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Romania 1990: the mineriads and the power of state television
In June 1990 a president thanked miners who had beaten students in Bucharest. In March, Târgu Mureș was told two opposite stories in two languages. How labels, one TV channel and a call to act turned neighbours into targets.
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Selling a war in 1917: the Creel Committee and modern propaganda
In 1917 the US built a propaganda machine in a week: 75,000 volunteer speakers, posters, films, forged documents and laws against dissent. What the record shows about the Committee on Public Information.
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Gulf of Tonkin, 1964: the attack that did not happen
A reported attack on US destroyers in August 1964 led Congress to vote 416-0 and 88-2 for war powers. The NSA's own historian later concluded the second attack never happened. How a non-event was presented as certain.
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When the "conspiracy theory" became an official assessment
The lab-leak idea went from "conspiracy theory" to an FBI, DOE and CIA leaning, all hedged. The laptop was blocked, then authenticated. 5G-COVID and chemtrails stayed false. The lesson is method: confidence, evidence, who said what when.
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Nayirah, 1990: how an atrocity story is built
A 15-year-old's four-minute testimony about babies taken from incubators helped sell the 1991 Gulf War. She was the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter, coached by a PR firm. How the story was built, and why real atrocities still get dismissed.
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"Just the old-fashioned grippe": wartime censorship and the 1918 flu
Around 20 September 1918 a federal health officer called the new flu "the plain old 'La Grippe'". Wartime censorship shaped what people were told, and the country that reported honestly got its name on the disease. What it cost.
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Iraq 2002–2003: how the case for war was made
The case for invading Iraq rested on a few weak strands of intelligence, presented with certainty while dissent stayed hidden. What the US Senate (2004, 2008) and the UK Chilcot Inquiry (2016) later found, and the regime's own bluff.
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The people who told: whistleblowers and what happened to them
From the Pentagon Papers to the Facebook Files: what six whistleblowers and a publisher revealed, what courts later confirmed, and what happened to them, including Assange's 2024 plea. Plus two cases from China and Russia.
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The press and the agency: Operation Mockingbird and the Church Committee
"Project Mockingbird" in the CIA's own files is a 1963 wiretap of two columnists. The Senate's Church Committee found covert ties to about 50 US journalists and over 1,000 subsidised books. Documented, disputed and legend, separated.
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Operation INFEKTION: how the KGB spread the claim that the US made AIDS
In 1983 an anonymous letter in a small Indian paper claimed the Pentagon made AIDS. By 1987 the story ran in 80+ countries; in 1992 Russia's spy chief admitted the KGB was behind it. How it travelled, and the same method today, from several capitals.
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The "corpse factory": WWI atrocity propaganda and its long shadow
In 1917 Britain's papers said Germany boiled its dead for fat; a minister found "nothing incredible" in it. It was false. In 1942 true reports of mass murder were dismissed as "too similar" to that old lie. How atrocity propaganda backfired.
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Syndication is not conspiracy: telling a herd from a script
When one headline is on 50 sites, is someone steering the news? Using LSN News data on the Microsoft outage and AI-layoff stories, a four-step method to tell a herd from syndication from a real script.