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Chargement... Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary Americapar Jordan E. Taylor
Aucun Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Aucune critique
"Fake news" is not new. Just like millions of Americans today, the revolutionaries of the eighteenth century worried that they were entering a "post-truth" era. Their fears, however, were not fixated on social media or clickbait, but rather on peoples' increasing reliance on reading news gathered from foreign newspapers. In Misinformation Nation, Jordan E. Taylor reveals how foreign news defined the boundaries of American politics and ultimately drove colonists to revolt against Britain and create a new nation. News was the lifeblood of early American politics, but newspaper printers had few reliable sources to report on events from abroad. Accounts of battles and beheadings, as well as declarations and constitutions, often arrived alongside contradictory intelligence. Though frequently false, the information that Americans encountered in newspapers, letters, and conversations framed their sense of reality, leading them to respond with protests, boycotts, violence, and the creation of new political institutions. Fearing that their enemies were spreading fake news, American colonists fought for control of the news media. As their basic perceptions of reality diverged, Loyalists separated from Patriots and, in the new nation created by the revolution, Republicans inhabited a political reality quite distinct from that of their Federalist rivals."-- Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)070.4Information Journalism And Publishing Journalism And Publishing JournalismClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (4)
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The most important reason that the Illuminati theory became popular, as I show in my new book, Misinformation Nation, was that it explained the otherwise inexplicable matter of why the French Revolution had spiraled out of control. The early stages of the revolution in France had thrilled Americans. It seemed that the French, their recent wartime allies who had helped them to secure independence, were following in their footsteps. Until 1798, most Americans remained hopeful that the French Revolution would follow the model of the American Revolution. Even news of guillotines, massacres, and growing public hostility to religion did not deter the most hopeful Francophiles, who dismissed such accounts as exaggerations by British propagandists.
Just as the Illuminati explained the otherwise inexplicable course of the French Revolution in 1798, these conspiracy theories [of later times] allow their believers to explain the apparent decay of American society as the will of evil elites, rather than the unintended consequences of a complex mix of historical forces. At the core of every conspiracy theory is the observation that only bad intentions can produce bad outcomes. There are no accidents, only evil people