Volume 52, No. 3, Fall, 2026. In this Special Issue we explore Media Literacy, Mis/Disinformation Research, and the Institute for Propaganda Analysis. We start with an introduction from guest editor, the Institute of Propaganda Anaylsis’, Anya Schiffrin, where she explores Clyde Miller and the Institute for Propaganda Analysis. Special Issue research articles include: The Misadventures of Clyde Miller: Democrats, Dictators, and the Curse of Propaganditis* by David Greenberg; The Institutes for Propaganda Analysis and Frankfurt School Social Research on Morningside Heights: A de facto Alliance and Its Legacies by Paul K. Jones; A Paradigm Displaced: Propaganda Analysis Within and Beyond the Field of Mass Communication by A.J. Bauer and From Patron to Persecutor: The Evolution of the US Government’s Role in Disinformation Research by Philip M. Napoli. Essays include: Ideological Steering of US Media Research: The Role of Redbaiting in the Early Communication Field by Victor Pickard; Of Politics and Playbooks: Silencing Disinformation Research(ers) in Times of Autocracy by James Fitzgerald, Rose Marie Santini & Débora Salles and The Personal Toll of the Contemporary Backlash Against Disinformation Research by Nina Jankowicz.
Research article abstracts
This introduction to the Journalism History special issue “Media Literacy, Mis/Disinformation Research, and the Institute for Propaganda Analysis” includes a summary of the founding of the IPA at Columbia University and lays out the parallels between today’s backlash against disinformation researchers and the criticisms made of IPA scholars in the 1930s. We also summarize the contributions to the special issue from a range of scholars who discuss contemporary influences on the IPA, the backlash against researchers of the past and today, and the effect this has had on media policy.
The Misadventures of Clyde Miller: Democrats, Dictators, and the Curse of Propaganditis*
In 1937, against a backdrop of threats to liberal democracy posed by the rise of totalitarian ideologies and doubts about whether democracy was up to the challenge, Columbia University education professor Clyde Miller founded the Institute for Propaganda Analysis to take up what seemed like a vital mission: teaching Americans to recognize deceptive or self-serving messaging and to cultivate what today we might call “media literacy.” Their goal was high-minded and laudable and executed with thought and care. But from the outset, critics identified certain fundamental flaws in Miller’s approach, rooted in the very challenges of fighting propaganda itself. Most important, the IPA’s focus on propaganda could obscure the larger stakes of the global crisis of the 1930s. This essay reflects on the establishing ideals, and ultimately the fatal contradictions, of Miller’s IPA project.
The relationship between the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) and the exiled Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research (FISR) is somewhat enigmatic, despite the two entities’ physical proximity on Morningside Heights during the 1930s and 1940s. This article challenges J. Michael Sproule’s “mutual disinterest” account of that relationship. It demonstrates the influence of Alfred and Elizabeth Lee on the FISR’s Studies in Prejudice project, which anticipated a scenario in the US like the democratic crisis that exists today. Theodor Adorno’s work on demagogic propaganda is particularly indebted to the Lees’ The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin’s Speeches (1939). Detailed archival and textual reconstruction of this relationship is presented. This focuses on the FISR’s plans for a popular manual like The Fine Art and Adorno’s reworking of the IPA’s famous “seven devices” of propaganda technique into a more elaborate theoretical and practical counter-demagogic program. This article also demonstrates that these developments in propaganda studies played a little-recognized role in the well-known tension between Adorno and Paul Lazarsfeld regarding “administrative” and “critical” communications research. Finally, the legacies of this complex history are briefly explored in the context of current debates about research on disinformation.
A Paradigm Displaced: Propaganda Analysis Within and Beyond the Field of Mass Communication
A. J. Bauer
This article tracks the rise of propaganda analysis as a social scientific research paradigm in the early twentieth century, its influence on the progressive media reform movement of the 1940s, and its rightward shift during the Second Red Scare (also known as McCarthyism) in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It challenges the prevailing critical historiography of mass communication as a discipline, which tends to narrate the Institute for Propaganda Analysis as the epitome of a critical scholarly paradigm within the field and sees the subsequent behaviorist turn toward quantification as obscuring that field’s political stakes. By emphasizing the political cultural impacts of notions of public opinion shared across and beyond the disciplinary divide, the article calls for reconsidering the animating fictions of contemporary political discourse—namely the existence of a unitary, agential, and hypothetically manipulable public.
From Patron to Persecutor: The Evolution of the US Government’s Role in Disinformation Research
Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including legal filings and decisions, executive orders, congressional hearings and testimony, news releases, agency decisions, and government reports, this article documents the ongoing governmental assault on disinformation research. This article assesses these activities through the historical lens of the origins of communications and media research. As this article will illustrate through a synthesis of relevant historical research, the origins of communication and media research as an academic field owe much to federal government initiatives in the 1940s and 1950s to develop a robust domestic research program that focused on issues of propaganda and disinformation. There is, obviously, a tremendous irony inherent in the current efforts by the federal government to dismantle a field of research that it played a central role in creating. This article seeks to understand this dramatic reversal through an analysis of the historical contexts that led to both the mid-twentieth century and early-twenty-first century iterations of propaganda/disinformation research; the key research questions that guided these bodies of work; and the national political dynamics at each of these moments in time.
Essay abstracts
Ideological Steering of US Media Research: The Role of Redbaiting in the Early Communication Field
Victor Pickard
The early US communication field took root during the 1930s and ‘40s upon a rapidly shifting ideological terrain. These years saw several critical threads of communication research rise and fall, while other less critical approaches ascended to become the dominant paradigm of communication research, emphasizing social science methods that consistently found only limited media effects. Although typically narrated as an intellectual/methodological interplay between critical and administrative approaches, early tensions in the field were also ideological, swaying research down a particular trajectory. To understand how certain types of research fell from favor, while others were more readily embraced, it’s instructive to consider an especially effective set of tools used to discipline the discipline that loosely fell under a general strategy: redbaiting.
Of Politics and Playbooks: Silencing Disinformation Research(ers) in Times of Autocracy
James Fitzgerald, Rose Marie Santini & Débora Salles
The enforced demise of Clyde Miller’s Institute for Propaganda Analysis—shuttered in 1942 amid accusations of communist sympathy and insufficient loyalty to the American ideal—resonates with coordinated campaigns to silence disinformation researchers today. This essay interrogates those campaigns, with a particular focus on Brazil. It begins by situating disinformation research within a matrix of democracy and autocracy, arguing that under current conditions, disinformation researchers function as an extension of civil society positioned against autocratic creep. Against that backdrop, the essay poses a central question derived from Arundhati Roy’s open-ended observation about the resemblances of authoritarian politics: do campaigns to silence disinformation researchers follow a playbook or do they spread via osmosis, as similar repertoires converge across structurally comparable authoritarian contexts? Tracing these dynamics across the US, the Philippines, Thailand, and India, the essay culminates in a granular account of how NetLab—a social media observatory at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro—experienced a campaign to discredit and shutter its research on disinformation and social media regulation. It concludes that amid constricting space for critical expression, disinformation research continues to speak democratic resistance to those who would see it undone and should be protected on that basis.
The New York Times has officially published its crossword puzzle since February 15, 1942. The puzzle is an American institution, generating a community of crossword aficionados, friends, and, most importantly, subscribers. It may be surprising, then, to learn that the Times was two decades late to the party. The history of the crossword—and the American public’s fascination with the puzzle—dates back to 1913 at the New York World. While most newspapers were printing crosswords by the 1920s, The New York Times was a noted holdout. Not only that, but the newspaper covered crosswords in those early years with a marked condescension. Through a careful reading of The New York Times’ historical coverage and editorials, archival materials, and secondary histories, this article documents the Times’ institutional attitude change toward crosswords from the 1924 “crossword craze” to the Times’ first official crossword in 1942. This evolving conception of taste, audience engagement needs, and the support from a particularly puzzling publisher facilitated the introduction of The New York Times crossword. Further, this background challenges institutional discourses that audience engagement is a “new” response to the internet age or financial precarity.
The Personal Toll of the Contemporary Backlash Against Disinformation Research
Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher who became the target of disinformation and harassment after taking on a role in the Biden administration, recounts the personal toll the experience has taken on both her and the broader information integrity research field since 2022
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