Book Review: Baines, Paul, O’Shaughnessy, Nicholas, and Nancy Snow, eds. The SAGE Handbook of Propaganda. London: SAGE, 2020.

A SAGE Handbook of Propaganda, including chapters from major contributors from around
the world on the topic of propaganda studies/research/praxis, is required now more than ever.
This volume comes at a most precipitous time. We live in what might be termed the
‘Apocryphal Era’, a time of doubtful authenticity, where information is less about power and
more about suspicion. When asked, we often yearn for the true, authentic, and genuine to make
sense of our media environment, but our authority systems stretching from academe, to the
faith-based, public or private, have emerged as deficient in providing tools and pathways to
reality. The world at present seem riven with a global dialectical: he vs. she, us vs. them, leave
vs. stay, left vs. right. It is into this vacuum of ‘truth’ that propaganda inserts itself, and in
which it thrives. This volume is about how propaganda is freshly relevant, not because it ever
went away, but because it is even more prevalent than it ever was. The sheer volume of
propaganda and the speed with which it is disseminated is new.