History’s Most Notorious Liars

Written By Mitchell Stephens

A video

This video proved particularly difficult to cobble together.

It discusses five compulsive and remarkably shameless and destructive liars—two of whom were also among history’s most notorious dictators. These five men, therefore, displayed different varieties and degrees of malevolence but a remarkably similar—and similarly untiring, pervasive and unconscionable—mendacity.

I hope I was able to make that clear.

I have argued, that video as a medium—in particular fast-cut video—has great, as yet mostly unexplored, potential as a means of communicating and exploring ideas. But it is a heck of a lot easier to edit a sentence than it is to redo a section of video—especially when images and words are dancing around stream-of-consciousness-like, especially at my level of technological expertise.

I’ve been fiddling with these images of and words about my five liars for many weeks.

Curious what you think.

Mitchell Stephens

Mitchell Stephens, one of the editors of this site, is a professor emeritus of Journalism at New York University, and is the author or co-author of nine books, including the rise of the image the fall of the word, A History of News, Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World, Beyond News: The Future of Journalism, and The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th Century Journalism. He lives in New York and spends a lot of time traveling and fiddling with video.

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