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 Norén is an Assistant Professor in Media and Communication Studies at Malmö University, Sweden. His research is geared toward 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.

Introduction: Towards a History of Media Tactics

Part 1: Entanglements

Emigrant Colonialism and Transnational Communities: Scandinavian Cultural Diplomacy through Nationals Abroad

Scientific Exchange as a Media Tactic: Creating “ever smaller worlds” through the Visit of Sir Lawrence Bragg to Sweden in 1943

Where Can You See Striking Workers? Communist Media Networks, Documentary Film, and Regimes of (In)Visibility in the Early Cold War

Broadcasting Agency in the Portuguese Empire: Disrupting the Dominant Discourse through Media Tactics

Part 2: Institutions

Supporting the Democratisation of Education and Anticolonialism in the Global South: The World Student News and Soviet Bloc Media Tactics in the 1970s

The Paradox of Parliamentary Propaganda: Parliamentarians’ Individual Media Tactics versus Parliament’s Institutional Media Strategy

Local 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 Strategies

The Information-by-Proxy Strategy: Cultural Policy as a Media Tactic in Swedish Governmental Information

Part 3: Infrastructures

Measuring Media Tactics to Improve Propaganda Strategies: The British Wartime Social Survey and ‘Publicity in Reverse’, 1941–45

Window Tactics: Entangled Visual Propaganda in Neutral Sweden, 1939–1945

Communications Infrastructures and Cold War Politics: The Middle Eastern Theatre of the US/American Empire and Anti-American Coalitions

Working their Cover: The CIA’s Forum World Features, Covert Propaganda Strategy, and News Tactics, 1966–1975

Propaganda -> Counterinsurgency -> Digital: A Brief History of Prediction and the Present

Afterword: Toward a Tactical Turn?