Vancouver’s Dr. Heidi Tworek’s new book News From Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945 looks at how one nation decided to up its media game and get its message (messages) out across the globe.
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While Germany’s march to make the news they liked the news that travelled is at the heart of this book, the story is just part of a much bigger look at the power of informational warfare.
Currently Tworek, an assistant professor in international history at University of B.C. and a visiting fellow at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard, is working on history and policy projects including a look at the history of health communications (very timely, thanks to the rise of the anti-vaxxers) . She took some time away from her work to answer a few questions.
Q: When you started researching this project was the “fake news” narrative out there?
A: Not at all! I started researching this project when we were in the utopian phase of the Internet. The Arab Spring was happening. There was tremendous optimism about how social media could connect us in new ways and unleash democracy around the world. For a while, there was complete dissonance between the present and the history I was writing about how new media can be manipulated for bad as well as good. The “fake news” narrative is an old one that went away for some decades and now is back.