Noam Chomsky pointed out when he was observing the role of the press during the Vietnam War, that it had a significant role to play in atrocities.
The job of print and broadcast media, he argued, was to legitimise and explain away mass killings and to tell the story of why they were necessary.
Looking at the role of the Soviet press, there is abundant evidence for this. Chomsky was writing about a notionally independent US media which generally found itself in broad agreement with the government. Here we will look at the role of a heavily controlled newspaper in a totalitarian state:
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Explaining History Podcast 