Today, “fake news” is everywhere—at least as a point of discussion. One side accuses the mainstream media of deceiving the public. The other side claims that it is absurd to question what almost all mainstream commentators are saying. They say that the major outlets generally publish the truth.

Who is right?

There’s a lot of discussion to be had about current news coverage. But it’s also worth taking a step back and looking at the past. Does the mainstream media generally publish the truth? Or does it believe that telling the truth is less important than advancing its ideology?

Last week, I wrote to you about the lgbt group at Goldsmiths University that claimed the Soviet gulags were a lot nicer than everybody thinks. Their claims are so absurd they’d be funny if so many lives hadn’t been lost.

But during the time that the gulags were in operation, many Western journalists said exactly the same things about them.

According to George Bernard Shaw, criminals loved the gulag so much that they didn’t want to leave. He wrote that a man would enter the gulags “as a criminal type and would come out an ordinary man but for the difficulty of inducing him to come out at all. As far as I could make out, they could stay as long as they liked.”

Journalist Anna Louise Strong wrote: “The labor camps have won a high reputation throughout the Soviet Union as places where tens of thousands of men have been reclaimed.” She also wrote, “So well-known and effective is the Soviet method of remaking human beings that criminals occasionally now apply to be admitted.”

H. G. Wells praised Stalin, saying he “never met a man more candid, fair and honest … no one is afraid of him, and everybody trusts him.” This love for Stalin was endemic throughout the Western media in the 1930s. And it’s still there today with the left in these universities.

Paul Johnson writes in his book Modern Times: “In the outside world, the magnitude of the Stalin tyranny—or indeed its very existence—was scarcely grasped at all. Most of those who traveled to Russia were either businessmen, anxious to trade and with no desire to probe or criticize what did not concern them, or intellectuals who came to admire and, still more, to believe. … There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped.”

Man never wants to see his own capacity for evil. Even in the face of heartrending evidence, many Western intellectuals of the day were quite happy to ignore or praise what was going on in Soviet Russia.

Some of these writers took bribes to print these lies. But many were not corrupt. “Self-decision was obviously the biggest single factor in the presentation of an unsuccessful despotism as a Utopia in the making,” writes Johnson. “But there was also conscious deception by men and women who thought of themselves as idealists and who, at the time, honestly believed they were serving a higher human purpose by systematic misrepresentation and lying.”

This history alone does not prove that the modern mainstream media is, on the whole, lying. But it does show that the press can be guilty of self-deception and even deliberate deception.

This is just one example of the press going completely off the rails. Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry writes in his free booklet Winston S. Churchill: The Watchman about the way Churchill was treated in the lead-up to World War ii. His warnings about Germany were ridiculed across the British media. Eventually, he struggled to find any publication that would print his warnings. In some cases, media bosses knew he was right. But they refused to let the truth out—until it was too late.

“As Mr. Churchill worked feverishly to save Western civilization, most of the media worked equally hard to destroy it!” wrote Mr. Flurry in his article “Churchill Versus the Media.” “This was a massive criminal act that should never be forgotten! And it should have caused the media to bitterly repent ….

“In the 1930s many newspapers were not seeking the truth as they so often boasted! So who can we trust? The Bible, written thousands of years ago, warns that trusting men will bring us many curses!”

The media has lied and deceived the public in the past. That is why it is important to prove whether what you are reading and watching is true.

A lack of truth in the media is dangerous. You need to know if what the press is printing is accurate, and you can’t take that for granted. I’ll conclude with a quote from a 2002 article by Mr. Flurry titled “Where Media Bias Is Leading Us”:

The press repeatedly discusses their passion for seeking the truth. Too often that is shamefully untrue. Only the truth can set us free (John 8:32). How often we discuss freedom in this land. But are we so enslaved to arrogance and self-importance that we don’t even know what freedom is?

Study history. Either we correct ourselves now, or the harshest events imaginable will do it for us!

This is not a subject to take lightly. The survival of our freedom is at stake.