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From Lie to Official History, via 'Simple Repetition'

08/16/2009 by Gabriel Voiles

Consortium News Robert Parry (8/13/09) is citing media-promoted "'deathers' who claim that President Barack Obama's healthcare plan would promote euthanasia," along with how the U.S. "population was persuaded that Iraq was some lethal threat" and "fear-mongering about Iraq somehow sending small remote-controlled airplanes across the Atlantic" as strong arguments against "hopeful slogans that 'the truth will out.'"

To Parry, "truth is a battle" and "the reality is that there are no automatic mechanisms for stopping lies and distortions":

What I have seen during more than three decades in Washington is that many truths remain effectively hidden, even if technically they have been revealed. A rare moment of truth-telling can be easily overwhelmed by a steady barrage of falsehoods and an infusion of well-calibrated doubts.

Before long, it is the oft-repeated faux reality that is remembered. It becomes Washington’s conventional wisdom and then the official history. [See, for instance, Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

In the United States today, there is a massive infrastructure for spreading lies and distortions--a right-wing media machine that reaches from newspapers, magazines and books to cable TV, talk radio and the Internet.

By simple repetition, this machine can transform any crazy theory or bald-faced lie into something that many Americans believe.

Case in point is "when the right-wing media... pushed the lies about Iraq's WMD and intimated that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9/11 attacks." See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "From Speculation to History: 'Saddam's Bluff' Becomes Conventional Wisdom--With No Evidence Presented" (5–6/04) by Seth Ackerman.

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5 Responses to “From Lie to Official History, via 'Simple Repetition'”

  1. Doug Latimer Says:
    August 17th, 2009 at 10:42 am

    I think it's important to point out that revisionism didn't begin with the rise of rightist propaganda organs.

  2. Doug Latimer Says:
    August 17th, 2009 at 7:53 pm

    I think it's important to point out that revisionism didn't begin with the rise of rightist propaganda organs.

  3. Doug Latimer Says:
    August 17th, 2009 at 7:55 pm

    (Cut off for some reason – here's the rest of the story)

    I think it's important to point out that revisionism didn't begin with the rise of rightist propaganda organs.

  4. Doug Latimer Says:
    August 17th, 2009 at 7:56 pm

    It's been a staple of the corpress since Hector was a pup – indeed, before the modern media conglomerate as we know it had even come into existence – hasn't it?

    The rulers control the truth – through state and religious mythology, through mainstream media, through the education system.

    It's not quite as neat as that, but it is the bottom line, isn't it?

  5. August 2009 « Questionable Content Says:
    September 6th, 2010 at 2:46 pm

    [...] http://www.fair.org/blog/2009/08/16/from-lie-to-official-history-via-simple-repetition/ 8/14 [...]

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