Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, Senior lecturer Modern History, coordinated the project MediaOorlog (Media War) between November 2020 and August 2023 at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision with a grand from the 75 Jaar Vrijheid programme of the Mondriaan Fonds. The project members sought to understand propaganda narratives in press and radio during the Second World War using digital humanities methods to study wartime media sources in the online platform CLARIAH Media Suite. The academic findings were shared in a Dutch language special issue of the online open access journal Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis. In addition to these general academic outcomes, the project developed specific outreach initiatives for the Dutch public presenting examples from Second World War propaganda to increase media literacy in the Netherlands.

The main public event of MediaOorlog was the exhibition ‘Media als Wapen’ (Media as a weapon) that was held at the museum for news and journalism in Sound and Vision The Hague between May and July 2023. This exhibition compared frames from the Second World War with more recent examples of war propaganda. For the exhibition the audio collective ‘Horens’ recorded two modern audioscapes based on radio transcripts and newspaper articles from the Second World War. These audioscapes, with accompanying podcasts in which researchers and journalists analyze the sources and comment on their contemporary relevance, are freely available via podcast platforms.