In promoting war, marketing empire and endorsing government actions the media actively shaped political, foreign and imperial policies and goals. Editors, journalists and pamphleteers did not simply present what government officials wanted the public to know about particular policies and ventures; indeed, even supporters printed material that could undermine government interests. There was no straightforward message transmitted from politicians through media conduits to readers. Pamphlets, for example, engaged in dialogue, asking audiences to follow polemical threads across different texts. Readers also did not necessarily receive and absorb propaganda messages as intended. The Commonwealth and Protectorate governments employed various strategies to secure popular support, including paying propagandists, withholding information from the press and increasing censorship. Government press control, however, was incomplete and public debate persisted.

The forms of particular media could influence the ways in which stories were told and movements were shaped. For example, much of the promotion of the English republic took place in newsbooks and pamphlets legitimizing the republic's creation as a product of godly struggle and justifying the conduct of Protestant war against Ireland and Scotland. Apart from editorials or prefaces, interpretive polemical thrusts and intermittent rhetorical commentary news-books and topical pamphlets were not primarily designed to provide direct, sustained theoretical discussion of what form the republic should take and why it should take it. Indeed, doing so had the potential to undercut the popular support polemicists hoped to secure. Marketing the republic as a defence of Protestantism and liberty from popish, tyrannical monarchy drew upon familiar conventions of public debate. According to these conventions critics and opponents were bound to explain how the republic was not a godly institution and why monarchy conversely was the form of government best equipped to protect Protestant subjects. Politicians and polemicists sought to solidify an unpopular republican government while waging war and pursuing the conquest of two nations that proclaimed their commitment to monarchy and took up arms in its defence. Public discussions of ideal constitutional and theoretical models could have undermined the familiar message of Protestant security and opened up the debate to encompass the merits of different republican forms, which in turn could have fractured the consensus polemicists aimed to win.