From Patron to Persecutor: The Evolution of the US Government’s Role in Disinformation Research

Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including legal filings and decisions, executive orders, congressional hearings and testimony, news releases, agency decisions, and government reports, this article documents the ongoing governmental assault on disinformation research. This article assesses these activities through the historical lens of the origins of communications and media research. As this article will illustrate through a synthesis of relevant historical research, the origins of communication and media research as an academic field owe much to federal government initiatives in the 1940s and 1950s to develop a robust domestic research program that focused on issues of propaganda and disinformation. There is, obviously, a tremendous irony inherent in the current efforts by the federal government to dismantle a field of research that it played a central role in creating. This article seeks to understand this dramatic reversal through an analysis of the historical contexts that led to both the mid-twentieth century and early-twenty-first century iterations of propaganda/disinformation research; the key research questions that guided these bodies of work; and the national political dynamics at each of these moments in time.