Piers Robinson

Organisation for Propaganda studies

Organized persuasive communication is essential to the exercise of power at national and global levels. It has been studied extensively by scholars of public relations, promotional culture and propaganda. There exists, however, considerable confusion and conceptual limitations across these fields: scholars of PR largely focus on what they perceive...

Understanding how power is exercised through communication is central to understanding the socio-political world around us. To date, however, political communication research has been limited by an over-emphasis on 'problem solving' research which, by and large, reflects the interests and concerns of more powerful political actors. Even the margina...

Executive Summary What follows is an attempt to define a research agenda for the ongoing study of 9/11 and related events. The aim of this agenda is to deepen our understanding of 9/11 and its consequences and to develop a broader understanding of the ways in which power is exercised in the contemporary world. This paper has been developed from the...

Major crisis events, such as the assassination of political leaders, terrorist attacks and public health emergencies, can be politically useful. Unfortunately, critical discussion of whether such events are exploited or even instigated in order to enable particular policy agendas is all too often dismissed as ‘conspiracism’. Fortunately, Peter Dale...

All wars are accompanied by propaganda. For example, the US and UK governments worked with intelligence services to promote the 2003 invasion of Iraq through deceptive claims regarding a ‘current’ and ‘threatening’ Iraqi WMD programme. Since then, an important development relates to the way in which ‘influence’ operations, otherwise identifiable as...

All wars are accompanied by propaganda and the current Ukraine conflict is no exception. Wartime propaganda activities focus on demonizing the enemy and emphasizing the righteousness of “our” side whilst simultaneously highlighting useful facts and censoring those deemed inconvenient. One component of realizing these objectives is to suppress disse...

The “Russiagate” deception played a significant role as part of drives to demonize the Russian Federation and, simultaneously, uphold public perceptions regarding the unassailability of Western claims to be the leading force for good in the world. These drives have, predictably, escalated with the Ukraine War. Other issues and associated propaganda...

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is a significant component of the global governance structure and considered a gold standard international body with 193 member states and scientific divisions expected to adhere rigorously to objectivity and political neutrality. However, OPCW's reputation has recently been tarnished....

In common with all wars, the 2011-present Syrian War has been accompanied by sharply contrasting ‘narratives’ and extensive propaganda. One ‘narrative’, emphasized across the UK and US media, is that the war is primarily a conflict between a brutal regime (guilty of chemical weapon attacks and torture) and pro-democracy groups seeking its overthrow...

Abstract Although the existence of propaganda in liberal democratic states is frequently denied it continues to play a central role especially with respect to war and conflict. Propaganda, understood as a non-consensual approach to influencing beliefs and behaviour, involves a variety of manipulative techniques including deception through lying, o...

This report is extracted from a larger report, in progress, which systematically documents the alterations and redactions observed across the OPCW Fact Finding Mission reports- The Original Interim Report, the Secretly Redacted Interim Report, the Published Interim Report and the Final Report. The focus of this report is on critical information reg...

Update on the OPCW's investigation of the Douma incident includes details of scientific and procedural irregularities

Briefing Note Detailing Fraud at the OPCW During the Douma alleged chemical weapon attack investigation.

The media imperialism paradigm has performed an essential role in helping to elucidate the ways in which communication technologies and corporate media maintain a global system characterized both by stark social and economic inequalities and the extensive use of use of coercive and militaristic strategies by, in particular, the US and its allies. I...

Briefing note from the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media

For many scholars the issues of propaganda and deception have been largely taboo subjects. There is only fleeting attention to deception from political scientists whilst communication scholars pay minimal attention to the issue of propaganda. And yet we live in an age in which debates about deception and propaganda are prevalent. Recent angst over...

From the sophists of ancient Greece, chastised by Plato (360 bc) for their specious rhetoric, through to the sixteenth- century realpolitik of Machiavelli and the twentieth- century advocacy of the necessity of deception in politics by thinkers such as Leo Strauss (1958, 1975), the issues of lying and deception have been perennials of politics. The...

Briefing Note regarding the Integrity Initiative

Briefing Note

This chapter examines the academic debates over the relationship between US public opinion, media, and foreign policy. It first considers the nature of US media and public opinion, including democratic expectations of mass media and public opinion, before discussing pluralist and elite approaches to understanding the links between media, public opi...

In this critical overview of the research to date on media and foreign policy, the relationship between media and public opinion and key international relations theories is described and two key research strands are examined. The first research strand concerns the liberal-pluralist approach to analyzing media and foreign policy and considering the...

A core problem of the contemporary fake news phenomenon is that professional persuaders and influencers have engaged in propaganda for so long that many people no longer trust mainstream news to communicate truthful and accurate information. We therefore need professional persuaders and influencers to develop less propagandistic modes of persuasion...

The 2016 Iraq Inquiry Report (the Chilcot report) was highly critical of the British government and its involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation. Drawing upon the authoritative material in the report, this article provides the most comprehensive and conceptually grounded post-Chilcot assessment of the empirical evidence no...

The academic sub-field of media and conflict has developed and expanded greatly over the past two decades. Operating across a diverse range of academic disciplines, academics are studying the impact the media has on governments pursuing war, responses to humanitarian crises and violent political struggles, and the role of the media as a facilitator...

This chapter examines the relevance of media and public opinion to our understanding of foreign policy and international politics. It first considers whether public opinion influences foreign policy formulation, as argued by the pluralist model, or whether the public are politically impotent, as argued by the elite model. It then explores whether t...

After the ‘CNN effect’ concept was coined two decades ago, it quickly became a popular shorthand to understand media-conflict interactions. Although the connection has probably always been more complex than what was captured in the concept, research needs to be updated in order to better understand the multifaceted contemporary environments of both...

This chapter provides an introduction to propaganda in relation to war and conflict. We start by outlining the importance of these activities to the contemporary generation of policymakers and noting also the relevance and significance of deception as a political strategy. We then map three distinct areas in which propaganda plays a key role in con...

Of Noam Chomsky’s many contributions, this chapter focuses on his analysis of mainstream US news media and its role as a propagator of elite interests. Published in 1988 and written in collaboration with communications scholar Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media presented a clear-cut and uncompromising crit...

The relationship between foreign policy, public opinion, and media has long been a focus of scholarly concern. One body of scholarship highlights the tendency of media to rally publics in support of government war aims, and another has explored the extent to which media coverage and public opinion can turn against wars, especially when they become...

After the 'CNN Effect' concept was coined two decades ago, it quickly became a useful shorthand to understand media-conflict interactions. Although the connection has probably always been more complex than what was captured in this concept, current research even more so reflects the need to have updated mechanisms to better understand the complex c...

This article analyzes the British government’s controversial September 2002 Dossier on alleged Iraqi WMD and addresses the question of whether the dossier was part of what it refers to as a campaign of “organized political persuasion” and the extent to which deception was involved. It argues that the available evidence is consistent with the dossie...

What happens at the end of a military intervention? What are the risks inherent in the transition of responsibility for governance or security? This volume examines the typology and dynamics of transition, the role of peacekeepers and security forces, and the processes of negotiated settlements. It reviews the principles, planning, and consequences...

This article provides an overview and critical assessment of the ways in which political communication scholarship has sought to understand and explain the importance of news media vis-à-vis war and international politics. It reviews existing approaches that have shaped debates over the last 30 years and critically evaluates the significance of new...

Ever since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there has been a widely shared public perception in the United Kingdom and beyond that the British government lied in making the case for war. One major theme has been the view that the Blair government lied about the strength of the intelligence about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the ext...

Ever since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there has been a widely shared public perception in the UK and beyond that the British government lied in making the case for war. One major theme has been the view that the Blair government lied about the strength of the intelligence about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the extent of the W...

This chapter examines the influence of media and public opinion on U.S. foreign policy and vice versa. It considers the extent to which the media and public have been manipulated by the government, and the extent to which public opinion and media have shaped foreign policy during tumultuous times such as the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001....

Debate over media coverage of foreign affairs has been dominated by a range of theoretical positions, here characterized as the ‘elite-driven,’‘independent’ and ‘oppositional’ models. In this article, we explore the relative cogency of these theoretical positions in the context of British media coverage of the 2003 Iraq War. We find that coverage g...

Media's role in wartime has long been the subject of controversy, marked by claims that media promote, or indeed constrain, military action, and over the impact of patriotism and new technologies on wartime levels of media autonomy. Based on a detailed examination of U.K. press and television coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and of the U.S./U....

In this article, the authors draw upon the results from a substantial content and framing analysis of the British media's treatment of the 2003 Iraq War to show how Britain's national press managed their coverage of the initial combat phase of the war against the background of substantial public and elite opposition. They show that reporting was do...

A B S T R A C T ■ The 2003 Iraq War was highly controversial in the UK, generating domestic opposition and a widely supported anti-war movement, the Stop the War Coalition. This article assesses the extent to which anti-war protesters were successful at securing positive coverage in the British press immediately before and during the invasion of Ir...

This short article is a response to an overview of research on media-political relations written by John Street and published in the Political Studies Review in 2005. The usefulness of the exercise is recognised but issue is taken both with the organising concepts of Street's account and the way he excludes a significant body of research from his a...

Noam Chomsky argues that, while the US news media are adversarial towards the US government on foreign policy, institutional filters operate to ensure that the criticisms made generally stay within narrow bounds set by the US political elite. Chomsky's research in this area is largely ignored even by academics who agree with this conclusion. The in...

Debate over the extent to which the mass media serves elite interests or, alternatively, plays a powerful role in shaping political outcomes has been dogged by dichotomous and one-sided claims. Some attribute enormous power to the news media (the so-called CNN effect) while others claim the media `manufactures consent' for elite policy preferences....

Richard Holbrooke, To End A War (New York: Random House 1998). Pp.432, illus., biblio., index. £27.95/$27.95 (cloth); £15.95/$15.95 (paper). ISBN 0–3755–0057‐X (cloth) and Revised (May 1999) ISBN 0–3757–5360–5 (paper).Ivo H. Daalder, Getting to Dayton: The Making of America's Bosnia Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press 1999). Pp.xi...

US intervention in Somalia (1992) and Iraq (1991) are held as evidence for a more powerful media in the post Cold War era and the thesis that media coverage of suffering people is a major cause of humanitarian intervention. This paper investigates the role of mass media during the 1992 decision to deploy ground troops in Somalia. A media influence...

This article details the results of a plausibility probe of a policy-media interaction model designed to identify instances of media influence. If sufficient evidence is found to support the model, it can be used as part of a wider study examining the impact of media coverage on decisions to intervene during humanitarian crisis, the so-called CNN e...

This article provides a summary of the current findings of an ongoing research project, the central aim of which is to search for evidence of media-driven intervention and to identify the scope of media impact on intervention. US policy responses to the humanitarian crises in Somalia (1992), Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999) have been analysed. In th...

It is widely asserted that news media coverage of suffering people has played a pivotal role in causing policy-makers to launch military intervention during humanitarian crisis. Yet research so far has failed to offer clear and non-anecdotal evidence for these claims. This paper reports the findings of a research project the central aim of which wa...

During the 1980s the proliferation of new technologies transformed the potential of the news media to provide a constant flow of global real-time news. Tiananmen Square and the collapse of communism symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall became major media events communicated to Western audiences instantaneously via TV news media. By the end of...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Bristol, 2000.