You may not think that some agitprop in your Facebook feed would really get under your skin. But that is exactly what smartly tuned postings … are designed to do …The Daily News of Los Angeles
especially: political propaganda promulgated chiefly in literature, drama, music, or art
Ample and gorgeous evidence … that all was not agitprop in Russia's postrevolutionary culture. Sada Fretz
… turning to studio heads to churn out the sort of rah-rah agitprop released during World War II … Graydon Carter
… [Joshua] Harmon reserves some of his powerful soliloquies for characters who probably oppose his private, personal opinions. That is the difference, of course, between art and agitprop. Samuel G. Freedman
agitpropadjective
agitprop theater
agitprop films/songs/posters
an agitprop campaign
Never has the Kremlin's agitprop mill cooed more seductively … Richard Poe
Example Sentences
Recent Examples on the WebA few months after Sandy Hook, the agitprop-documentary-maker Michael Moore, writing in HuffPost, imagined a scenario in which the parents of the victims leaked photographs of the classroom crime scenes to the press. Jessica Winter, The New Yorker, 25 May 2022 Establishment eyebrows arched over a streaming radio station in reception and the agitprop collage on the ceiling of a library-lounge furnished with Kilim rugs and books on Eames furniture and environmental justice. Andrew Nelson, WSJ, 8 Mar. 2022 Last Friday night, then, the delegations marched into Beijing’s arena of agitprop, and the rebels stayed behind the scenes. Matt Sullivan, Rolling Stone, 11 Feb. 2022 But as a solution to the league’s persistent optics problem, the NFL on Nick is like a spoonful of agitprop, coating professional football in sugar and slime. Jake Nevins, The Atlantic, 7 Feb. 2022 But then the show became a strident piece of agitprop that strained credulity. Omid Khazani And Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times, 18 Nov. 2021 His tendency to explain it through leftist politics is the same inclination that infects recent inferior literary agitprop such as Between the World and Me, The Underground Railroad, and Citizen: An American Lyric. Armond White, National Review, 12 Nov. 2021 But beyond the hyperbole and agitprop expected from the likes of such NGOs, even seasoned observers of oil markets seem to have taken to media-lynching the Saudis. Tilak Doshi, Forbes, 11 Nov. 2021 In front of a wall filled with agitprop posters of Malcolm X, Mao Zedong, and Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón, doctors stuck tiny needles into the ears of a woman going through heroin withdrawal. Valeria Ricciulli, Curbed, 25 Oct. 2021 See More
Word History
Etymology
borrowed from Russian Agitprop, shortened from Agitacionnopropagandistskij otdel "Agitation-Propaganda Section (of the Central Committee, or a local committee, of the Communist Party)"; later used for the head of such a section, or in compound names of political education organs, as agitpropbrigada "agitation-propaganda brigade"
Note: Russian agitpróp was probably first used in the names of state organs, then generalized as a shortening of agitatsiya i propaganda "agitation and propaganda," though the chronology is uncertain. In the latter sense well-known in Russian at least from the time of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem Vo ves' golos (1928-30), containing the line "i mne agitprop v zubakh navyaz" ("and I was sick and tired of agitprop," literally, "and agitprop stuck in my teeth").