The Long Way Back to Ourselves

8.8

Truth, Media, Propaganda

This episode challenges the idea that disinformation is new: a shared body of facts from a few broadcasters was only a brief twentieth-century exception. A Soviet campaign that began in July 1983 with a letter in Delhi and reached the world press by 1987 shows how a false claim outlives its refutation: in 2005, just under half of surveyed African Americans agreed the immunodeficiency virus was manufactured by humans. A 2018 study by Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral of some 126,000 rumor chains found false reports spreading faster than true ones. As a remedy, you get Sam Wineburg's lateral reading.