Reading this review of how the American press covered Mussolini and Hitler as they rose to power makes me uneasy.

smithsonianmag.com

When Hitler’s party won influence in Parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933 - about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power - many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate. Sure, he had a following, but his followers were “impressionable voters” duped by “radical doctrines and quack remedies,” claimed The Washington Post. Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government the “sober” politicians would “submerge” this movement, according to The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. A “keen sense of dramatic instinct” was not enough. When it came to time to govern, his lack of “gravity” and “profundity of thought” would be exposed.

Sound familiar?