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May 11th, 2024 (Permalink)

How to Lie with Photographs, Part 2

"Let the jury consider their verdict," the King said….

"No, no!" said the Queen. "Sentence first―verdict afterwards."

"Stuff and nonsense!" said Alice loudly. "The idea of having the sentence first!"1

The best evidence for factual claims is usually that of your own senses, but you probably won't be able to check most claims you read in the media so directly. The second best evidence is likely to be video or still photographs, but both can be manipulated in ways that may not be detectable by your own senses and, instead, require technical expertise to expose. For this reason, just because a factual claim is based on videos or photographs is no reason to accept it uncritically.

It used to be the case that you needed a darkroom and special equipment to fake photographs, but with the advent of digital photography and programs such as Photoshop, anyone with a computer can do so―even princesses2. Despite these developments―pun noted―many people still look at photos as though they never mislead and, as a result, they accept such evidence without critical examination.

Though it sometimes takes specialized knowledge to detect fake photography, not every misleading photo involves such trickery. As we saw in the first part of this series3, sometimes it's not the photo itself that lies but its caption, or the text of an article to which the photo is attached.

Dino Brugioni, in his book Photo Fakery, classifies fake photography into four types: "deletion of details", "insertion of details", "photomontage"4, and "false captioning"5. About the latter, he writes: "The falsely captioned photo differs from other groups of fake photos in that, although the photography has not been altered, the context of what the photograph purportedly conveys is simply falsified.6"

In order for Brugioni's four categories to cover all types of misleading photograph, the name "false captioning" must not be taken literally. Rather, any photograph that is misleadingly described, whether in a caption or accompanying article, is an example. In particular, staged photos which are represented as portraying something other than what they actually portray, should fall in this category.

The infamous Cottingley fairy photographs7 are examples of this last type. The two young sisters who took the photos lacked both the knowledge and access to the tools required to engage in any sophisticated fakery. Instead, they simply copied drawings from a children's book, cut them out, and propped them up in the weeds with hatpins. The problem was not with the photos themselves but with gullible adults, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote books claiming that they showed real fairies8.

Let's look at a more recent example of false captioning. I won't display any of the photos or video discussed, since they are probably owned by the photographer, and you can see them on many of the articles linked in the Notes, below.

On September 20, 2021, the El Paso Times published a report which began:

A mounted U.S. Border Patrol agent shouted commands in a tense encounter with Haitian migrants wading through the Rio Grande near Del Rio, Texas. As the Haitians tried to climb onto the U.S. side of the river Sunday afternoon, the agent shouted: "Let's go! Get out now! Back to Mexico!" The agent swung his whip menacingly, charging his horse toward the men in the river who were trying to return to an encampment under the international bridge in Del Rio after buying food and water in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. One migrant fell as he tried to dodge, others shielded their heads with their hands.9

The article was illustrated by a couple of photos showing Border Patrol agents (BPAs) on horseback, and in the one at the top of the report a BPA appears to be holding up a long, thin cord or strap. If you glance at the photo after reading the above description of a BPA swinging a whip, you might interpret it as showing a whip at the top of its swing.

However, the next day the highlighted sentence was changed to: "The agent menacingly swung his reins like a whip, charging his horse toward the men in the river who were trying to return to an encampment under the international bridge in Del Rio after buying food and water in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico."10. Also, a "Clarification" was added at the top of the story:

Our reporting team witnessed at least one agent on horseback swing his reins like a whip. We have updated the story to clarify that fact since it was not an actual whip.

In addition to the still photos, there is some video of a BPA on horseback twirling one of this reins, though not appearing to make contact with anyone11. Notice that even the uncorrected report quoted above does not claim that the BPA who supposedly swung a whip "menacingly" actually used it to whip anyone.

Nonetheless, this tiny spark was enough to start a firestorm of criticism of the Border Patrol over the next few days. The condemnation went all the way to the top, namely, President Biden, who was quoted as saying:

It's horrible what you saw. To see people like they did, with horses, running them over, people being strapped, it's outrageous…. I promise you: those people will pay… There is an investigation underway right now and there will be consequences.12

Despite referring to an investigation, Biden apparently had already made up his mind that the BPAs should be punished. Verdict first, investigation afterwards. Does the presumption of innocence not apply to BPAs, or is the president exempt from applying it?

"Strapped" is an interesting choice of words because "to strap" as a transitive verb usually means to tie something down, as with straps, but there's a less common meaning, namely, to beat with a strap13. Why not say "whipped" rather than the rare "strapped"? Had Biden been informed that no whip was involved? Had he seen the photos or videos? He talks as though he had, pronouncing the sight "horrible" and "outrageous", but did he think that he had seen people beaten with straps in the photos or video?

A few days after Biden's remarks, the outrage continued with an opinion piece in The Seattle Times:

In recent days, images of Border Patrol agents on horseback whipping Haitian asylum seekers at the Texas-Mexico border have reminded Americans of the racist origins―and current practices―of our nation's immigration enforcement agencies. … Title 42…is the Trump-era policy of expelling asylum-seekers, ostensibly on public health grounds; the whip-wielding Border Patrol agents were enforcing this rule when they forced Haitian refugees back into Mexico.14

Within a couple of days, "Whip-wielding" was deleted and "whipping" changed to "corralling" 15.

As for the investigation mentioned by Biden, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed that it would "be completed in days, and not weeks", but six weeks later NPR was fretting that it was still ongoing16. In reality, the investigation was not completed until almost a year later17, concluding:

There is no evidence that BPAs involved in this incident struck, intentionally or otherwise, any migrant with their reins. The horses involved in this incident were equipped with split reins which can be twirled by the rider to guide the horse's movements. One BPA involved in this incident also reported twirling these split reins as a distancing tactic.18

By the time the report was released, the outrage had died down, the incident was mostly forgotten, and few cared what had really happened.

As with the Cottingley photographs, the Border Patrol photos and video were not fake, they just didn't show what some people―including the President of the United States―claimed they did. There were no fairies at the bottom of the garden in the Cottingley photos, and there were no "whips" in the hands of BPAs. In both cases, you don't need any advanced knowledge of photography to detect the false claims, you just have to look closely.

Notes:

  1. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), chapter 12: "Alice's Evidence".
  2. See: Seeing is Disbelieving, 3/13/2024.
  3. For Part I, see: How to Lie with Photographs, 12/9/2023.
  4. This is what I initially thought National Enquirer's Oswald and Cruz photo would be, but it turned out to be false captioning; see: Mashed or Matched?, 4/27/2024.
  5. Dino A. Brugioni, Photo Fakery: The History and Techniques of Photographic Deception and Manipulation (1999), chapter 2. See, also, by the same author: "Spotting Photo Fakery", CIA Historical Review Program, 9/22/1993. This shorter and earlier work also divides fake photos into four types, but the first three types differ from those in the later book, though the last type is also "false captioning".
  6. Ibid., p. 22.
  7. See: Fairy Tale, 2/6/2013.
  8. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies (1922).
  9. Martha Pskowski, "Haitian migrants face tough choices in Del Rio amid crackdown at Texas-Mexico border", El Paso Times, 9/20/2021. This is the Internet Archive's copy of the original report which has since been corrected. Paragraphing suppressed.
  10. Martha Pskowski, "Haitian migrants face tough choices in Del Rio amid crackdown at Texas-Mexico border", El Paso Times, 9/21/2021. This is the earliest snapshot of the corrected report.
  11. "White House condemns whip use on Haitian migrants", Reuters, 9/21/2021. The title of this video is still uncorrected despite the fact that the description beneath it reads: "The White House criticized the use of horse reins to threaten Haitian migrants after images circulated of a U.S. border guard on horseback charging at migrants near a riverside camp in Texas". So, Reuters appears to have known that there was no whip.
  12. Kevin Liptak & Kate Sullivan, "Biden and Harris harshly condemn horseback wrangling depicted in images from US-Mexico border", CNN, 9/24/2021. Second ellipsis in the original; paragraphing suppressed.
  13. "Strap", Collins Dictionary, accessed: 5/10/2024.
  14. Angelina Snodgrass Godoy, "ICE arrests in Washington tell stories of suffering that goes unseen", The Seattle Times, 9/28/2021. This is the Internet Archive Wayback Machine's archived copy of the uncorrected op-ed article.
  15. Angelina Snodgrass Godoy, "ICE arrests in Washington tell stories of suffering that goes unseen", The Seattle Times, 9/30/2021. This is the corrected version of the op-ed article.
  16. Joel Rose, "The inquiry into border agents on horseback continues. Critics see a 'broken' system", NPR, 11/6/2021.
  17. Carolina Cuellar, "CBP report finds 'no evidence' of border agent whipping Haitian migrants, despite viral photo", NPR, 7/8/2022.
  18. "Report of Investigation", Department of Homeland Security, 5/2023, p. 5.
Puzzle
May 3rd, 2024 (Permalink)

Crack the Combination VII*

The combination of a lock is three digits long and each digit is unique, that is, each occurs only once in the combination. The following are some incorrect combinations.

  1. 807: No digits are correct.
  2. 592: Two digits are correct but both are in the wrong position.
  3. 012: One digit is correct and in the right position.
  4. 758: One digit is correct but in the wrong position.

Can you determine the correct combination from the above clues?

*Previous "Crack the Combination" puzzles: I, II, III, IV, V, VI.

Recommended Reading & Viewing
May 1st, 2024 (Permalink)

Ich Bin ein Berliner & the "Disinformation" Industry

  • Uri Berliner, "I've Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust.", The Free Press, 4/9/2024

    In case you don't know, "NPR" stands for "National Public Radio", a government-supported radio network1.

    It's true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

    In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

    If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it's always been this way. But it hasn't.

    Maybe not, but it's been that way as long as I can remember, which is decades. Perhaps it's worse now, but so are all the other establishment news media outlets.

    …Back in 2011, although NPR's audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

    By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren't just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.

    An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America. That wouldn't be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it's devastating both for its journalism and its business model.

    At this point, I've omitted three examples Berliner gives of NPR's misreporting of major news stories in recent years: "Russiagate", Hunter Biden's laptop, and the lab leak hypothesis of the origin of COVID-19. About these stories, he goes on to say:

    It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you're emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It's bad to blow a big story.

    What's worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don't practice those standards yourself. That's what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media. … But to truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step inside the organization.

    You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. … He declared that diversity―on our staff and in our audience―was the overriding mission, the "North Star" of the organization. Phrases like "that's part of the North Star" became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

    Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to "start talking about race." Monthly dialogues were offered for "women of color" and "men of color." Nonbinary people of color were included, too.

    These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots―among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity. … All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR's internal website suggested, the groups were simply a "great way to meet like-minded colleagues" and "help new employees feel included," it would have been one thing. But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. …

    …[W]hat's notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview. And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.

    There's an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It's frictionless―one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It's almost like an assembly line.

    The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance―disseminated by news management―we're asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories―on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.

    More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the "intersectional" lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That's meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world. …

    For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our coverage has gone off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news leaders, sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. … Throughout these exchanges, no one has ever trashed me. That's not the NPR way. People are polite. But nothing changes. So I've become a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love. It's uncomfortable, sometimes heartbreaking. … But what's indisputable is that no one in a C-suite or upper management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint diversity at NPR and how that affects our journalism.

    Which is a shame. Because for all the emphasis on our North Star, NPR's news audience in recent years has become less diverse, not more so. … Despite all the resources we'd devoted to building up our news audience among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn't come close to reflecting America. It's overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.

    These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren't conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio―where for years NPR had no peer―is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from.

    Even within our diminished audience, there's evidence of trouble at the most basic level: trust.

    In February, our audience insights team sent an email proudly announcing that we had a higher trustworthy score than CNN or The New York Times. But the research from Harris Poll is hardly reassuring. It found that "3-in-10 audience members familiar with NPR said they associate NPR with the characteristic 'trustworthy.'?" Only in a world where media credibility has completely imploded would a 3-in-10 trustworthy score be something to boast about.

    With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not promising. Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we're doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we've gone wrong. News organizations don't go in for that kind of reckoning. But there's a good reason for NPR to be the first: we're the ones with the word public in our name.

    Actually, this is a reason why NPR probably won't change. As a government-supported news outlet, it's insulated from the market; whereas, a for-profit corporation would be more likely to change in the face of a declining audience.

    Despite our missteps at NPR, defunding isn't the answer. As the country becomes more fractured, there's still a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith. Defunding, as a rebuke from Congress, wouldn't change the journalism at NPR. That needs to come from within.

    It should come from within, but this article is itself evidence that it's unlikely to do so, and a financial "rebuke" from government may be the only way to force it to change. Given that Berliner himself has just documented how NPR is not now "a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith", why should taxpayers keep paying for it?

    Unsurprisingly, a week after publishing this article, Berliner resigned from NPR2, which is unfortunate because now NPR has one less actual journalist, and one less voice for intellectual diversity. I don't blame Berliner for resigning―I don't know the details, of course, but the internal backlash against his article probably made it unpleasant for him to continue―but there's even less chance now of any kind of reform coming from within.

  • Disinformation is a real problem, but the word "disinformation" has been hijacked by censors. "Disinformation" originally referred to misinformation that was intentionally and knowingly spread, usually by governments; now, the word often refers to information that the government doesn't want spread, even if true. Check out the following video on the way that "disinformation" is used as an excuse for censorship:

Notes:

  1. "National Public Radio", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 4/23/2024
  2. Benjamin Mullin, "NPR Editor Who Accused Broadcaster of Liberal Bias Resigns", The New York Times, 4/17/2024

Disclaimer: I don't necessarily agree with everything in this article and video, but I think each is worth reading or watching as a whole. In abridging the article, I have changed some of the paragraphing.

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National Enquirer cover
April 27th, 2024 (Permalink)

Mashed or Matched?

Former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump is now on trial in New York City for alleged election interference. The first testimony has been that of David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer tabloid newspaper1.

According to Pecker, Trump and The Enquirer came to an agreement in 2015 that the tabloid would publish only favorable stories about Trump and unfavorable ones about Trump's primary opponents, including Senator Ted Cruz2. One such smear story claimed that Cruz' father was somehow implicated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; see the cover shown.

I first read about Pecker's testimony in an article from NBC News which reported it as follows:

David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, testified at Donald Trump's trial Tuesday that the tabloid completely manufactured a negative story in 2016 about the father of Sen. Ted Cruz, of Texas, who was then Trump's rival for the GOP presidential nomination. The paper had published a photo allegedly showing Cruz's father, Rafael Cruz, with Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Fidel Castro pamphlets in New Orleans in 1963, not long before Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy. … Pecker said that then-National Enquirer editor-in-chief Dylan Howard and the tabloid's research department got involved, and Pecker indicated that they faked the photo that was the foundation for the story. "We mashed the photos and the different picture with Lee Harvey Oswald. And mashed the two together. And that's how that story was prepared―created I would say," Pecker said on the witness stand.3

When I first read this article, I assumed that by "mashed" Pecker meant that a single photograph was put together from two separate photos. This used to be a common practice of tabloid newspapers such as The Enquirer, so it sounded credible. It caught my attention since it suggested the creation of a fake photograph, something I've written about in the last few months4. So, I initially thought that this entry would concern composite photography, but I haven't been able to find any such photo of Oswald and Cruz from The Enquirer or anywhere else.

So, what did Pecker mean? The quote of Pecker was presumably transcribed by the reporter who wrote this article. In comparison, here is how the exchange was recorded in the trial transcript by the court reporter:

Q. I am going to show you one more from this exhibit, … top headline, "Donald Trump Blasts Ted Cruz's Dad for Photo with JFK Assassin." Do you remember anything about the history behind this article?

A. Yes. Dylan Howard had the Research Department take a look at Ted Cruz's father's photos, and we matched the photos in every different picture with that of Lee Harvey Oswald, and we matched the two together. That's how that story was prepared and created, I should say.5

Were the photos "mashed" or "matched"6? These two words are not quite homophones, but they sound similar, which explains the fact that the news reporter and the court reporter heard different words. Though they may sound similar, they would seem to mean quite different things in this context. "Mashed" makes it sound as though two different photographs were combined into a single one, whereas "matched" would involve a comparison of different photos. As I mentioned above, when I read "mashed" I assumed that it referred to a composite photo of a type that at least used to be typical of tabloid newspapers.

As a matter of fact, the photo supposedly showing Oswald and Cruz together is a single, non-composite one that shows Oswald standing on a street corner, handing out leaflets to passersby, with the help of a couple of other men. Oswald apparently hired the two from an unemployment line to help him pass out the leaflets, which we know because one of the two was subsequently identified and interviewed. However, the other man has never been identified, and that one is supposedly Ted Cruz' father, though the photo is black-and-white, grainy, and too unclear to identify the other man as Cruz or anybody else for that matter7.

By "matching" photos Pecker meant that photographic experts had identified the man in the photo as Rafael Cruz, based on comparing photos of Cruz to the image of the unidentified man. Here's how the article claims the identification was made:

Experts compared these images: The one at right is from the Warren Commission report on the JFK assassination and shows Lee Harvey Oswald distributing pro-Castro flyers in New Orleans in 1963. The other man circled is suspected to be Rafael Cruz. Another image, taken four years earlier, shows the young Cruz…at a pro-Castro rally. Chillingly, several experts determined it is the same man!8

The notion that the unidentified man is actually Rafael Cruz was debunked at the time the article appeared by various fact-checkers9, so I won't repeat their findings―you can check them out for yourself. I'll just comment that the original charge, even if true, was utterly silly. So what if Ted Cruz' father was the man in the photo with Oswald? Apparently, he was hired from an unemployment line to help Oswald hand out the leaflets. Even if Rafael Cruz was in some mysterious way connected to the assassination, how does that implicate his son who was born seven years afterward10? Are the sins of the father visited on the son?

By the way, I got a laugh out of the following exchange between Pecker and the prosecutor about the 2015 meeting in which the deal between Trump and The Enquirer was worked out:

Q. Did you discuss this meeting with anyone afterwards?

A. Yes. … [A]s a matter of fact, I went immediately back to my office and I met with Dylan Howard. … He was…the Editor-in-Chief of the National Enquirer. I described to him the meeting I just had with Mr. Trump and Michael Cohen, and I described to him that this concept and agreement that I made has to be highly, highly confidential. …

Q. Did you tell him why you asked him to keep this arrangement secret?

A. Yes, I did.

Q. What did you tell him?

A. I told him that we were going to try to help the campaign, and to do that, I want to keep this as quiet as possible. …

Q. Why was it important to you that the arrangement be kept secret? …

A. We have several hundred people that work within the company…and I did not want anyone else to know about this agreement I had and what I wanted to do, so that's why I wanted it very confidential.11

So, he wanted the agreement kept confidential so that it would be secret because he wanted it kept as quiet as possible since he didn't want anyone else to know about it. After being run around in this circle, the prosecutor just dizzily moved on.

Of course, the reason why Pecker wanted the agreement kept secret was that if it became known the Enquirer's stories attacking Trump's opponents and puffing up Trump himself would lose what little credibility they might have had. Moreover, the tabloid's practice of paying sources for stories about celebrities, then taking money from the celebrities to suppress those stories, seems uncomfortably close to blackmail. Pecker subsequently entered into a deal with prosecutors to avoid prosecution for his own role in these shenanigans in exchange for testimony12. So, keep that in mind when weighing that testimony.

Notes:

  1. Sara Dorn, "Who Is David Pecker? Ex-National Enquirer Publisher Admits 'Catch And Kill' Scheme On Trump's Behalf At Hush Money Trial", Forbes, 4/25/2024.
  2. "People Vs. Donald Trump Transcript", New York Courts, pp. 1023ff.
  3. Rebecca Shabad, "National Enquirer made up the story about Ted Cruz's father and Lee Harvey Oswald, former publisher says", NBC News, 4/23/2024. Paragraphing suppressed.
  4. See:
  5. "People Vs. Donald Trump Transcript", New York Courts, p. 1031. Paragraphing suppressed.
  6. Rolling Stone, in its coverage of the trial, also transcribed Pecker's words as "mashed"; see: Nikki McCann Ramirez & Catherina Gioino, "Tabloid Exec Lifts Curtain on 'Catch and Kill' Scheme to Boost Trump in 2016", Rolling Stone, 4/23/2024.
  7. Philip Bump, "The 50-year-old mystery behind that photo of Lee Harvey Oswald", The Washington Post, 7/22/2016.
  8. Andrew Beaujon, "What Does the National Enquirer Have Planned for the General Election? It's Not Saying!", The Washingtonian, 5/5/2016.
  9. See:
  10. "When was Ted Cruz born?", Wolfram Alpha, accessed: 4/26/2024.
  11. "People Vs. Donald Trump Transcript", New York Courts, pp. 1020f.
  12. Jim Rutenberg, Rebecca R. Ruiz & Ben Protess, "David Pecker, Chief of National Enquirer's Publisher, Is Said to Get Immunity in Trump Inquiry", The New York Times, 8/23/2018.
April 21st, 2024 (Permalink)

Goebbels' Final Big Lie

Writing about the dubious statistics put out by Hamas during its ongoing war with Israel1 reminded me that this is not the first time that death tolls have been used for propaganda. In fact, there is a long history of such disinformation, which is one reason why I was immediately skeptical of the current claims. In this entry, we're going to examine one historical example in some detail.

In the waning days of World War II, on February, 13th-14th, 1945, Dresden, Germany was subjected to an aerial firebombing by the Royal Air Force Bomber Command2. Much of the central, historic part of the city was incinerated, with many civilians killed. But how many?

In the aftermath of the attack, city officials attempted to actually count the dead, rather than just making an estimate. However, some unknown number of bodies were still buried in the rubble, so the number they produced was necessarily an undercount. According to the official report, the number of dead was 20,204, of which 6,865 bodies had been mass cremated3. These were obviously actual counts rather than estimates, but the report also estimated that the count might end up as high as 25K. None of this was propaganda as the numbers were not intended for public consumption but for internal use by the government itself.

At this point, propaganda began, though what exactly happened is unclear. Some unknown bureaucrat, perhaps within Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry4, added a zero to the end of each of the numbers supplied in the report, thus increasing them by an order of magnitude (OOM). Thus, the number of dead was inflated to 202,040, the number cremated to 68,650, and the estimated total to 250K.

The propaganda ministry then began to play a two-faced game of doublespeak, saying one thing to its own people and another to foreigners. Since the ministry didn't want to hurt the already low morale of Germany's beleaguered population, it released the inflated numbers only to neutral countries, such as Sweden and Switzerland5, where they might generate sympathy for Germany and anger at the Allies. Despite the disinformation put out by his ministry, Goebbels himself knew better: "According to…the chief of the Propaganda Ministry's press division, … Goebbels had already made his own private estimate of about forty thousand dead at Dresden"6, which is on the high side but at least the right OOM. In contrast, a Swedish newspaper published an article with the headline: "Rather 200,000 than 100,000 Victims"7.

Only a few months later, as Nazi Germany collapsed around them, Goebbels and his wife committed suicide after murdering their six children8. With the end of the propagandist, one might expect the end of the propaganda, but Dresden is located in the part of Germany that was captured by the Soviet Union and subsequently became the communist state of East Germany. According to a report on the bombings by the United States Air Force after the war:

[T]he Communists have with increasing frequency and by means of distortion and falsification used the February 1945 Allied bombings of Dresden as a basis for disseminating anti-Western and anti-American propaganda. From time to time there appears in letters of inquiry to the United States Air Force evidence that American nationals are themselves being taken in by the Communist propaganda line concerning [the bombings]. …

The most distorted account of the Dresden bombings―one that may have become the basis of Communist propaganda against the Allies, particularly against the Americans, in recent years―was prepared by two former German general officers for the Historical Division, European Command (U.S.A.) in 1948. In this account, the number of dead from the Dresden bombings was declared to be 250,000.9

Whoever these former German officers were, they seem to have simply parroted the Nazi propaganda line. Given that the Communists took possession of Dresden at the end of the war, they were in the best position to produce an accurate estimate of the death toll, and they were also in a position to prevent those from outside the Iron Curtain from doing so themselves until the two Germanies were reunited in 199010.

The next phase of this history began in 1963, when a British amateur historian named David Irving wrote a book about the bombing of Dresden11. In the first edition of his book, Irving gave the Dresden death toll as 135K12, that is, four times the count given in the local government's report, but quite a bit less than that put out by Goebbels. A few years later, however, Irving was given a copy of the report, but one with the extra zeroes, and he increased the death count to 250K in an updated edition of his book in 196613. Finally, and to his credit, when a copy of the original report without the added zeroes was discovered, he grudgingly accepted that 250K was propaganda and revised the number back down to 135K14.

Meanwhile, the popular American science fiction writer, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who had survived the Dresden bombing as a prisoner of war, used his wartime experiences as the basis for his best-known novel, Slaughterhouse-Five15(S-5). Though its war scenes were set during WW2, it was published in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War. In the novel, Vonnegut cited the exaggerated figure of 135K dead from Irving's book16.

What Vonnegut didn't know at the time was that Irving was an admirer of Adolf Hitler; given that the Dresden book was Irving's first, few did. In a later book17, Irving claimed that Hitler had neither approved nor known about the "Final Solution". When the professional historian Deborah Lipstadt pointed out that Irving had "become a Holocaust denier"18, Irving sued her for defamation but lost19.

S-5 was a best-seller that must have been read by far more people than ever read Irving, and then it was made into a successful movie20. I was myself a part of this readership, and believed the six-figure number for many years thereafter. It is perhaps partly due to this unpleasant experience that I'm particularly suspicious of wartime death tolls.

The point of this convoluted history is that, once created, a false statistic has a life of its own. Goebbels, or one of his minions, added zeroes to the Dresden death count as propaganda against the Allies; then the Communists who took over Dresden also took over Goebbels' propaganda in order to attack their cold war opponents; later, Irving adopted Goebbels' big lie to defend his hero, Hitler, by playing down the horrors of the Holocaust and playing up those of Allied bombing; finally, even Vonnegut was likely motivated by his anti-Vietnam War position to embrace Irving's exaggerations21. Each of these actors used the same or similar exaggerations for their own propagandistic purposes.

One reason why this history is important is that Goebbels' big lie and Irving's smaller one are not completely dead. For instance, as recently as four years ago, the History Channel's "Day in History" for February 13th, 2010, the anniversary of the Dresden bombing raid, read:

On the evening of February 13, 1945, a series of Allied firebombing raids begins against the German city of Dresden, reducing the "Florence of the Elbe" to rubble and flames, and killing as many as 135,000 people. It was the single most destructive bombing of the war―including Hiroshima and Nagasaki―and all the more horrendous because little, if anything, was accomplished strategically, since the Germans were already on the verge of surrender.22

Where did the History Channel get the statistic of 135K if not directly from Irving, or perhaps indirectly via Vonnegut? Also, the actual number (25K-35K) is smaller than the number of those who died in Hiroshima (>70K) and Nagasaki (>40K)23. Thankfully, the page was subsequently corrected to: "On the evening of February 13, 1945, a series of Allied firebombing raids begins against the German city of Dresden, reducing the 'Florence of the Elbe' to rubble and flames, and killing roughly 25,000 people.24"

Another example comes from National Public Radio (NPR), the government-supported radio network currently under siege by critics for its left-leaning bias25. An article on its website about four of Vonnegut's novels being republished claims:

Slaughterhouse-Five depicts the firebombing of Dresden by Allied warplanes in 1945. The city was destroyed. More than 100,000 civilians were killed.26

Presumably, the article's author took the number from the book itself, yet he understood that the book was a novel, that is, a work of fiction. Is that how NPR does fact-checking? The article was published thirteen years ago and still hasn't been corrected.

It should go without saying that the loss of life and suffering inflicted on innocent people in Dresden 79 years ago was a tragedy, even if it was "only" 25K-35K instead of 135K-250K. There should be no need to exaggerate such numbers to shock our consciences. But those exaggerations were created and spread by Nazis, Communists, and Holocaust deniers for their own perverse purposes. It should also shock our consciences to repeat their lies.

Notes:

  1. Who's Counting?, 3/25/2024.
  2. "Bombing of Dresden", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3/28/2024.
  3. "Allied Air Raid on Dresden: Dresden Death Toll", Holocaust Denial on Trial (2018).
  4. "Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment", Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed: 4/19/2024.
  5. Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 (2005), p. 368.
  6. Ibid., p. 372.
  7. Ibid., p. 369.
  8. Helmut Heiber, "Joseph Goebbels", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3/6/2024.
  9. "Historical Analysis of the 14-15 February 1945 Bombings of Dresden", United States Air Force, (1945), pp. 1 & 21.
  10. "German Reunification", Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed: 4/21/2024.
  11. David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden (1963).
  12. Ibid., "Author's Note", p. 14.
  13. I don't have access to later editions of Irving's book, but see: Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (2001), p. 152.
  14. Ibid., pp. 169-171.
  15. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, Or The Children's Crusade (2005); first published in 1969.
  16. Ibid., pp. 239-240.
  17. David Irving, Hitler's War (1977). I haven't read the book, but see: Charles W. Sydnor, Jr., "Review: The Selling of Adolf Hitler: David Irving's 'Hitler's War'", Central European History, Vol. 12, No. 2 (June, 1979), pp. 169-199.
  18. Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993), p. 111.
  19. For an account of the litigation, see: Deborah Lipstadt, History on Trial (2005). Also see Evans' book, cited above. Lipstadt's book was also made into a mediocre movie, see: "Denial", Bleecker Street Media, accessed: 4/19/2024.
  20. "Slaughterhouse-Five", Turner Classic Movies, accessed: 4/20/2024. Cinematic adaptations of Vonnegut's other novels―such as Slapstick and Breakfast of Champions―are best forgotten.
  21. To his discredit, when Vonnegut had a chance to add a correction to a later edition of the novel, he did not do so; see: Raphael Mostel, "Repeating Nazi Propaganda, From Kurt Vonnegut to NPR", Forward, 8/10/2011.
  22. "This Day In History", History, 2/3/2020. This is the archived page from the Internet Archive; as mentioned in the entry, it has since been corrected.
  23. "Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 4/5/2024.
  24. "Firebombing of Dresden", History Channel, accessed: 4/20/2024.
  25. Uri Berliner, "I've Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust.", The Free Press, 4/9/2024. Unsurprisingly, Berliner has resigned from NPR since this piece was published; see: Emily DeLetter, "NPR editor Uri Berliner resigns after essay accusing outlet of liberal bias", USA Today, 4/18/2024.
  26. Tom Vitale, "Kurt Vonnegut: Still Speaking To The War Weary", NPR, 5/31/2011.

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