Trumpoganda at the University of Illinois

If the name of the new course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign wasn’t clear enough, the progenitors of it leave no doubt where it is heading. “Students who are looking to add an eight-week course for the second half of the semester now have the option to take a journalism course called Trumpaganda — The War on Facts, Press and Democracy,” Emily Dao reported in The Daily Illini. “This semester is the first time this journalism course is offered, and it will explore the Trump administration’s combative relationship with mainstream media and its subsequent labeling of certain news outlets as ‘fake news.'”

“The course will be taught by Mira Sotirovic, associate professor in Media, who is a Karin and Folke Dovring Scholar in propaganda.”

Sotirovic said that ““Propaganda is effective only if it is concealed and camouflaged as something else, such as news, advertisements or PR releases, and it is critical to learn how to detect propaganda and recognize propagandistic features of any communication, including presidential.”

So which came first, the fake scholarship or the fake news?

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