The Adventures of an Oral History Archive in the Greek Public Domain

Abstract

In December 2021 a famous Greek TV and radio journalist and well-known anti-vaxxer, Yiorgos Tragkas, passed away due to Covid-19 complications. In the previous two decades, Tragkas had become a controversial figure, employing an anti-elite, pro-Russian and anti-Western narrative that fed into the country's underdog culture. His ethnocentric, populist, toxic tabloid journalism had been a popular genre in Greek political culture since the early 1980s. However, the debt and migration crises that shook Greece fuelled populist politics and a wave of misinformation.1 Tragkas jumped on the bandwagon of this new era by whitewashing the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party on national TV and by live appearances dressed up as a Second World War Nazi officer, with photos of Adolf Hitler and Angela Merkel on his desk.