Existing Approaches to Propaganda Analysis: A Critical Review and the Need for an Integrative Analytical Framework

This article critically examines the principal theoretical and methodological approaches to propaganda analysis in order to evaluate their capacity to investigate implicit propaganda in contemporary political media discourse. Although propaganda research has evolved from classical models of persuasion to approaches grounded in discourse analysis, cognition, framing, pragmatics, and multimodality, existing analytical traditions remain methodologically fragmented. The study reviews the contributions and limitations of classical propaganda studies, semiotics, Critical Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, the socio-cognitive approach, framing theory, pragmatics, narrative analysis, and multimodal discourse analysis, with particular attention to their ability to identify implicit forms of propaganda. The comparative analysis demonstrates that these approaches address different analytical levels, including lexicogrammatical, discursive, cognitive, pragmatic, narrative, framing, and multimodal dimensions, and should therefore be regarded as complementary and their isolated application cannot adequately explain the multidimensional interaction of linguistic, discursive, cognitive, and semiotic mechanisms underlying implicit propaganda. The article argues that the principal limitation of contemporary propaganda research lies in methodological fragmentation rather than in the explanatory value of individual approaches. It substantiates the need for an integrative analytical perspective that combines complementary analytical levels into a coherent methodology for investigating implicit propaganda