This is a past event
Public event with Professor Sean Moore (Visiting Scholar 2022), supported by RIISS, FAUL, AHF and Museums and Special Collections.
“Fake news” is as old as the printing press. While the production of fake news in recent elections has refocused scholarly attention on how the media is funded and by whom, it is rarely acknowledged that this activity has occurred since the founding of the modern state. This lecture looks at this question by examining the state financing of print culture during the Enlightenment, the crucial juncture in the formation of the state of Great Britain. In doing so, it examines eighteenth-century precedents for “manufacturing consent,” a phrase coined by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky to describe how governments use financial sponsorship and legal intimidation to influence the media to produce popular support for decisions to go to war and other policy initiatives.
This talk will establish the international historical context for the First Amendment right to free speech and the press established by James Madison in the U.S. Bill of Rights by explaining the use of English Secret Service Funds to bribe or otherwise persuade newspaper editors, theatre owners, and the entire book trades of Scotland and Ireland to publish propaganda in favour of English annexations such as the 1707 Scottish Act of Union and the 1800 Irish Act of Union. Image description: black and brown historical print showing soldiers approaching a person wearing women’s clothing, sitting at a spinning wheel.
- Speaker
- Professor Sean Moore (Friends of Aberdeen University Library Visiting Scholar 2022)
- Hosted by
- RIISS, FAUL, AHF and Museums and Special Collections.
- Venue
- The Sir Duncan Rice Library, Craig Suite, Floor 7
- Contact
-
Dr Lisa Collinson
FREE EVENT No booking required