Free Republic

The media are still feeling the impact of an executive order signed in 1917 that created ‘the nation’s first ministry of information’.. When the United States declared war on Germany 100 years ago, the impact on the news business was swift and dramatic. In its crusade to “make the world safe for democracy,” the Wilson administration took immediate steps at home to curtail one of the pillars of democracy – press freedom – by implementing a plan to control, manipulate and censor all news coverage, on a scale never seen in U.S. history. Following the lead of the Germans and...

Richard Stengel, a former high-level U.S. government official, head of the office for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department from 2013 to 2016, former editor of Time Magazine and a regular pundit on MSNBC, said in April of 2018 at a Council on Foreign Relations forum about “fake news,” that he “supports the use of propaganda on American citizens.” He then continued; “Basically, every country creates their own narrative story and, you know, my old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the ‘chief propagandist’ job.” Keep in mind, that in 2013,...