MEDIA BETWEEN STATE, LAW AND SOCIETY DURING INTERNATIONAL ARMED CONFLICTS. PART TWO: WORLD WAR I, THE CENTRAL POWERS

Abstract

This article continues the cycle of publications highlighting problems of restriction of the right to information, countering enemy propaganda and promoting one's own ideologies and narratives as elements of counter-propaganda. The object of propaganda in all states participating in the First World War was mainly external forces – enemy states. Instead, the main consumer of this propaganda was a domestic audience, especially in the Central Powers (with the exception of Czechoslovakia after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) due to a lack of resources to spread their own propaganda narratives abroad. The peculiarity of the information policy of the Central Powers, in contrast to those considered in the previous article (Great Britain, France, the USA), is determined by the fact that they, being land empires, faced a number of difficulties caused primarily by their polyethnic composition, which ultimately led to their defeat and disintegration into separate states as one of the main results of this war.