Tracking Report #8

Time to see how the fake quotation “truth is the greatest enemy of the State” is doing.   

A Google search on 15 December 2013 produces 308,000 hits, down from 348,000 the last time we checked.  Our two sites are still #1 and #2, so who knows?  We may be having a modest effect. A Bing search gets 37,300, much more reasonable than the 17,000,000 that mysteriously showed up back in September 2013.

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A Good Site on Bad Quotations

While reading an article on dubious quotations by Corey Robin in the 20 September 2013 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, I learned of a blog devoted to what he calls WAS — Wrongly Attributed Statements.  It’s a blog worth following.

Sighting Report #10

It’s bad enough having hundreds of thousands of web pages spreading the false Goebbels quotation, but people can even proclaim their gullibility by wearing a t-shirt with the phrase.

A t-shirt company offers Sarah Palin against a Nazi backdrop with the quotation “Truth is the greatest enemy of the state.”

And you can also get the quotation on a bumper sticker, courtesy of e-Bay.

Tracking Report #7

A Google search on 11 September 2013 finds 379,000 hits for the phrase “truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”  Bing, which last time returned only 8,500 hits, now claims 17,000,000.  That can’t be right, so I'll check again in a few days.  The Google total is almost exactly the same as it was back in May 2013.

A Sign of Success

One of the reasons we began this blog was to make it possible for people to check the accuracy of the dubious quotation.  Since this page shows up fairly high on a Google search that sometimes happens.

Today I came across this interesting posting by “eatbees” that found the quotation used by a British politician, went to this site, and wrote an interesting post reflecting on larger issues.  It’s worth a look.

Sightings Report #9

In the last 24 hours, twenty new pages cite the phrase “truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”  All are from the right, using the quotation to attack President Obama.  This is fairly typical.  During the Bush administration, those on the left found it useful to attack him as an acolyte of Joseph Goebbels.

The blog Polichicks has a post titled “Truth is the Greatest Enemy of the State.”  It claims that former IRS Acting Commissioner Steven Miller was following Goebbels’s strategy.  And following Goebbels’s advice, the post claims, has been the policy of the Obama administration: “This has been the across the board mantra for President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder for four and a half years.”

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Tracking Report #6

A search on Google for the phrase “truth is the greatest enemy of the State” returns 380,000 hits.  Bing returns 8,510.  These are holding relatively steady since the last time we checked on 12 February 2013.

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Google vs. Bing Search Results

A search today on Google for the phrase “truth is the greatest enemy of the State” returns 396,000 hits. On Bing, it only gets 8,710, an interesting difference.

And on Google, the first hit is our page on False Nazi Quotations. It doesn’t make the top ten on Bing, although this blog is the 5th item on the first Bing page.  Rather curiously, the top Bing hit is a 2007 blog entry — and the blog has not been updated since 2008.   Makes one wonder about Bing.

Tracking Report #5

As of today, a Google search for “truth is the greatest enemy of the State” returns 348,000 hits.  We are happy to report that the top two are our pages that attempt to persuade people not to use the dubious quotation.  However, we don’t seem to be having a great impact.  People tend to believe that “if it is on the Internet, it must be true.”

There are also 83,000 pages that attribute the quotation to “Joseph M. Goebbels.”  As we’ve noted before, “M” was not his middle initial.