Sadly, the US government has a sorry history of lying to its subjects, and none of its lies were quite so brazen as those told about Stalin in the thirties and forties.
For example, Owen Lattimore, director of the US Office of Wartime Information, visited Stalin’s slave labor camp in Kolyma with Vice President Henry Wallace in 1944. In his National Geographic travelogue, Lattimore gushed about the gulag’s conditions, praising it as a combination of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Tennessee Valley Authority, remarking on how strong and well-fed the inmates were, and ascribing to camp commandant Ivan Nikishov “a trained and sensitive interest in art and music and also a deep sense of civic responsibility”. Solzhenitsyn documented an entirely different account of Kolyma in Gulag Archipelago. McCarthy accused Lattimore of being a communist or communist sympathizer, because he actually was one or the other. As it turns out because of repeated portrayals in media and entertainment, McCarthy is political villain in the popular mind and the likes of Lattimore are victims of McCarthyism.
Others have referenced Stalin’s mass murders of Polish officers in Katyn. Roosevelt’s government covered that up, too.
NYT has also been printing fake news for a very long time: the NYT saw it fit to print John Reed’s stories about how wonderful, glorious, and popular the Bolshevik Revolution was. Later on, during the Holomodor, the NYT saw fit to print the reports of Pulitzer-prize-winning foreign correspondent Walter Duranty that “any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda” because “there is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation”.
Despite Donald Trump’s peculiar relationship with the truth, I see no reason to doubt anything he says any more than I doubted previous presidents. Which is to say, I think it appropriate to be skeptical of everything he says just like I’m skeptical of everything the government says and everything in the media.
There’s no reason to think that the US government or the mainstream media is less reliable now than in 1978, or 1968, or 1938. As some wag said, “If you don’t read the papers, you’re uninformed; if you do read the papers, you’re misinformed.” That line old enough to have been misattributed to Mark Twain in 1927.
well written and informative comments that are much appreciated!
I do think though that our government over the last 40 years and particularly the Clinton/Obama years has gone way off the road into the swamp with it’s clearly criminal activities in support of the Clintons and Obama. Indeed. much more so than the thirties or any other timeframe.
I further see this coalition between the Corporate Media and the Democratic Party as more of a threat to America than Russia or China. Calling them “the enemy of the people” is an understatement, if anything.