read that way.
27. 2015-02-28 - Detecting propaganda in Chinese newspapers. Molly Roberts presents research on identifying propaganda in the Chinese press, using text analysis across many newspapers to separate directed messaging from ordinary reporting. The talk is a good corrective to the assumption that state influence looks like crude praise: it often shows up as distraction, in what is covered and when, rather than in what is asserted. Academic methods seminar.
28. 2015-06-09 - Russian troll farms and online hoaxes. A PBS NewsHour interview with the reporter who first documented the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg, describing staff paid to post under invented American identities. It marks the point where propaganda stopped needing a broadcast tower: fabricated crises and fake local accounts could be pushed straight into other countries' social feeds. Reported in 2015, well before the tactic became widely understood.
29. 2015-11-17 - Learning to make a North Korean propaganda film. An Australian filmmaker travels to Pyongyang to be trained by North Korean directors, and reports back on the rules they teach - the heroic protagonist, the emotional crescendo, music cued to instruct the viewer how to feel. Taking the craft seriously reveals a formal system rather than mere crudeness, which is why the exercise works better than mockery. The segment keeps the regime's claims at arm's length while studying its methods.
30. 2016-02-04 - Eisenstein and Vertov. A student documentary on Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, the two filmmakers whose experiments defined early Soviet cinema. Both worked inside a state that treated film as its main instrument for reaching a mass audience, and both developed editing systems intended to produce a conclusion in the viewer rather than to record an event. The film-school vocabulary that came out of that work is still the vocabulary of persuasion on screen.
31. 2016-03-21 - Propaganda in the First World War. An overview of how the combatant states organised persuasion between 1914 and 1918, when mass literacy, cheap printing and cinema arrived together with total war. It traces the recruitment icons still recognised today and shows how the demands of a whole-society war effort produced the first permanent state propaganda bureaux. Well-sourced history channel treatment.
32. 2016-06-10 - Battleship Potemkin introduced. Mark Kermode introduces Eisenstein's 1925 film for the BFI, including the Odessa Steps sequence and its long afterlife. The film was commissioned for a revolutionary anniversary, and its most famous scene is a construction rather than a record - a massacre staged on those steps as it is remembered, not as it happened. That gap between invented image and public memory is the clearest single lesson in the archive.
33. 2016-06-20 - The Century of the Self: Happiness Machines. The first part of Adam Curtis's BBC series, on Edward Bernays applying his uncle Sigmund Freud's ideas to selling goods and managing opinion in 1920s America. It documents the shift from arguing that a product is useful to attaching it to a desire or an identity, the move that created public relations as a profession. Curtis's own thesis is strongly argued and should be watched as an interpretation, not a neutral chronicle.
34. 2016-08-08 - Eisenstein's montage in 1925. A film-history essay on how Eisenstein used collision editing in Battleship Potemkin to render events no single shot could hold. The core claim of montage theory is that meaning is produced between shots, in the viewer's head, which makes the conclusion feel self-generated rather than imposed. That is precisely why the technique became indispensable to propaganda everywhere.
35. 2016-09-19 - Film propaganda in the First World War. How the combatant states turned cinema, still a novelty in 1914, into a propaganda medium once they had overcome their initial distrust of it. Because real combat was almost impossible to film, most of what audiences accepted as front-line footage was staged behind the lines - an early lesson in how readily a moving image is taken for evidence. The reconstructions were often more convincing than the genuine material.
36. 2017-01-05 - Goebbels the agitator. An episode of the German documentary series on Hitler's inner circle, covering Goebbels from street agitator to minister controlling press, radio and film. It shows the apparatus in practice: cheap radio sets distributed to households, mass rallies designed for the camera, and the steady narrowing of what could be published. The series' archival footage is Nazi-produced material and carries that regime's framing wherever it is shown unnarrated.
37. 2017-02-10 - The cinematic language of Triumph of the Will. A close analysis of how Riefenstahl's 1935 film builds its effect: the arrival from the clouds, low angles that monumentalise a single figure, columns arranged as geometry, and crowds shot as one mass rather than as individuals. The film advances the party's racist ideology almost without argument, because the persuasion is carried by composition, scale and rhythm. This is the study version of the film, with the mechanics named as they appear.
38. 2017-04-08 - American posters and the entry into the war. A short survey of the poster campaign that followed the United States' declaration of war in April 1917. The posters had to manufacture enthusiasm quickly in a country that had spent years staying out, so they leaned on personification, direct address and shame at inaction rather than on any argument about war aims. Compressed but soundly sourced television history.
39. 2017-06-15 - Computational propaganda. A Columbia journalism talk on computational propaganda, the use of automation, data and platform mechanics to shape political discourse. The argument is that the decisive unit is no longer the message but the distribution system - bots, coordinated accounts and ad targeting that make a fringe position look like a groundswell. Presented as a working syllabus for reporting on it.
40. 2017-06-15 - How to recognise propaganda. A Cold War era educational film that teaches viewers to spot loaded language, name-calling, testimonials, bandwagon appeals and the transfer of prestige. It belongs to the school of propaganda analysis that grew out of the 1930s and became civic instruction once the Cold War made persuasion a permanent condition. The film is also a period artefact: what it treats as propaganda is largely what the other side produced.
41. 2017-07-10 - Computational propaganda worldwide. A short research briefing on how automated accounts and paid operators are used to simulate public opinion in campaigns across many countries. The point it makes is about scale and cost: manufacturing an apparent consensus online is cheap enough that it no longer requires a state broadcaster. No commentary track accompanies the clip beyond the researchers' own remarks.
42. 2017-07-12 - Bernays and group psychology. An essay on Edward Bernays' debt to crowd psychology, and his conviction that the public's irrational drives could be organised by an unseen professional class. It sets out his own vocabulary - the engineering of consent, the deliberate creation of desire - and connects it to the campaigns that made him famous. Bernays' confidence in his own influence was itself a piece of self-promotion and should be read sceptically.
43. 2017-07-27 - Eisenstein's methods of montage. A video essay working through the categories of montage Eisenstein set out in Film Form - metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal and intellectual - with examples from classic and modern cinema. Each category is a different way of making the cut itself carry the argument, from pacing that raises the pulse to juxtapositions that assert a comparison no shot contains. It is the technical grammar behind most persuasive editing since.
44. 2018-01-21 - Triumph of the Will and the power of propaganda. A film-history account of Riefenstahl's 1935 record of the Nuremberg rally, and of how a party congress was built as a set for the camera rather than merely filmed. The essay is direct about what the spectacle carried: the racist and antisemitic programme of the party is naturalised by being staged as order, unity and devotion. It sets the film in the longer history of cinema used as a political instrument.
45. 2018-03-20 - The Creel Committee's films. A curated selection of American film propaganda from the First World War, produced under George Creel's Committee on Public Information. The compilation shows the CPI's core method - official material distributed as ordinary newsreel and entertainment, so government messaging reached audiences through the channels they already trusted. It was the first attempt by the United States to run persuasion as a national industry.
46. 2018-04-03 - Influence and persuasion in the media. A media literacy lesson separating advertising, public relations and propaganda, and showing how much of media revenue depends on changing what people buy, believe or do. Its useful move is to treat the three as one family of techniques with different clients, which is how the same practitioners moved between corporate and government work. Clear introductory framing for the commercial side of persuasion.
47. 2018-04-10 - Online advertising and targeting. An episode on the data trade behind online advertising: what platforms collect, how audiences are segmented and sold, and why the terms nobody reads matter. The propaganda relevance is direct - the same targeting infrastructure built to sell products is what lets a political message be aimed at a few thousand people and seen by nobody else. Persuasion becomes unauditable when every viewer gets a different version.
48. 2018-06-04 - George Creel and the Committee on Public Information. How a journalist was given charge of American opinion in 1917 and built a machine of press releases, posters, films and volunteer speakers to sell a war the public had been against. The CPI is the founding case of modern state propaganda in a democracy, and several of its staff carried the methods straight into the new public relations industry. What began as an emergency measure became a peacetime profession.
49. 2018-10-24 - Computational propaganda and fake news. A research briefing on how political actors use social platforms, automated accounts and paid amplification, prompted by the 2016 referendum and election campaigns. The finding it stresses is structural: the manipulation is often legal, cheap and invisible to the people it reaches, which makes it far harder to counter than a broadcast lie. Funded academic work rather than commentary.
50. 2018-11-05 - Tokyo Olympiad against Riefenstahl. A video essay comparing Kon Ichikawa's 1965 film of the Tokyo Games with Riefenstahl's Olympia, two records of the same event type made under very different commissions. The comparison isolates the choices that carry ideology: whether the camera looks up at the athlete or across at them, whether exhaustion is shown, whether the crowd is a mass or a collection of faces. It is a practical demonstration that framing, not subject, decides what a documentary argues.
51. 2019-02-11 - Joseph Goebbels: a biography. A biographical account of Goebbels from provincial failure to Reich Minister of Propaganda controlling press, radio, film and public spectacle. It is useful for the mechanics: cheap state-backed radio receivers, the coordination of newspapers, and total control over what a population could hear before any argument had to be won. His antisemitic incitement is described here as his campaign, not as a description of the world.
52. 2019-04-25 - Propaganda in the Cold War. An overview of the propaganda contest between the Western powers and the Soviet Union, fought through film, radio and television aimed at home audiences, at each other and at non-aligned states. It notes how thoroughly the vocabulary of the period was shaped by Orwell, whose novels became the standard reference for describing political language. Compilation-style history with light sourcing.
53. 2019-08-02 - Walter Lippmann and Public Opinion. An examination of Lippmann's 1922 book, written after he had watched the First World War's press offices operate from inside. His claim was that people act on a simplified picture in their heads rather than on the world itself, and that this pseudo-environment can be shaped - a diagnosis that became a manual for the profession he was warning about. The essay also covers his doubts about whether mass democracy could survive it.
54. 2019-08-20 - Platforms and state-media advertising. A short news report on Twitter's decision to stop taking advertising from state-controlled news outlets while Facebook made no immediate change. The underlying issue is labelling: a state broadcaster's post looks identical to any other in a feed, and paid promotion buys it an audience it would never otherwise reach. Platform policy became a front in the propaganda question.
55. 2019-10-24 - Canada's wartime poster board. A short teaching piece on the Wartime Information Board, created in 1942 to manage Canadian morale and opinion, and on the posters it commissioned. It reads a poster as a document with a purpose - who made it, who was meant to see it, what response it wanted - which is the habit that makes the rest of this archive legible. Produced as a media literacy resource.
56. 2019-12-08 - Montage in Battleship Potemkin. A shot-by-shot analysis of the editing in Eisenstein's 1925 film, taking the Odessa Steps sequence as the standard demonstration of montage. Breaking the action into fragments and reassembling them out of real time produces an emotional certainty that a continuous shot could not, which is why the sequence has been imitated for a century. The film was made for the Soviet state, and its power is inseparable from that commission.
57. 2020-02-26 - Leni Riefenstahl: a video essay. A student documentary essay on Riefenstahl's career, centred on Triumph of the Will and Olympia and on her lifelong insistence that she was only an artist. The essay treats that defence as the thing to be examined: the aesthetic choices she claimed were apolitical are exactly what gave the regime its images. A useful case in how authorship and complicity are argued about.
58. 2020-03-22 - American propaganda in the Second World War. An overview of the American wartime effort, from the Office of War Information to Hollywood studios, Disney animation and the Why We Fight series. Its point is the breadth of the machine: entertainment, news and instruction were coordinated so that the same argument reached a citizen at the cinema, on the radio and at work. Persuasion at that scale required the willing participation of an entire industry.
59. 2020-04-28 - Analysing First World War posters. A school history lesson that takes First World War recruitment and home-front posters apart, asking what each image claims, who it addresses and what it wants the viewer to do. Working through the common devices - the accusing figure, the threatened family, the shamed bystander - shows how few moves the form actually needs. Source-analysis teaching aimed at younger students.
60. 2020-05-14 - The disinformation industry. A security conference talk on disinformation as a commercial sector: firms and freelancers who will build fake audiences, seed narratives and run influence campaigns for whoever pays. The important shift it identifies is outsourcing - a state no longer needs its own troll farm when the service can be bought, which also makes attribution far harder. Presented at CYBERWARCON in November 2019.
61. 2020-06-11 - China's global media campaign. A news segment on a US Justice Department filing reporting payments by the state outlet China Daily to American newspapers for inserted supplements. The mechanism is placement rather than broadcast: state-approved copy carried inside a trusted domestic masthead inherits that masthead's credibility. The segment is from an Indian news channel with its own editorial line on China, which is worth holding in view.
62. 2020-08-05 - Riefenstahl and the politics of technique. An essay on Riefenstahl as a technician - the tracking rails, telephoto lenses, underwater cameras and editing rhythms she developed, and how those innovations entered mainstream cinema. It argues that her work legitimised film as a political instrument precisely because the craft was so admired that the commission behind it could be set aside. Technical brilliance is treated as the problem, not the defence.
63. 2020-08-07 - A propaganda analysis presentation. A graduate coursework presentation from a university propaganda and persuasion class, applying analytical categories to specific campaign material. Student work of this kind shows the standard classroom method: identify the sponsor, the intended audience, the appeal and the intended action, then test whether the claim survives outside the frame. Useful as a worked example of the discipline rather than as original research.
64. 2020-11-23 - Newspeak and doublethink in Orwell's 1984. An analysis of the linguistic machinery in Orwell's novel: Newspeak as a vocabulary engineered so that dissent has no words, and doublethink as the trained ability to hold contradictory beliefs. Orwell's insight was that the deepest propaganda works on the tools of thought rather than on opinions, which is why his terms are still the ones reached for when describing political language. Literary analysis of a fictional system, not a historical one.
65. 2020-12-16 - Russian Revolution posters. A British Library curator presents revolutionary and civil-war era posters from the collection, produced when print was the fastest way to reach a scattered and often illiterate population. The designs strip politics down to a few readable signs - the worker, the wedge, the parasite, red against white - so a passer-by absorbs the argument in the second it takes to walk past. Poster art was the Bolshevik state's first mass medium, before radio or film could carry the load.
66. 2021-02-01 - Eisenstein on editing and meaning. A lecture on Eisenstein's film theory, working from his essay on the cinematographic principle and the ideogram through to Battleship Potemkin. The ideogram analogy is the key idea: as two characters combine into a new concept, two shots combine into a meaning neither contains, so the viewer performs the argument themselves. That is the mechanism that made montage a political tool as well as an aesthetic one.
67. 2021-05-10 - Chomsky's propaganda model. A short clip in which Chomsky summarises the propaganda model and answers questions on it: ownership, advertising revenue, sourcing and flak as filters that shape news without any order being given. The model's claim is that outcomes look coordinated because incentives are shared, not because anyone directs them. It is an argued thesis with its own critics, and is presented here as analysis rather than settled fact.
68. 2021-05-23 - Propaganda in the movies. A survey of feature films used for political persuasion, from the First World War through the Second World War, Vietnam and the Cold War to present-day releases. The recurring device is identification: an audience that has spent two hours with a sympathetic protagonist absorbs the politics attached to them without registering an argument. Broad and briskly made rather than deeply sourced.
69. 2021-11-04 - What propaganda is. The philosopher Jason Stanley gives a working definition of propaganda: an appeal that trades on an ideal - freedom, safety, fairness - in order to undermine that same ideal. The definition is useful because it does not depend on the claim being false, which is why so much effective propaganda survives fact-checking intact. A short conceptual foundation for recognising it in ordinary political speech.
70. 2022-01-19 - Inside Russia's troll farms. A Wall Street Journal cybersecurity reporter explains what Russia's so-called troll farms are: paid staff operating large numbers of fake accounts to make marginal positions look like popular consensus. The technique exploits a reflex most readers never examine, that apparent agreement from many strangers is evidence of truth. Because platforms reward volume and engagement, a small salaried team can imitate a crowd.
71. 2022-02-04 - Soviet agit-trains. A short account of the agitation trains the Bolsheviks sent into the countryside after 1917, fitted with printing presses, poster stocks, film projectors and speakers. The method paired novelty with repetition: cinema arriving in villages that had never seen a projected image gave a handful of simple slogans enormous weight. It let a young state address a largely illiterate population that print alone could not reach.
72. 2022-04-03 - Propaganda and psychological warfare. A video essay tracing persuasion techniques from Edward Bernays through wartime psychological operations to social-media memes. It argues that the core mechanics have not changed, only the delivery: emotional framing, repetition and the manufacture of an apparent consensus. The examples are drawn from both Western and Russian messaging.
73. 2022-04-20 - Russian information operations against Ukraine. Nina Jankowicz describes the origins of Russia's Internet Research Agency and how its operations against Ukraine long predated the campaigns that drew attention in the United States. The pattern she describes is a slow one: seeding divisive material for years so that, in a crisis, the audience is already primed. Ukraine functioned as the testing ground.
74. 2022-08-17 - Joseph Goebbels and the Reich propaganda ministry. A long-form biography of the man who ran Nazi Germany's propaganda apparatus, covering the centralisation of press, radio and film under a single ministry. Its subject's method was volume and consistency rather than argument: the cheap state-backed radio set, an approved vocabulary and the constant staging of unity. The film treats these as a case study; the claims made by the regime's output are presented as claims, not facts.
75. 2022-10-18 - Romantic love in Chinese state messaging. An academic webinar in which Dr Kailing Xie examines how the Chinese state promotes particular models of romance, marriage and family as national role models. The persuasion works by attaching political goals to an intimate subject that audiences do not read as political at all. It is a study of how state messaging reaches into private life.
76. 2022-11-01 - Socialist realism in Soviet and Chinese posters. An informal visual analysis of Sino-Soviet friendship posters of the 1950s and the conventions of socialist realism. The recurring devices are readable: idealised muscular bodies, the upward diagonal gaze towards an off-frame future, and two figures sharing a single frame to make an alliance between states look like a personal bond. The video reads the aesthetics rather than repeating the political message.
77. 2023-01-29 - A guide to Bernays' Propaganda. A walkthrough of Edward Bernays' 1928 book Propaganda, which argued openly that the deliberate manipulation of public opinion was a necessary feature of mass democracy. The video sets Bernays alongside the later critique in Chomsky and Herman's manufacturing-consent argument. Useful as an introduction to the founding text of the public relations industry.
78. 2023-02-12 - American propaganda in the First World War. A short classroom account of the Committee on Public Information, created days after the United States declared war in 1917 and known as the Creel Committee after its chairman. It combined posters, a daily official bulletin, film and the Four Minute Men who gave scripted talks in cinemas. Its significance is structural: it was the first peacetime-democracy attempt to organise domestic opinion at national scale.
79. 2023-03-12 - Propaganda in art. A survey of political artwork and how the modern sense of the word propaganda became attached to mass-produced imagery around the First World War. It works through the formal devices artists used, including simplified silhouettes, single dominant colours and the direct-address gaze. Historical context is supplied for each work.
80. 2023-03-20 - China's media influence in Africa. A university panel on China's investment in news media across the African continent, and what its output is designed to achieve. The discussion covers content-sharing agreements, journalist training programmes and the framing of governance models, rather than any single broadcast. It is an examination of influence built through infrastructure and access rather than through overt argument.
81. 2023-04-13 - Atrocity propaganda and the invasion of Belgium. A researcher's lecture on the German army's conduct in neutral Belgium in 1914 and the Allied campaign that followed. It separates two things usually confused: documented mass killings of civilians, and the embellished or invented atrocity stories that were then circulated abroad. That mixture is what made post-war audiences sceptical of all atrocity reporting, with grim consequences a generation later.
82. 2023-04-19 - How North Korean film propaganda works. A reported video essay based on watching a large number of North Korean films, examining the narrative formulas the state relies on. The recurring structure is a threatened community rescued by the leader, which converts political loyalty into an emotional reflex rather than a stated argument. The claims the films make about their own country are described as claims.
83. 2023-04-21 - Propaganda in Western media. A video essay arguing that propaganda is not confined to authoritarian states and that Western audiences underestimate the framing in their own media. It leans on the manufacturing-consent tradition, focusing on story selection and omission rather than outright falsehood. The channel has an explicit political position, which is worth knowing while watching.
84. 2023-07-20 - The War You Don't See. John Pilger's investigation into the relationship between governments and war reporting, from the First World War through Iraq and Afghanistan. Its central claim is about embedding and access: journalists dependent on military cooperation reproduce official framing without being instructed to. The film is itself argumentative and takes a strong position.
85. 2023-09-26 - The wartime carrot myth. A short account of the British claim during the Second World War that carrots improved night vision. The story served to explain away the true reason for improved night interceptions, airborne radar, while also promoting a vegetable that was not rationed. It is a compact example of a cover story that outlived the war and became folk belief.
86. 2023-10-11 - George Creel and the Committee on Public Information. A profile of the journalist who ran America's first federal propaganda agency and who saw shaping public opinion as legitimate government work. The Committee flooded every available channel at once, from cinema slides to press bulletins, so that a single line of argument appeared everywhere independently. That saturation model was studied and copied by later ministries.
87. 2023-10-13 - Computational propaganda. A long interview with a researcher from the Oxford Internet Institute's Computational Propaganda Project on automated and coordinated influence operations. It covers how bot networks and coordinated accounts are detected, and why measuring their actual effect is harder than documenting their existence. A useful corrective to both dismissal and panic.
88. 2023-10-30 - Bernays and the Torches of Freedom campaign. A clip from Adam Curtis's series on how Edward Bernays staged the 1929 campaign that presented women smoking in public as an act of emancipation. The method was to attach a product to an existing desire, in this case for independence, and then supply journalists with a scene worth photographing. It is the clearest single illustration of a manufactured news event.
89. 2023-12-09 - Reading a North Korean propaganda film. An analysis of the North Korean feature Order Number 27, used as a case study in how the state's cinema is constructed. The commentary picks out the conventions, including the invincible collective hero and the enemy rendered as caricature, and explains what domestic audiences were meant to take from them. The film's assertions about history are treated as the state's assertions.
90. 2024-03-18 - Second World War propaganda in brief. A three-minute overview of why the combatant governments invested so heavily in persuasion between 1939 and 1945, and what they asked of civilians. It covers recruitment, rationing compliance, security silence and the depiction of the enemy. A serviceable entry point before the longer material.
91. 2024-04-16 - What was Nazi propaganda?. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's short explainer on how the Nazi party used advertising technique, catchy slogans, symbols and the newest available media to exclude Jews and others from German society. It shows persuasion working as a preparation for policy rather than a decoration on top of it. The museum states plainly that the material's claims were lies.
92. 2024-04-16 - Walter Lippmann and public opinion. An introduction to Lippmann's 1922 book Public Opinion and its argument that citizens act on the pictures in their heads rather than on the world itself. Lippmann concluded that news could not supply what democratic theory assumed it would, which made the management of opinion look inevitable to his contemporaries. The video's framing of journalism is pointed and worth weighing against the book.
93. 2024-04-22 - The troll farm. Journalist Peter Pomerantsev traces how modern Russian disinformation evolved, and why its aim is often confusion rather than belief. If an audience concludes that nothing can be verified, it stops looking, which serves the operator as well as a successful lie would. The episode covers the tactics and the people who ran them.
94. 2024-07-05 - When the pictures learned to lie. The opening episode of a documentary series on modern war propaganda, covering the First World War and the moment images became instruments of state. It examines staged battle footage, censored dispatches, enemy stereotypes and the atrocity story as a recruiting device. The lasting lesson it draws is that the camera's apparent objectivity is exactly what made the staging effective.
95. 2024-08-17 - Leni Riefenstahl, the Reich's filmmaker. A German-language profile of Riefenstahl, who filmed the Nuremberg rallies and the 1936 Olympics and spent the rest of her life denying that she had served the regime. Her contribution was aesthetic rather than argumentative: she filmed a political party as a monumental spectacle and its leader as a figure descending from the sky. The programme sets her own account against the record.
96. 2024-11-22 - How to spot propaganda. A short media-literacy piece for young viewers explaining what propaganda is and where they are likely to meet it. It gives concrete checks: who benefits from this message, what is being left out, and why the feeling it produces is the point. Plain and practical.
97. 2024-12-18 - Teaching American propaganda in German classrooms. An American living in Germany walks through how German secondary schools teach students to analyse United States propaganda in English lessons. The point of interest is pedagogical: media literacy taught on foreign material first, where the emotional stake is lower, before turning it on one's own. It is a personal channel responding to a viral discussion, not a curriculum document.
98. 2025-01-15 - Goebbels and the making of a national campaign. A documentary on how Goebbels built and ran the Nazi propaganda operation, from his early Berlin work to control of the state's media output. It shows the machinery of hatred assembled piece by piece, with the enemy defined first and the policy following. The regime's assertions are presented as the regime's, and the film is explicit that they paved the way for mass murder.
99. 2025-01-19 - Leni Riefenstahl and the power of images. A public broadcaster's documentary on Riefenstahl's technique and its effect, focusing on the Nuremberg rally film and the 1936 Olympics films. The devices are identifiable and were widely copied afterwards: low camera angles that enlarge a single figure, the massed geometry of crowds, and editing cut to music rather than to speech. It also addresses her lifelong denial of complicity.
100. 2025-05-11 - Hitler's propaganda machine. A three-part documentary series on how the Nazi regime built its image, took control of German media and sustained public consent through the war. It moves from brand-building in the 1920s to persuasion under bombardment, showing the messaging adapt as the facts turned against it. The films are analytical throughout and quote the regime's output as evidence rather than as information.
101. 2025-05-19 - The Second World War as political memory. A documentary on how the memory of the Second World War is used politically in present-day Europe, particularly the Russian state's handling of the Great Patriotic War and the very different Polish experience. It is a study of commemoration as a persuasive instrument: the events are real, the selection and framing are the message. The subject is contemporary politics, examined historically.
102. 2025-07-19 - Michael Mann on Battleship Potemkin. A filmmaker discusses Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 Battleship Potemkin, the film that made montage a persuasive technique rather than a stylistic one. Eisenstein's method was collision: two shots that mean little separately produce an emotion in the cut between them, most famously on the Odessa steps. Potemkin was itself a commissioned commemorative work, which is exactly why it is studied.
103. 2025-07-30 - Soviet posters and the image of the state. A short documentary on Soviet poster art as an instrument of ideology rather than decoration. It reads the standard devices, including the heroic worker, the pointing figure that addresses the viewer directly, and the compressed slogan designed to be legible at a distance and remembered. It sets the imagery against the conditions it was concealing.
104. 2025-10-04 - Poster styles of political propaganda. A quick survey of the major poster idioms, from constructivist diagonals and wartime realism to the flat two-colour styles of later campaigns. Each is tied to what it was trying to do: legibility at speed, emotional charge, or the impression of an unstoppable collective. Useful for recognising the visual grammar in the archival material.
105. 2025-12-09 - Reading Soviet propaganda posters. A close reading of well-known Soviet posters, taken one at a time with the composition explained. The recurring technique is direct address, a figure looking out of the frame and speaking to the viewer as an individual while representing the state. Several examples are domestic campaigns rather than war messaging, which shows the same visual language applied to everyday conduct.
106. 2025-12-19 - Propaganda: the art of selling lies. A feature documentary on the dominant methods of persuasion used by those seeking power, working back from the polarised present to the historical precedents. It treats propaganda as a craft with identifiable moves rather than as a synonym for opinions one dislikes. A good spine for the whole subject.
107. 2026-01-28 - Walter Lippmann on why publics misjudge. A lecture-style episode on Lippmann's Public Opinion, published in 1922, and its account of how opinion actually forms. Lippmann's argument was that stereotypes are unavoidable because attention and time are scarce, and that the press cannot supply the picture democratic theory assumes citizens have. That diagnosis is the root from which both public relations and modern media criticism grew.
108. 2026-03-26 - Orwell on propaganda and the internet. A video essay applying Orwell's writing on political language to online influence, alongside Jason Stanley's account of how propaganda works. The shared claim is that the most effective propaganda borrows the vocabulary of the values it is undermining, so it never announces itself. Orwell's interest in the degradation of language is treated as a diagnostic tool rather than a prophecy.
109. 2026-04-25 - How authoritarian leaders use propaganda. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who studies authoritarian rule, explains the recurring pattern by which such leaders hold power: a designated internal enemy, a claim to be the only remedy, and the steady discrediting of independent sources. The conversation applies the historical pattern to present-day figures, and the host's outlet has a declared political position. It is included for the historian's analysis rather than the commentary around it.
110. 2026-05-26 - The war on truth. A documentary on how fake news, misinformation and deliberate disinformation are reshaping public understanding, with attention to African media markets. It covers the speed advantage falsehood has over verification and what newsrooms are attempting in response. The framing is journalistic rather than alarmist.
111. 2026-06-28 - Television in Nazi Germany. A documentary on the German television service that broadcast from 1935 until the war years, long before television became a mass medium anywhere. The programming mixed news, sport, cabaret and light entertainment, which is the point: the entertainment was what made the political content go down. Surviving footage from the archives carries the analysis.
112. 2026-07-05 - What is propaganda? A lecture on wartime media. The opening lecture of a university course on media during the Second World War, defining propaganda and setting out the techniques the course will analyse. It covers emotional appeal, slogan construction and visual imagery, with iconic campaigns as worked examples. Straightforward academic framing for the archival material that follows.
113. 2026-07-16 - Repetition as a propaganda technique. A short examination of repetition as the Nazi regime's most transferable method: a claim restated constantly across every channel acquires familiarity, and familiarity is mistaken for truth. Psychologists later named this the illusory-truth effect, and it works regardless of whether the audience agrees at first hearing. The video notes that the same mechanism operates in advertising and online feeds today.
114. 2026-07-22 - Edward Bernays and the making of public relations. A profile of Bernays, Freud's nephew, who took psychoanalytic ideas out of the consulting room and applied them to selling goods and shaping political opinion. His insight was that people can be moved more reliably through desire and identity than through argument, which is why his campaigns sold a feeling and let the product follow. It covers both the commercial work and the later political consequences.
115. 2026-08-05 - Russia's information war. A documentary on the Russian state's information apparatus, following the same methods across Ukraine, Syria, the United States, Catalonia and Mali. It shows state broadcasters, troll accounts, bots and paid influencers working as one system, with the aim of amplifying existing divisions rather than converting anyone. The claims made by that apparatus are examined, not repeated.

Full text archive: /loreline-text/propaganda.md