Propaganda and Persuasion [Paperback]

Garth S. Jowett (Author), Victoria J. O'Donnell (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0761911472 | ISBN-13: 978-0761911470 | Publication Date: August 17, 1999 | Edition: 3rd

The Third Edition of this successful book has been revised, updated and expanded, building on the book's excellence. The book covers: an explanation of what propoganda is, its history, media and developing audiences, theory and research, and the use of propoganda in psychological warfare. Original methods of propoganda analysis are presented, there are new and revised case studies and a process model that depicts how propoganda works in modern society. This book provides students and scholars with a cogent, applicable approach to the study of persuasion and propoganda.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Garth Jowett is Professor of Communications at the University of Houston. He obtained his Ph.D. in history and communication from the University of Pennsylvania. He has served as Director for Social Research for the Canadian government's Department of Communication and has been a consultant to various international communication agencies. He has been widely published in the area of popular culture and the history of communication. His book Film: The Democratic Art (1976) was a benchmark in firm history. His other publications include Movies as Mass Communication; Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Studies; and his forthcoming 5th edition of Propaganda and Persuasion with Victoria O'Donnell. He is on the boards of several communication and film journals.

Victoria O'Donnell (Ph.D., the Pennsylvania State University) is Professor Emeritus at Montana State University-Bozeman. She teaches a seminar on television criticism for the School of Film and Photography at Montana State University. She has published on topics concerning persuasion, the social effects of media, women in film and television, British politics, Nazi propaganda, collective memory, cultural studies theory, and science fiction films of the 1950s. She is also the author (with June Kable) of Persuasion: An Interactive-Dependency Approach, Propaganda and Persuasion (with Garth Jowett), and Speech Communication. She’s co-edited (with Garth Jowett) Readings in Propaganda and Persuasion. She made a film, Women, War, and Work: Shaping Space for Productivity in the Shipyards During World War II, for PBS, has written television scripts for environmental films, and has done voice-overs. She served on several journal editorial boards, is the recipient of numerous research grants and teaching awards, has been a private consultant, a Danforth Foundation Associate, a Summer Scholar of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has taught in Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Wales.

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Sage Publications, Inc; 3rd edition (August 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0761911472
• ISBN-13: 978-0761911470
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,486,777 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not Elegant, but it works, June 16, 2005

By 

TitaniumDreads "http://blog.titaniumdreads.com" (Cambridge, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Propaganda and Persuasion (Paperback)

The overwealming impression that I got from the Propaganda and Persuasion was that it was muddled and poorly put together. I would probably rate it at three stars but there are enough gems in this to justify a four. Even though the flow of the book is clunky you will end up taking away a lot from it.

My first complaint is that the book spends a lot of time tripping over the definition of propaganda. There is obviously quite a bit of rigorous academic debate on exactly what propaganda is but the book has trouble deciding how, when and in what format it wants to present the debate. Rather than coming up with a coherent, consistently used definition of propaganda (or even multiple definitions that are used in parallel) it haphazardly loops back on itself covering the same information two and three times.

I think this accounts for roughly 75-100 extra pages that would have been more useful as examples of propaganda throughout the ages, more rigorous analysis using the constructs presented, or even just pictures. The book has a few very cool pictures of propagandistic architecture, art, and old posters from wars. I would have been much happier with more pictures of actual propaganda that were deconstructed using the theories presented.

Coverage of the propaganda leading up to and through the first gulf war was better than nothing but certainly not what I would expect from academic material. The authors managed to strip down a fairly interesting subject into kind of blah coverage. It should also be noted that this book covers a reasonably basic view of history, something that might be suitable for first or second year undergraduates. That's not a complaint per se, just something you should know.

The book also takes on a lot of info regarding abstract theories of communication. In this respect I think this book would work quite well as a reference for a communications class but even there it is a little weak on explanations in some places.

Although my review may seem overly negative there is a lot of good content in this book that will REALLY make you think. Very quickly I could see that most people use the term propaganda incorrectly. The perfect example of this is the other reviewer who thought the book itself was propaganda because of a "liberal" slant.

Even if you accept the (dubious) argument that the book has a liberal bias that does not meet even the lightest qualifications for propaganda. Does the book contain intentional lies that are psychologically designed to subvert the readers own best interest? Do Jowett and O'Donnell hide or misrepresent their own identities in order to perpetuate this deception? Do they use creative artisanship to promote poorly reasoned support for government programs? NO, NO, NO and if anonymous reader has gotten past the third chapter they would know this book is not propaganda!

Since reading the book it appears that when most people say "x is propaganda" what they really mean is "x is an opinion/fact that I don't really like and want to suppress by labeling it propaganda." In this sense the word propaganda is frequently a "white" form of propaganda itself. Whoa....meta! Admittedly the book does dig on Rush Limbaugh in passing but justly so, he's said some insanely stupid stuff. If you're a fan of his parts of the book will make your ego a bit sore.

The book also impacted to a very large degree the way I conceive of political maneuvering by all governments. It appears that most leaders are not in fact agents of a populace but instead working out what they can get the populace to put up with. That is of course something that I took away not anything the book proclaims. Prop and Persuasion wins stars because it is awash in compelling anecdotes that I ended up sharing with friends and family. Despite what I said above there is some crucial explorations of propaganda taxonomy. Perhaps the book is even worth a read for these alone.

However, this book failed to pass the ultimate textbook test, at the end of the semester almost all of the students I took the class with trashed or resold the book. Even more telling is that most people decided not to read it at all. My complaint was that the book was poorly ordered everyone else in my class thought it was dry and uninspiring. I can see where they are coming from and accept that maybe my personal interest in the subject influences my opinion. I even showed the book to 2 other friends and they both found the writing unengaging. I certainly don't think that was the case but I since this is a review I want to encompass as many opinions as possible. Personally, I was actually looking forward to the class and read 80% of the book before the semester even started.

My final say is that this is a decent book for a classroom setting. I would have enjoyed reading it for it's own sake but among my peers (whom I consider to be highly educated, intelligent and witty) it was a dud. If you liked this or are generally interested in the subject matter I would also recommend Toxic Sludge is Good For You by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. It manages to tell many of the same stories in a more interesting way while using less space. Another winner is Noam Chomsky's short and sweet Media Control:Spectacular Achievements in Propaganda. You won't agree with ALL of his views but it's concentrated, hard hitting and rigorous.

Cheers and Happy Reading!
-TitaniumDreads

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good review of the literature on propaganda, October 23, 2007

By 

Santi Tafarella (california) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Propaganda and Persuasion (Paperback)

This book functions as an excellent outline for reflecting on rhetoric and propaganda through the ages. The authors review the history and literature of propaganda pretty thoroughly. Not much scholarship on the subject seems to have escaped their attention. You can use the references at the back of the text as a good guide to all the major academic books and articles on propaganda (at least those that have been written over the past fifty years).

After attempting to define propaganda, the authors devote the first half of the book to a historical survey of the subject, from ancient times to the present. The second half of the book is devoted to an analysis of the techniques of propaganda. My only negative critique of this book is that the authors are not fluid writers. But this did not put me off from reading the book in its entirety. I'm often impatient with awkward wording, or choppiness of phrase in a book, but the authors' thoroughness of documentation, and their commitment to survey and summarize the academic literature thoroughly, makes the text worthy of close (if sometimes painful) reading.

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well-written, easy to understand, interesting, August 11, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Propaganda and Persuasion (Paperback)

Terrific book for anyone interested in not only propaganda and its history, but public relations, marketing, advertising, etc