"Newsweek lied, people died."

Propaganda can be defined many ways. For example, "propaganda" can mean:

The systematic effort of controlling public opinion or a course of action by using selected facts, ideas or allegations

Or

Information given to show something or someone in a biased way

Or

a specific type of message presentation aimed at serving an agenda. At its root, the denotation of propaganda is 'to propagate (actively spread) a philosophy or point of view'.

Governments used to pay good money to create and disseminate propaganda. In the modern world, our elites and media do it for free.

The Rantingprof has the story on Newsweeks spurious claim that Americans in Guantanamo had flushed a Koran down the toilet, a claim that was used to spark violence in Afghanistan. And here is Newsweek's apology.

Glenn Reynolds nails the issue with this observation:

People died, and U.S. military and diplomatic efforts were damaged, because -- let's be clear here -- Newsweek was too anxious to get out a story that would make the Bush Administration and the military look bad.

On a not entirely unrelated intellectual front, Victor Davis Hanson points to another kind of anti-western progaganda - the systemmatic effort by intellectual elites to write America and Britain out of the history of World War II.

What is going to happen if in the future we ever really need the will to win against opponents like the Nazis?