ABSTRACT
Michael Sproule provides an important descriptive analysis of anti-propaganda studies in relation to American ideology. In responding to his essay, I am not in disagreement with the historical linkages drawn between progressive responses to propaganda in the early twentieth century and their reappearance under different guises in contemporary media criticism. Sproule’s observation that “today’s students of mass media would do well to reexamine the powerful American dialectic on propaganda” (p. 231) is supported with clear argument and solid documentation. His claim that such reexamination provides a “theoretical counterpoint to contemporary Marxist studies” (p. 211), however, deserves further discussion. The aims of these orientations are so markedly different as to belong to separate realms. While the surface manifestations regarding the unmasking of ideology – whether at the level of the state or of the society – appear similar and thus may seem to be “parallel” analyses, their underlying assumptions are radically at odds with one another. In responding to Sproule’s excellent analysis, I shall set forth some of the key assumptions underlying what has elsewhere been termed a “critical rhetoric” (McKerrow, 1989). By contrasting these assumptions with those undergirding a “progressive criticism,” the aims and limitations of both will be more clearly articulated.
