Dr. Elisabeth Fondren, an Assistant Professor of Journalism in the Division of Mass Communication at St. John's University, published her research article, “We Are Propagandists for Democracy: The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Pioneering Media Literacy Efforts to Fight Disinformation” in the academic journal American Journalism (2021, Vol. 38, No 3). Dr. Fondren was recently invited to discuss this project on the ground-breaking organization, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) with the Propwatch Project, an educational non-profit media site, whose mission is to raise public awareness of propaganda and disinformation in mass media and social media.
In this interview, Dr. Fondren details how the rise of propaganda, both domestic and foreign, prompted the IPA’s inception, the organization's early successes, the political headwinds it faced drawing closer to WWII, and the factors that led to its too-early demise. “I decided to do a paper on the IPA's legacy, and specifically how they tried to expose extremist and fascist thought in America, and in American media leading up to World War II. I became really interested in this idea of ‘what about counter propaganda’? I wrote this paper to really shed light on that history,” explains Dr. Fondren.
The purpose of Dr. Fondren’s study was to provide new insights into American efforts to build and manage institutional media literacy programs before World War II. The article explored the efforts that members of the pioneering IPA planned, envisioned, and undertook to advocate for media and information literacy during the years 1937–1942. The historical evidence shows that the IPA faced political pressures from government, the press, and members of the public to stop its anti-propaganda efforts in a social climate that favored cohesion and unified public opinion over skepticism.
Link to the American Journalism article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08821127.2021.1950481
Link to the Propwatch Interview (January 2023): https://www.propwatch.org/article.php?id=334