O' Great Nation of Iraq : A Study on Iraqi Blogs - Examining the Impact of the 'Group Situation'in the Formation of the Ba'thi Propaganda Heritage

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Malin Rodling

Summary, in English

This master thesis is a mass communication study on cognitive and affective effects of the Iraqi Ba'th regime's propaganda, focusing on a specific segment of the receiving side of the influence process - the Arab middle class in Baghdad. This segment is here represented by a selection of Iraqi blogs, used as sources for analysis. The analysis is performed on the assumption that 1) effects always are conditional phenomena having functional explanations, and are guided by the receivers' interests, needs, experiences, norms, relation to the sender etc; 2) such guiding factors are fairly similar for members of the same social grouping.

Investigating the blog-sources I have searched for both the very effects and for factors in the bloggers' group situation which have facilitated or hindered the messages to achieve their purposes. My work reveals that some parts of the propaganda have been accepted, while others have not and hence resulted in effects opposite to the intentions. It further reveals that the occurrences and characters of the effects have been determined by factors such as the impacts of the modernisation, the circumstances characterising the bloggers' daily lives, and the experiences of decades of political violence and wars. One of the most important findings is that the overall propaganda heritage is highly formed by the actual experiences of propaganda measures. These have resulted in a grave distrust towards political actors and their rhetoric, a distrust which reaches far beyond the Ba'thi context.

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