5 Things About... Fake News (Patreon)

It's been almost two years since Trump was elected, in which he swept into the White House with corrupt, racist, and wicked cronies to publicly challenge the notion of truth. They all love lying as much as Trump, who according to Washington Post fact checkers has made at least 4,229 false or misleading claims so far in his presidency. They were all a continuation of campaign trail lies, like his erroneous and desperate yet effective claims that Obama wasn't actually an American citizen. But lying in politics- or any public forum for that matter, isn't anything new. Here's five things you should know about the history of Fake News.

1. There Are Multiple Types of Fake News

In addition to the complete creation of lies, there are other forms of fake news to identify. Propaganda is created by the state to influence public thought. The manipulation of photos or video to tell a false story is another type of fake news. Content created by marketing and advertising companies that appear on blogs (and market themselves as real without being specified as advertisements) are another. Then of course there is the fake news spread by viral memes.

2. Smearing Public Figures Has Been a Thing Since Antiquity And Has Evolved Over Time

16th Century Italian author and playwright Pietro Aretino wrote lewd and libelous sonnets about candidates for the papacy (except for the candidate supported by the wealthy and powerful Medici family). He pasted these sonnets for all to see on a statue called the Pasquino. This form of fake news came to be known as Paasquinade and later, Canard. One of the biggest pre-French Revolution targets was Marie Antoinette, whom, it was falsely claimed by pamphlets and leaflets, had incestuous relationships with her son. 

3. Papers Have Always Loved Turning Gossip Into [Fake] News

In Europe, "paragraph men" were known to hang around coffee houses (which were often the center of social life) to get the latest gossip. London was notorious this. The forerunner of 20th and 21st century tabloid magazines and gossip columns, these wild stories required no verification or fact checking. In Revolutionary America, British loyalist Thomas Hutchinson complained that the freedom of the press wrongly meant "print everything that is libelous and slanderous." In 1765 his house was burned down by American Patriots because they read an erroneous rumor that he was in favor of the despised Stamp Act.

4. Wild Stories Netted Big Money

19th and 20th century recollections of lynch mobs that demonized black men and positively viewed white murderers were abundant- and often contained fake news. Stories about black men's superhuman strength was common.

In 1835 the popular penny newspaper The Sun (New York) claimed that the moon was inhabited by man bats. The story was quickly spread and copied by other papers, and follow-up stories were anticipated by Ivy League scholars during the first daily releases. Below is a picture of the man bats printed along with the story in 1835. A competing newspaper declared it was a hoax, and the fake news died out. But this formula proved useful years later.

Another major kind of fake news was the yellow journalism craze, perfected by men like Joseph Pulitzer. In 1883 he was already the wealthy and established owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch when he purchased the floundering New York World. To boost circulation, the paper published sensationalized pieces on crimes and scandals that weren't always true. The paper grew at one point to have a circulation of 1 million daily, and subscriptions fell not because of the fake news but because of a major newsboys strike in 1899. (Sidenote: did you also watch Newsies in grade school)? 

There was a gigantic fight between New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, in which for roughly three years the papers tried to outsell each other by publishing the wildest stories. It was more serious newspapers that called them out. Both papers are considered to be a catalyst of the Mexican American War,  because they exaggerated stories about Cuban people under persecution from the Spanish, in need of American intervention.  The most impactful incident was courtesy of Hearst, who falsely reported in 1897 that the USS Maine was blown up thanks to a placed torpedo by Spain. He even read alleged diagrams of Spanish torpedoes. The story caught on and played a large role in troops being sent to Cuba. 

5. FDR Utilized Fake News When He Hired The First Press Secretary

While the office of the presidency has been around since 1787, and previous American presidents had underlings who dealt with the press when necessary, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first to create the full time press secretary position in 1932, making it just 86 years old. Through this office, FDR was able to maintain the lucrative propaganda that he was physically healthy (and therefore strong enough to be re-elected as president). Americans knew that FDR had polio, but had no clue that he largely lived in a wheelchair and was unable to walk without help because photographs of him in the chair weren't allowed. Reporters were threatened with unemployment and their employers were threatened with lost white house access. 

A huge study analyzed 126,000 stories tweeted by 3 million users over 10 years and found that fake news reaches more people and spreads faster than accurate stories. Falsehoods are 70% more likely to get retweeted than accurate news. This is scary to consider when you know that tech jerks are currently developing accessible software to manipulate video footage. 

The biggest difference between these past examples of fake news and the current administration's policy of boldface lying (even about things that are easily verifiable in audio or visuals) is the complete openness of the latter. From Kellyanne Conway calling things "alternative facts" to Rudy Giuliani saying "truth isn't truth", to press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refusing to revise or retract White House lies, the Trump administration isn't concerned with appearing trustworthy. The other major difference is the wider availability of independent media outlets and the mega platform that is twitter to call out fake news on large scales, a nearly impossible feat in the past when news was concentrated into the hands of a few. 

References

• How The Sun Conned The World With "The Great Moon Hoax" (Matthew Wills)
• The Grim Conclusions of the Largest Ever Study of Fake News (Robinson Meyer)
• The Age-Old Problem of "Fake News" (Jackie Mansky)
• The True History of Fake News (Robert Darnton)