As soon as governments found out that newspapers were a fantastic and very often unsuspicious medium for supporting propaganda they tried to pull them to their side.
Two ways existed:
a) to have one's own newspaper, which implies that mostly friends of the government read it. Nothing is regarded as something neutral.
b) to keep a good relationship to the most powerful/most frequently read newspapers and then try to make one's opinion theirs.
Today mostly elected is b), trying to set up alliances.
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In the beginnings of Christianity most people were illiterate. Therefore the Bible had to be transformed into pictures and symbols; and not only the stories but also the moral duties of everybody. Images and legends of the Saints turned out as useful models for human behavior - easy to tell and easy to understand.
Later, when the crusades began, the Christian Church used propaganda against Muslims, creating pictures of evil, pagan and bloodcurdling people. While the knights and others were fighting abroad, people in Europe were told to pray for them. Daily life was connected to the crusades, also through money-collections - more for the cause of propaganda than for the need of money.
During the period of the Counter-Reformation Catholic propaganda no longer was against foreigners but turned against people at home - the Protestants; and against their publications/books, which got prohibited by starting the so-called index. By then both sides were using disinformation for
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Disinformation is part of human communication. Thousands of years ago it was already used as a political medium. In the age of mass-communication and information its possibilities have grown tremendously. It plays an important role in many different fields, together with its "companion" propaganda. Some of these fields are: politics, international relations, the (mass-)media and the internet, but also art and science.
There is no evidence at all for a disappearance of disinformation. On this account it is important to understand where it comes from, what its tools are and how nations (democratic as well as totalitarian systems), international organizations and the media work with it or against it.
This report tries to give a short insight into this topic:
on a theoretical level
by demonstrating cases of disinformation, like the 2nd Chechnya War in 1999.
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the study of breaking others' codes to transform a message back into a legible form without knowing the key from the beginning
A superset of Boolean logic (
In this essay, Friedrich Kittler, one of the world's leading media theorists and media historicist, offers a concise and fascinating history of communication technologies in general terms from its beginnings up to now, provoking new insights by showing interesting interdependencies.
http://www.ctheory.com/ga1.14.html