“Roosevelt was a credible and singular news source during World War II.”

President Trump has already given many more press conferences about the Coronavirus than FDR gave carefully written fireside chats about WW II. There were only twelve from 1941–1944. FDR gave his last radio address in June 1944 because it was becoming obvious that he was too frail to run for a fourth term in November. Of course he ran anyway with the true nature of his health being hushed up, won with 53% of the popular vote, and died four months into the term. Politics went on as usual during WW II because we are a free country, and about half the newspapers in the USA were still hostile to FDR.

Most Americans recieved their information about WW II from the Office of War Information which used the mass media in all it’s forms to advance the US war effort. If that sounds like propaganda, it’s because that’s exactly what it was. The OWI even worked with other government agencies to make the relocation of Japanese Americans into interment camps look like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The difference between WW II and now is that information security is paramount during a war in a way that it isn’t during a pandemic. That German and Japanese secret codes had been cracked was kept a secret until 30 years after the war because it was so sensitive, and almost every history book about WW II had to be rewritten when it was revealed.

The moral of this story is to take everything you hear from anybody that you don’t know personally with a healthy dose of skepticism, even FDR.