How a Columbia Institute from the 1930s Explains Today’s Information Environment

Researchers who study online disinformation in the US are facing sustained political pressure — House subpoenas, sweeping demands for records, cancelled federal grants, and online harassment. Columbia University has experienced this reality before: the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), founded at the University in 1937 to teach Americans how propaganda works, was severely attacked in the right-wing press and eventually shuttered in 1942.

That history was the starting point for an October 2 three-panel conference titled Backlash: The Institute for Propaganda Analysis and the Attacks on Disinformation Researchers. The event also launched a special issue of Journalism History, the oldest peer-reviewed journal of mass media history in the US and the official journal of the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).

Opening the event, Anya Schiffrin, senior lecturer and codirector of the Technology Policy and Innovation concentration at SIPA, said that the founder of the IPA, Clyde Miller, believed that propaganda should be countered on an individual level — by teaching individuals to spot it and changing audience behavior. But if Miller were alive today, she asked, would he still believe in media literacy as the solution to propaganda, “or would he push for regulation?”

Miller wanted the institute to be apolitical and study propaganda scientifically, according to David Greenberg of Rutgers University. This, however, eventually divided the institute as some members argued that “debunking everything leaves people with nothing to believe” and decided that fighting Nazis called for propaganda in democracy’s defense. Attempting to stay neutral also drew criticism from both the right and the left.

The right, in particular, has a long history of targeting media critics and scholars of misinformation, said AJ Bauer of the University of Alabama. Conservative magazines would “reveal” that a media critic had attended civil rights meetings to recast the scholar as an activist whose findings should be dismissed. Politicians eventually faced the same treatment, said Andie Tucher of Columbia Journalism School, pointing to Senator Millard Tydings, a staunch critic of Joseph McCarthy, the 1950s senator, infamous for leveling unfounded accusations of communism against members of the US government, military and universities. Tydings lost his seat after a doctored photo showed him meeting with a prominent communist leader.

Money was similarly used to shape the mass communication and propaganda research field, said Victor Pickard of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. Funders decide what gets studied, and the Rockefeller Foundation steered early communication research away from criticism of US commercial broadcasting, which failed to support the country’s democratic foundations. “Perhaps if we were more aware of commercial media’s structural issues, we would have been able to defend democracy better,” he said.

One of the main funders, the federal government, has since gone from patron to persecutor. Phil Napoli of Duke University pointed out that Washington used to fund communication and propaganda research in the 1940s and 1950s but is now cancelling National Science Foundation grants and investigating scholars as a method of punishing through process.

Gordon Crovitz, cofounder of NewsGuard, described what that looks like in practice. His company rates the reliability of news sites using apolitical journalistic criteria, and provides those ratings to advertisers, who use them to keep their ads off unreliable sites. According to the Federal Trade Commission, that’s technically censorship, so the FTC issued a consent order barring the largest advertising agencies from using NewsGuard’s ratings. Crovitz’s company is challenging the order in court.

Scholars and journalists, however, are not the only targets of disinformation attacks. Research by Amrit Singh of New York University’s Rule of Law Lab found that federal judges of every political affiliation now increasingly face disinformation, ad hominem attacks, swatting and violent threats meant to influence their rulings. President Trump is not the first to attack judges, she said, but the attacks have escalated under him. Still, Singh said that so far the judiciary is holding strong.

To highlight the importance of resisting autocratic intimidation, especially at the highest levels of society, Jean-Marie Guéhenno of Columbia SIPA’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies drew a lesson from occupied France. Despite living under the Nazi regime, many intellectuals carried on with their work as usual, telling themselves that French literature and institutions relied on them. Doing so, Guéhenno argued, only normalized the Nazi occupation. His father, Jean Guéhenno, one of the few writers who refused to publish during those years, believed that a university’s “capital sin” is to “abandon the pursuit of truth,” which “cannot be excused even in difficult times.”

American universities face that test now, according to Sanjay Reddy of the New School. Even tenured professors critical of their own universities are losing jobs and grants under the guise of budget cuts and shifting research priorities, he noted. Faculty are being replaced with adjuncts who are cheaper and easier to dismiss, but that, according to Reddy, is all the more reason to stand their ground. “If we don’t speak out right now in our own institutions,” he asked, “then when and where will we speak out?”