The Guardian: Death of truth: when propaganda and 'alternative facts' first gripped the world

Truth was the first casualty of the Great Depression. Reflecting the anguish of the time, propaganda was manufactured on an unprecedented scale. As economic disaster threatened to trigger shooting wars so, as George Orwell said, useful lies were preferred to harmful truths. He went further, declaring that history stopped in 1936; after that there was only propaganda. [...]

But propaganda, like advertising, only strikes chords when the conditions are right. For all his ranting, Hitler could never have won widespread support if he had not been able to exploit the multiple miseries of the Depression. After 1929, Germans were receptive to his assertion that their sufferings were the evil fruits of the rotten Weimar system. The problem was not economic but political, he insisted, and it could only be solved by the restoration, under his leadership, of German might: “The key to the world market has the shape of the sword.” His means of grasping that sword was the Nazi party, which he organised entirely “to serve the propaganda of ideas”. [...]

Truth was further occluded by faith and fear. In the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, Arthur Koestler observed some of the worst horrors of the famine but affirmed they were products of the capitalist past, whereas the few hopeful signs pointed to a communist utopia. Even in the gulag, Eugenia Ginzburg wrote, people refused to believe the evidence of their senses: “Anything that appeared in a newspaper carried more conviction with them than what they saw in the street.” [...]

The Labour politician Arthur Ponsonby gave voice to the widespread outrage: “The injection of the poison of hatred into men’s minds by means of falsehood is a greater evil in wartime than the actual loss of life.” In consequence, people were reluctant to credit stories of genuine atrocities emanating from Hitler’s Germany. When the News Chronicle printed a circumstantial account of the horrifying brutality of guards at Sachsenhausen in 1938, Hilaire Belloc wrote that this “example of lying on the anti-Nazi side” made it impossible “to believe anything from that quarter without corroborating testimony”.

read the article 

CNN: Where fake news goes to die

Snopes is the first place a lot of people go when they're not quite sure about what they've seen online. But Mikkelson and others who run the site have aspirations to be more than just a debunker of fake news

 

They want it to be a place where people come for real news, too. [...]

Mikkelson started Snopes -- named after a family of characters in William Faulkner novels -- more than 20 years ago with his now ex-wife. Back then, in 1994, he wasn't trying to launch a debunker of myths. He was just playing around with this shiny new thing called the Internet.

 

"I worked for a large computer company, so I was on the Internet before most people knew there was an Internet," Mikkelson told CNN from his home office in Calabasas. [...]

Today, Snopes has grown from essentially a one-man band to a team of 12 editorial employees (including four staff writers and two contract writers) and a handful of operations staff to handle the technical and business side of things. 

 

read the article

Reuters: Polish regional leadership ambitions hit by EU humiliation over Tusk

Poland's ambition to be central Europe's leader within the EU suffered a humiliating blow when Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic defied its call to block the re-election of Donald Tusk as European Council president.

The lack of support from the other three "Visegrad" countries left Prime Minister Beata Szydlo in uncomfortable isolation at an EU summit on Thursday - one leader out of 28 refusing to back Tusk, a former Polish leader who is loathed by her Law and Justice (PiS) party. [...]


"Tusk understands our world view and our view of how the European Union should work," Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka told reporters.

He added that Poland would also have to explain its refusal to sign off on the official record of the summit in protest against Tusk's reappointment, suggesting a potential new rift within the V4.

"Poland will have to explain it well because it simply is not possible for one member state to veto European Council conclusions without giving specific, factual reasons," Sobotka said. [...]

While EU officials and diplomats also consider Hungary's Orban an authoritarian, they generally see him as a more cunning player who would eventually sit down for talks to hammer out deals, whereas Poland's Kaczynski is seen as a rigid ideologue that people outside Poland do not understand.

read the article 

FiveThirtyEight: There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble

Last summer, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in what bettors, financial markets and the London-based media regarded as a colossal upset. Reporters and pundits were quick to blame the polls for the unexpected result. But the polls had been fine, more or less: In the closing days of the Brexit campaign, they’d shown an almost-even race, and Leave’s narrow victory (by a margin just under 4 percentage points) was about as consistent with them as it was with anything else. The failure was not so much with the polls but with the people who were analyzing them. [...] 

It’s hard to reread this coverage without recalling Sean Trende’s essay on “unthinkability bias,” which he wrote in the wake of the Brexit vote. Just as was the case in the U.S. presidential election, voting on the referendum had split strongly along class, education and regional lines, with voters outside of London and without advanced degrees being much more likely to vote to leave the EU. The reporters covering the Brexit campaign, on the other hand, were disproportionately well-educated and principally based in London. They tended to read ambiguous signs — anything from polls to the musings of taxi drivers — as portending a Remain win, and many of them never really processed the idea that Britain could vote to leave the EU until it actually happened. [...]

Decentralization? Surowiecki writes about the benefit of local knowledge, but the political news industry has become increasingly consolidated in Washington and New York as local newspapers have suffered from a decade-long contraction. That doesn’t necessarily mean local reporters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Ohio should have picked up Trumpian vibrations on the ground in contradiction to the polls. But as we’ve argued, national reporters often flew into these states with pre-baked narratives — for instance, that they were “decreasingly representative of contemporary America” — and fit the facts to suit them, neglecting their importance to the Electoral College. A more geographically decentralized reporting pool might have asked more questions about why Clinton wasn’t campaigning in Wisconsin, for instance, or why it wasn’t more of a problem for her that she was struggling in polls of traditional bellwethers such as Ohio and Iowa. If local newspapers had been healthier economically, they might also have commissioned more high-quality state polls; the lack of good polling was a problem in Michigan and Wisconsin especially.

read the article 

The Atlantic: White Evangelicals Believe They Face More Discrimination Than Muslims

In February, pollsters at the Public Religion Research Institute asked Americans about their impressions of discrimination in the United States. Two religious groups were included on the list of those who might face bias: Christians and Muslims. Depending on who was answering, the responses were wildly different.

Overall, people were twice as likely to say Muslims face discrimination as they were to say the same thing about Christians. Democrats were four times more likely to see Muslim vs. Christian discrimination, and non-religious people more than three. White Catholics and white mainline Protestants were both in line with the American average: Each group was roughly twice as likely to say Muslims face discrimination compared to how they see the Christian experience.

The people who stuck out, whose perceptions were radically different from others in the survey, were white evangelical Protestants. Among this group, 57 percent said there’s a lot of discrimination against Christians in the U.S. today. Only 44 percent said the same thing about Muslims. They were the only religious group more likely to believe Christians face discrimination compared to Muslims.

read the article