What History Teaches: Propaganda & Media Manipulation
About the Event
Explore how the Nazi regime used propaganda to manipulate public opinion, suppress dissent, and normalize antisemitism. Discussion will include reflections on today’s digital misinformation landscape.
An Urgently Relevant Conversation.
John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Michele Forman, an award-winning documentary filmmaker & professor of history & film
Jonathan Wiesen, a leading scholar of modern German history & Nazi Germany
Join us as these four experts come together to examine how Hitler’s regime masterfully wielded propaganda to seize control, manipulate the masses, and spread antisemitism with terrifying effectiveness.
Together, they’ll explore striking parallels between Nazi-era media manipulation and today’s digital landscape, where misinformation spreads at lightning speed and truth is increasingly in question.
The discussion will culminate in a thought-provoking Q&A, giving you a chance to reflect and engage.
Insightful and deeply relevant, this is a program you cannot afford to miss.
About the Speakers
John Archibald
John is a journalist and longtime voice in the South. He is a columnist at AL.com, a two-time Pulitzer winner, and an award-winning podcaster. Archibald won the Pulitzer for Commentary in 2018 for his “lyrical and courageous” columns, and was lead reporter on the Pulitzer winner for Local Reporting in 2023, which examined out-of- control policing in the tiny Alabama town of Brookside.
He was elected to last year to the Pulitzer Prize Board. In 2021, Archibald wrote and co-hosted the national Murrow Award-winning podcast Unjustifiable, the story of a Black woman killed by Birmingham police in 1979. He is the author of Shaking the Gates of Hell: A Search for Family and Truth in the Wake of the Civil Rights Revolution, one of NPR’s favorite books of 2021.
He was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University in 2020-2021 and the inaugural writer in residence at Boston University in 2023. He is now working on a podcast series about serial bomber Eric Rudolph and the rise of Christian Nationalism.
Michele Forman
Michele is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and Director of Media Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, an interdisciplinary minor she co-founded in 2003.
Her work with the UAB Media Studies Program has created a student-produced archive of over 400 short documentary films about Alabama communities. The films are available free of charge online, streaming from both the UAB Mervyn H. Sterne Digital Collection and the UAB Media Studies Vimeo Channel. Her own documentary work has been broadcast on HBO, Independent Film Channel, PBS, Sundance Channel, among others.
Michele gained her early experience as an executive in feature films, serving as Director of Development at Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, where she was responsible for the acquisition and development of new projects. In addition, she served as associate producer on Mr. Lee’s Academy Award-nominated film 4 Little Girls, a feature-length documentary for HBO about the bombing of the Sixteenth Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. She currently serves as the Series Producer for Southern Exposure, a documentary series about environmental issues in its 13th season.