Media Tactics in the Long Twentieth Century

Marie Cronqvist is a Professor of Modern History at the Department of Culture and Society, Linköping University, Sweden. Her main research focus is Cold War culture, history of civil defence, information and preparedness, and transnational broadcasting.Fredrik Mohammadi Noren is an Assistant Professor in Media and Communication Studies at Malmö University, Sweden. His research is geared towards media history, strategic communication, digital humanities, and parliamentary history.Emil Stjernholm is an Assistant Professor in Media and Communication Studies at Lund University, Sweden. His main areas of research include media and communication history, digital methods, and visual communication.

“The editors of Media Tactics in the Long Twentieth Century have shaken the concept of media tactics loose from the military, propaganda and strategic communication contexts they formerly belonged to. Instead they propose seeing media tactics and counter-tactics as a key to understanding media power. Their practice-based and historical approach is a genuinely innovative move. I believe that following the editors’ lead through this collection’s stimulating range of articles will be highly rewarding not only for media and other historians but for media and communications researchers more generally.”Espen Ytreberg, Professor of Media Studies at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo“This carefully curated collection provides a much-needed historical corrective to contemporary debates about strategic communication, reminding us of its long historical roots and many historical precedents, from propaganda and covert influence operations to public diplomacy. Inviting us to look beyond the neat designs of strategic communication, the contributors draw attention to the fascinating, messy world of media and communication ‘tactics’ and the many ways in which these tactics can expand, adapt, and sometimes subvert and resist strategic goals.”Sabina Mihelj, Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis at the School of Social Sciences, Loughborough University“This imaginative collection lays bare the ‘messy’ tactics that have underpinned the fundamentally key relationship between media and power around the world and over time. Occasionally there are no ‘rational’ or easily theorised explanations for why and how individuals, institutions, and governments react the way they do. Failure is often intrinsic to the process and there are uncomfortable truths to be faced. The dialectical relationship between ‘strategy’ and ‘tactic’ explored in several essays also raises interesting avenues for future research.”Chandrika Kaul, Professor of Modern History at the School of History, University of St Andrews

• Introduction: Towards a History of Media TacticsPart 1: EntanglementsEmigrant Colonialism and Transnational Communities: Scandinavian Cultural Diplomacy through Nationals AbroadScientific Exchange as a Media Tactic: Creating “ever smaller worlds” through the Visit of Sir Lawrence Bragg to Sweden in 1943Where Can You See Striking Workers? Communist Media Networks, Documentary Film, and Regimes of (In)Visibility in the Early Cold WarBroadcasting Agency in the Portuguese Empire: Disrupting the Dominant Discourse through Media TacticsPart 2: InstitutionsSupporting the Democratisation of Education and Anticolonialism in the Global South: The World Student News and Soviet Bloc Media Tactics in the 1970sThe Paradox of Parliamentary Propaganda: Parliamentarians’ Individual Media Tactics versus Parliament’s Institutional Media StrategyLocal Media Tactics: Municipal Information, Audio-Visual Media and the Roots of City Branding in Gothenburg (1973)Revisiting ‘The CIA and the Media’: FOIA, Paperwork, and the Dialectic of (Media) Tactics and StrategiesThe Information-by-Proxy Strategy: Cultural Policy as a Media Tactic in Swedish Governmental InformationPart 3: Infrastructures Measuring Media Tactics to Improve Propaganda Strategies: The British Wartime Social Survey and ‘Publicity in Reverse’, 1941–45Window Tactics: Entangled Visual Propaganda in Neutral Sweden, 1939–1945Communications Infrastructures and Cold War Politics: The Middle Eastern Theatre of the US/American Empire and Anti-American CoalitionsWorking their Cover: The CIA’s Forum World Features, Covert Propaganda Strategy, and News Tactics, 1966–1975Propaganda -> Counterinsurgency -> Digital: A Brief History of Prediction and the PresentAfterword: Toward a Tactical Turn?