A Necessary Evil? Propaganda, Censorship, and Class in Britain's Ministry of Information, 1939-1941
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the early phase of World War II, Britain’s Ministry of Information (MoI) instituted propaganda and censorship regimes that were shaped by British attitudes about class. The effectiveness of these regimes is debatable, especially in light of their continually hypocritical nature. Although the wartime context necessitated a high level of secrecy and guile within Whitehall, certain aspects of the Ministry’s campaigns were morally and politically questionable. A brief consideration of the historiography of British secrecy is followed by an analysis of the actions of the MoI and the Government generally from 1939 to 1941. The MoI failed to uphold the democratic ideals that it purported to represent in opposition to Nazi Germany. This failure manifested most obviously in the Ministry’s propaganda, its treatment of troops rescued from Dunkirk, and in its public addresses to the British public.\nCONOR WILKINSON is a fourth-year student at Huron University College with an Honours Specialization in History and a Minor in Geography. He will be attending the University of British Columbia to pursue a Master of Arts in British History in September 2015, where he will be working under the supervision of Dr. Joy Dixon.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".