Today we have news for conservatives and different news for liberals. That's stupid. News doesn't need built in commentary. Now it seems like history is going the same way. We will have conservative history and liberal history. But I hope not.
History is story telling about a period of time for which we do not have easy access to all the information, nor full access to the participants and their motivations and self-conceptions. In addition, even with the benefit of hindsight, it is common to be unable to identify conclusively which possible elements of the story are the most significant (and as a corollary, which are cotemporal but irrelevant). Consequently, there are different ways to tell the story, and no "objective" set of rules to decide which to choose. Like all human story telling, history must come with a point of view that is critical in framing the elements used in the telling.
Now repeat everything I've just said, but substitute "news" for "history".
History is susceptible to narratives because anything that isn’t clear cut (slavery, holocaust, etc) is open to subjective interpretation.
It’s the conspiracy theorists that are the real wildcard in all of this. They will take the clear cut (slavery, holocaust) and make that open to subjective interpretation.
Funny stuff.
But there's something required beforehand: definining what this or that is. It's not really a subjective process, but it certainly isn't objective either.
Before you can decide whether or not William the Conqueror's invasion of the British Isles was a good or a bad thing, you first need a description of how the invasion was carried out and "all" the consequences. But there is no "objective" or "clear cut" version of this. What do you include? What do you exclude?
Regardless, I suppose the bigger point I want to make is the truth for non clear cut things is only as true as the number of people that co-sign it. If there’s simply more people on one side, welp, that’s that. That’s the truth, as far as we know.
Right or wrong or true or false are almost not even in the equation (enter the conspiracy theorist).
I don’t know, based on what I just said, what do you believe?
You see?
Examples:
* Multiple attestation. Do we have multiple independent sources telling us the same thing?
* Contextual credibility. Do people behave in a way that's plausible given their setting (the languages they spoke, what they knew at the time).
* Embarrassment. Is this detail actually inconvenient for the person relaying it (and not the sort of thing they'd make up)?
see "Criteria of authenticity" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_the_historical_Jesus
Why is this an important question at all?
I just plucked it out of the air as a historical event that took place a long time ago and occured in a culture with written history. It has no particular importance in the abstract (though the British and French do still seem to talk about it more than one would expect).
The low hanging fruit to me appears to be the fact that propaganda is profitable, ::shrugs::
Just one more war machine that got repurposed for civilian use.
Edit: this actually got downvoted, yikes
Most of this stuff isn't lies. It's different groups of people focusing on different parts of the same events. Most of the time when you get two competing narratives for an event, neither are actually dishonest, they're just a collection of events that tell a particular story that is of particular concern to a group. Usually the events all actually happened but their importance and relatedness are re-arranged.
I’d argue we’re well past the days of distinct alternative narratives around events.
Already in 1928, Edward Bernays' book on PR and marketing was named Propaganda.
Another interesting point is that the term propaganda comes from the Latin "propaganda fide" (propagation of faith). Nowadays it seems to just be called evangelization in the Vatican and elsewhere.