Once upon a time propaganda was not a bad word. It simply meant the dissemination of information in favor of a given cause. To us now it sounds Orwellian, but governments — including our own — had committees of propaganda. The various wars and “isms” of the 20th century transformed propaganda into how we perceive it today: slanted, biased, misleading. Its latest iteration is “fake news,” which emerged from social media during the last presidential election.
But fake news isn’t new — it’s only the medium and moniker that are new.
For anyone interested in this topic I highly recommend an excellent podcast from BBC’s Radio 4 Archive on 4 program. In “Disinformation: A User’s Guide,” journalist Phil Tinline combs the radio station’s archives to provide a concise and insightful history of “fake news.”
Tinline ably showcases how every new mass media technology has driven its own era of disinformation. The first, radio, was heavily exploited by the Nazis, a topic I actually researched for an undergraduate class at Brandeis, “Dreams and Nightmares: The Third Reich on Film.”
Television, continues Tinline, was utilized by Sen. Joe McCarthy in his HUAC witch hunt, and now the internet and specifically social media have fueled fake news.
Not surprisingly, it’s the Nazis and specifically Adolf Hitler who warped and then distilled propaganda’s essence into “The Big Lie” (of course he blamed it on the Jews). The idea was to tell a lie so big, so outlandish, that it must be true. The brilliance lay in it being counterintuitive.
King Solomon famously observed that there’s nothing new under the sun. But with disinformation being potentially so dangerous, that’s cold comfort.
Shana Goldberg may be reached at shana@ijn.com
Copyright © 2018 by the Intermountain Jewish News
