idk, I was thinking about this a lot with the Chapo interview and how completely fraudulent the coverage of Israel was. It feels like we shouldn’t let liberals get away with this shit by burying it in the past and pretending they always held more “moderate” beliefs. Even I had forgotten about the “putting Jewish babies in ovens” claim and I’m really fucking online about this mythbusting stuff (ask me about any story involving the DPRK). I think it got overshadowed by the “40 beheaded babies,” which admittedly there is more memory of because the WH has struggled to get Biden to stop lying about it.
There are some rare cases of people remembering these hoaxes, probably the best example being “Saddam’s human shredder,” where there is memory of how there was this hoax that mainstream news pushed and libs completely bought, while the next closest example, WMDs, is something that Democrats kind of just pin on Republicans despite Dems also falling for it/perpetrating fraud for it (just not for quite as long).
I’ve got easily another dozen examples off the top of my head, but you get the idea. It’s sort of the cousin of the retroactive invention of reality that we see with cases like MLK, how people pretend northern whites were broadly on his side and ridiculous shit like that, or even that he wasn’t still hated by whites throughout the country at the time of his death, and it was the long-term impact of the campaigns lead by himself and others that ultimately forced even most of white culture to acknowledge his side as being that of justice.
Im not sure if it exists but I promise you whatever liberal you are arguing with, it wasn’t them who held those beliefs. Even if 99% of democrats supported believed it they didn’t, they wouldn’t do that.
Old editions of encyclopedias, archival records of old newspapers, archival polling data? The actual resource would be what archival records are available to the public at a library or college.
I guess a consensus would imply a poll, or a collection+comparison of what each newspaper (including international) said about topic X in year Y? if you mean what the average pre-internet person believed, they probably only knew what the TV/newpaper/radio told them.