Book Review: Baines, Paul, O’Shaughnessy, Nicholas, and Nancy Snow, eds. <i>The SAGE Handbook of Propaganda</i>. London<i>:</i> SAGE, 2020.

<p dir="ltr">A SAGE Handbook of Propaganda, including chapters from major contributors from around<br>the world on the topic of propaganda studies/research/praxis, is required now more than ever.<br>This volume comes at a most precipitous time. We live in what might be termed the<br>‘Apocryphal Era’, a time of doubtful authenticity, where information is less about power and<br>more about suspicion. When asked, we often yearn for the true, authentic, and genuine to make<br>sense of our media environment, but our authority systems stretching from academe, to the<br>faith-based, public or private, have emerged as deficient in providing tools and pathways to<br>reality. The world at present seem riven with a global dialectical: he vs. she, us vs. them, leave<br>vs. stay, left vs. right. It is into this vacuum of ‘truth’ that propaganda inserts itself, and in<br>which it thrives. This volume is about how propaganda is freshly relevant, not because it ever<br>went away, but because it is even more prevalent than it ever was. The sheer volume of<br>propaganda and the speed with which it is disseminated is new.