I’ve been searching for a word to describe this exact phenomenon. These people are children of the Cold War, and all the propaganda lives in their head, but none of the underlying politics that the propaganda was masking. They’re reacting to the shadows of their predecessors.
In his biography, William Herst (newspaper mogul) talked about this exact phenomena within newspapers and editorial staff. Basically, people who believed the lies you told would come work for the newspaper and within a generation the entire newspaper wouldn’t even know they were telling lies, which (according to him) was incredibly dangerous because then you aren’t controlling the narrative, the narrative is controlling you and you are unable to adapt and change the narrative to suit the market.
He basically said most of his job was trying to get his editorial staff to understand that they were shaping a changing narrative, not reporting truth (because he believed getting actual truth is borderline impossible, therefore not the job of a newspaper).
This is exactly correct and describes both parties in the US as well. The old true believers did not actually believe the shit they were peddling but now we have people like MTG as sitting congress members who are true believers of the bullshit their fascist predecessors peddled.
a rant about Hearst's politics that is not directly relevant
William Hearst – Friend of Hitler
William Randolph Hearst is the name of a multi-millionaire who sought to help the Nazis in their psychological warfare against the Soviet Union. Hearst was a well-known US newspaper proprietor known as the ‘father’ of the so-called ‘yellow press’, i.e., the sensationalist press. William Hearst began his career as a newspaper editor in 1885 when his father, George Hearst, a millionaire mining industrialist, Senator and newspaper proprietor himself, put him in charge of the San Francisco Daily Examiner.
This was also the start of the Hearst newspaper empire, an empire which strongly influenced the lives and thinking of North Americans. After his father died, William Hearst sold all the mining industry shares he inherited and began to invest capital in the world of journalism. His first purchase was the New York Morning Journal, a traditional newspaper which Hearst completely transformed into a sensationalist rag. He bought his stories at any price, and when there were no atrocities or crimes to report, it behoved his journalists and photographers to ‘arrange’ matters. It is this which in fact characterises the ‘yellow press’: lies and ‘arranged’ atrocities served up as truth.
These lies of Hearst’s made him a millionaire and a very important personage in the newspaper world. In 1935 he was one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune estimated at $200 million. After his purchase of the Morning Journal, Hearst went on to buy and establish daily and weekly newspapers throughout the US. In the 1940s, William Hearst owned 25 daily newspapers, 24 weekly newspapers, 12 radio stations, 2 world news services, one business providing news items for films, the Cosmopolitan film company, and a lot of others. In 1948 he bought one of the US’s first TV stations, BWAL – TV in Baltimore. Hearst’s newspapers sold 13 million copies a day and had close to 40 million readers. Almost a third of the adult population of the US were reading Hearst newspapers every day. Furthermore, many millions of people throughout the world received information from the Hearst press via his news services, films and a series of newspapers that were translated and published in large quantities all over the world. The figures quoted above demonstrate how the Hearst empire was able to influence American politics, and indeed world politics, over very many years – on r issues which included opposition to the US entering the Second World War on the side of the Soviet Union and support for the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.
William Hearst’s outlook was ultra-conservative, nationalist and anti-communist. His politics were the politics of the extreme right. In 1934 he travelled to Germany, where he was received by Hitler as a guest and friend. After this trip, Hearst’s newspapers became even more reactionary, always carrying articles against socialism, against the Soviet Union and especially against Stalin. Hearst also tried to use his newspapers for overt Nazi propaganda purposes, publishing a series of articles by Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man. The protests of many readers, however, forced him to stop publishing such items and to withdraw them from circulation.
After his visit to Hitler, Hearst’s sensationalist newspapers were filled with ‘revelations’ about the terrible happenings in the Soviet Union – murders, genocide, slavery, luxury for the rulers and starvation for the people, all these were the big news items almost every day. The material was provided to Hearst by the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s political police. On the front pages of the newspapers there often appeared caricatures and falsified pictures of the Soviet Union, with Stalin portrayed as a murderer holding a dagger in his hand. We should not forget that these articles were read each day by 40 million people in the US and millions of others worldwide!
I truly believe in many respects that is where we are at these days. I think, for the ghouls at the state department, they’re in effect the new Dulles, producing real propaganda to mask their political agenda regarding China and Palestine, but socialism as a whole, real political economy and its consequences, these people are back in the cave.
It’s been awhile since I read it, but I think Herst’s conclusion for that chapter was that, the best he could personally do was get them to learn how to shape the message, but he was never able to truly disabuse them of the notion that what they believed and what they had been told was shaped in exactly the same way, if not more egregiously false, which he believed would eventually be catastrophic for the U.S. down the line. Never believe your own bullshit.
I’ve been searching for a word to describe this exact phenomenon. These people are children of the Cold War, and all the propaganda lives in their head, but none of the underlying politics that the propaganda was masking. They’re reacting to the shadows of their predecessors.
In his biography, William Herst (newspaper mogul) talked about this exact phenomena within newspapers and editorial staff. Basically, people who believed the lies you told would come work for the newspaper and within a generation the entire newspaper wouldn’t even know they were telling lies, which (according to him) was incredibly dangerous because then you aren’t controlling the narrative, the narrative is controlling you and you are unable to adapt and change the narrative to suit the market.
He basically said most of his job was trying to get his editorial staff to understand that they were shaping a changing narrative, not reporting truth (because he believed getting actual truth is borderline impossible, therefore not the job of a newspaper).
This is exactly correct and describes both parties in the US as well. The old true believers did not actually believe the shit they were peddling but now we have people like MTG as sitting congress members who are true believers of the bullshit their fascist predecessors peddled.
Man Hearst was such a piece of shit, I’m unsurprised that he also understood things this well
a rant about Hearst's politics that is not directly relevant
William Hearst – Friend of Hitler
William Randolph Hearst is the name of a multi-millionaire who sought to help the Nazis in their psychological warfare against the Soviet Union. Hearst was a well-known US newspaper proprietor known as the ‘father’ of the so-called ‘yellow press’, i.e., the sensationalist press. William Hearst began his career as a newspaper editor in 1885 when his father, George Hearst, a millionaire mining industrialist, Senator and newspaper proprietor himself, put him in charge of the San Francisco Daily Examiner.
This was also the start of the Hearst newspaper empire, an empire which strongly influenced the lives and thinking of North Americans. After his father died, William Hearst sold all the mining industry shares he inherited and began to invest capital in the world of journalism. His first purchase was the New York Morning Journal, a traditional newspaper which Hearst completely transformed into a sensationalist rag. He bought his stories at any price, and when there were no atrocities or crimes to report, it behoved his journalists and photographers to ‘arrange’ matters. It is this which in fact characterises the ‘yellow press’: lies and ‘arranged’ atrocities served up as truth.
These lies of Hearst’s made him a millionaire and a very important personage in the newspaper world. In 1935 he was one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune estimated at $200 million. After his purchase of the Morning Journal, Hearst went on to buy and establish daily and weekly newspapers throughout the US. In the 1940s, William Hearst owned 25 daily newspapers, 24 weekly newspapers, 12 radio stations, 2 world news services, one business providing news items for films, the Cosmopolitan film company, and a lot of others. In 1948 he bought one of the US’s first TV stations, BWAL – TV in Baltimore. Hearst’s newspapers sold 13 million copies a day and had close to 40 million readers. Almost a third of the adult population of the US were reading Hearst newspapers every day. Furthermore, many millions of people throughout the world received information from the Hearst press via his news services, films and a series of newspapers that were translated and published in large quantities all over the world. The figures quoted above demonstrate how the Hearst empire was able to influence American politics, and indeed world politics, over very many years – on r issues which included opposition to the US entering the Second World War on the side of the Soviet Union and support for the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.
William Hearst’s outlook was ultra-conservative, nationalist and anti-communist. His politics were the politics of the extreme right. In 1934 he travelled to Germany, where he was received by Hitler as a guest and friend. After this trip, Hearst’s newspapers became even more reactionary, always carrying articles against socialism, against the Soviet Union and especially against Stalin. Hearst also tried to use his newspapers for overt Nazi propaganda purposes, publishing a series of articles by Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man. The protests of many readers, however, forced him to stop publishing such items and to withdraw them from circulation.
After his visit to Hitler, Hearst’s sensationalist newspapers were filled with ‘revelations’ about the terrible happenings in the Soviet Union – murders, genocide, slavery, luxury for the rulers and starvation for the people, all these were the big news items almost every day. The material was provided to Hearst by the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s political police. On the front pages of the newspapers there often appeared caricatures and falsified pictures of the Soviet Union, with Stalin portrayed as a murderer holding a dagger in his hand. We should not forget that these articles were read each day by 40 million people in the US and millions of others worldwide!
from http://www.mariosousa.se/LiesconcerningthehistoryoftheSovietUnion.html
Yeah he deserved to be shot for sure. An extreme nihilist when he wasn’t being an outright nazi.
I truly believe in many respects that is where we are at these days. I think, for the ghouls at the state department, they’re in effect the new Dulles, producing real propaganda to mask their political agenda regarding China and Palestine, but socialism as a whole, real political economy and its consequences, these people are back in the cave.
It’s been awhile since I read it, but I think Herst’s conclusion for that chapter was that, the best he could personally do was get them to learn how to shape the message, but he was never able to truly disabuse them of the notion that what they believed and what they had been told was shaped in exactly the same way, if not more egregiously false, which he believed would eventually be catastrophic for the U.S. down the line. Never believe your own bullshit.