Speaking of Books with Sarah Oates: Seeing Red: Russian Propaganda and American News

Powered by Research Education at University Libraries. Speaking of Books series features free, open to the community and public talks by UMD faculty authors on their recently published work.

Join us for a discussion for Professor Sarah Oates's latest book, Seeing Red: Russian Propoaganda and American News. Professor Oates and co-author Gordon Neil Ramsay examine how the convergence of strategic narratives from U.S. President Donald Trump and the Kremlin created historic opportunities for Russia’s global propaganda war. Through the 2020 election, the Stop the Steal conspiracy, and the Capitol insurrection, Russians found myriad ways to publicize the end of American democracy and the rise of Russia. Identifying and tracking four key Russian strategic narratives—democracy is flawed and failing, resurgent Russia, protecting Russians abroad, and the West is out to destroy Russia—allows us to better understand how Russian propaganda finds echoes in U.S. news. Despite knowledge of the risk and resourceful work by analysts and journalists in tracking down Russian propaganda in the United States, the problem of foreign disinformation continues to this day and played a key role in Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Oates's and Ramsay's analysis deploys both traditional political communications methods such as content analysis as well as computational methods to leverage our insights at a greater scale. Detecting foreign propaganda in U.S. news is a critical task for democracy. They argue that Americans need to understand a dangerous menace lies not just in how foreign governments attempt to manipulate the media, but in how the U.S. media system has been compromised by domestic actors who follow an authoritarian playbook.

Professor Sarah Oates is Associate Dean for Research at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland (College Park). She is a UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and Co-Principal on the Grand Challenges Maryland Democracy Initiative. A scholar in the field of political communication and democratization, a major theme in her work is the way in which the media can support or subvert democracy in places as diverse as Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Prof. Oates has published many books, articles, chapters, and papers on topics including how the internet can challenge dictatorship, how election coverage varies in different countries, and how national media systems cover terrorism in distinctive ways. Her 2024 book, Seeing Red: Russian Propaganda and American News (with Gordon Neil Ramsay, Oxford University Press) uses human content analysis and AI to show how Russian propaganda content and tactics infiltrate the U.S. media. You can see her work on www.media-politics.com.

Prof. Oates has an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Emory University and a B.A. from Yale University. She was a Fulbright scholar in Russia and a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Oates has served as a media observer in elections in Russia and Kazakhstan for the European Commission and has been a visiting professor at the Kyiv-Mohyla School of Journalism in Ukraine. She has held numerous grants over her career, including from the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, and the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council.

Before joining the faculty at the University of Maryland, she was Professor of Political Communication at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. At the University of Glasgow, she founded Scotland’s first post-graduate program in political communication. Prof. Oates is a frequent commentator for U.S. and British media. A former journalist, she has published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and the Orlando Sentinel.