It’s common cause that Leni Riefenstahl was a gifted filmmaker, her movies well shot and hugely evocative. The problem is, those films were almost pure Nazi propaganda. Their odious content was a covert message, selling the Third Reich’s nonsense — that Aryans were superior to other races — under titles such as Triumph des Willens, or Triumph of the Will.

Sadly, this is just one example of insidious propaganda that uses the medium of the day for its own ends. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide it was radio, where the word "cockroach" took on a deadly meaning...

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