We know Hitler was a master of embroidering events for their propaganda value, eg, the death of Horst Wessel, the Reichstag fire, and then there was the whole dubious 'stab in the back' theory about the end of World War One.
But are there other examples in other countries, and other sides of politics, where faked stories gained widespread acceptance? And did this lead to a revision of how news was processed or presented after 1945?
A quite well known and also influential example is Walter Duranty, the Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times 1922–1936 and correspondent until 1941. He even won a Pulitzer prize for his series of articles about the Stalin's Soviet Union.
Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow
To say that Duranty's reporting was misleading would be an understatement, they contained lies and propagandist apologism for Stalin's rule including persistent denial of famine and the mass starvation of Ukraine killing millions.
"There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be."
New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931
"Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin's program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding."
New York Times, December 9, 1932
"In the middle of the diplomatic duel between Great Britain and the Soviet Union over the accused British engineers, there appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with 'thousands already dead and millions menaced by death from starvation."
New York Times, March 31, 1933
"Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda."
New York Times, August 23, 1933
New York Herald Tribune reporter Ralph Barnes asked Duranty what he was going to write about the famine. He replied: "Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated."
"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
New York Times, May 14, 1933
In his groundbreaking history about Stalin's forced collectivization and mass starvation in Ukraine, Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest concluded:
As one of the best known correspondents in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, Mr. Duranty's denial that there was a famine was accepted as gospel. Thus Mr. Duranty gulled not only the readers of the New York Times but because of the newspaper's prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime. And he certainly influenced the newly-elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union.