If by "western" you meant some other power then you should be specific. Western as a term is imprecise and can be interpreted differently depending on the audience.
Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives
From my memory (might be mistaken) there have been attempts to somewhat study this via polls etc, and determined that coverage via propaganda (specifically Fox News) is less helpful then randomly guessing what actually happened...
But ymmv, social studies are always hard to trust, because it's borderline impossible to prove cause and effect
