Fake News, Part I: The Long History

Authored by John Maxwell Hamilton via RealClearPolitics,

In 1896, a daring journalist covering the Cuban revolution against their colonial masters crossed the Spanish lines three times to interview insurgent leaders. William Francis Mannix’s final trip into the Cuban interior was made at the request of the leader of the insurgent government, Salvador Cisneros Betancourt. El Presidente Cisneros wanted the intrepid correspondent to carry back an appeal begging for support from the American people.

Mannix’s riveting reports appeared on the front page of the New York Times and other leading newspapers. After the Spanish expelled Mannix from Cuba, he was invited to speak to the National Geographic Society and other prestigious gatherings. The Cuban appeal was published in the Congressional Record. “I applaud and approve every word in that splendid appeal,” said Alabama Sen. John T. Morgan, who supported U.S. government intervention to help the Cuban rebels.

The nation’s leading newspapers decried Spain’s subsequent expulsion of Mannix from Cuba. The Washington Star, another newspaper that carried Mannix’s dispatches, said he was being banished “for having told the truth about insurgents and their cause.”

Mannix scored a journalistic triumph, but it was not one that his editors, legislators, or readers imagined. His three trips over enemy lines and his stories, including the Cisneros appeal, were all fakes. Mannix wrote them while sitting in the bar of the Moscotte Hotel in Havana or – for a change of scenery – on the hotel’s veranda.

In an October 2017 interview on Fox News, President Donald Trump said, “I’ve really started this whole ‘fake news’ thing.” He called it “one of the greatest of all the terms I’ve come up with.” But faking has a long history. No journalist surpassed Mannix as a fabulist in Cuba, but many followed in his footsteps on the island. Their fabricated sensationalizing reached such proportions that a book-length expose was devoted to the subject on the eve of the United States entering war with Spain. It was called Facts and Fakes About Cuba.

This article and two that follow give perspective on three aspects of fake news: its long history, its attraction to readers, and the consequences of political fake news.

The power of modern technology to pollute streams of information has made fake news seem terrifyingly new. Russian bots flood the Internet with horrifying stories that did not happen. Political operatives produce AI-generated videos of despicable speeches their opponents did not deliver. Your crazy cousin spreads word in his social media posts that President Trump’s supporters staged the assassination attempts on his life. As to the latter, a NewsGuard/YouGov poll recently found that almost one-third of Americans believe at least one of the three attempts on Trump’s life was staged.

Modern technology is a force multiplier for falsehood. But technology is not the root cause. The launching pad is and always has been people: people who for a variety of reasons want to mislead, and people who for a variety of reasons find falsehood more satisfying than fact. Fake news goes back much further than the computer, the television, the radio, the typewriter, or the printing press.

The history of mankind has been a history of the battle between truth and falsehood. The ancient Greeks created gods in their own image by naming them Apate (fraud), Dolos (guile), and Pheme (rumor). The Roman poet Virgil wrote in the Aeneid of the goddess Rumor:

Her frightening mingle of truth and lies,/ Rhapsodically singing about them in the darkness,/ And all the people hear what she is singing.

One place Rumor did her work was on a busy street corner near the Piazza Navona. Beginning in the 16th century, Romans surreptitiously placed false malicious notes about public figures on a statue of Pasquino, who in legend was supposed to be a local tailor and wit. The name of the mendacious notes lives on as pasquinades.

Buttered news

In the years leading up to the French Revolution, historian Robert Darnton documented that France was awash in misinformation. Craque was slang for fake news. The word mimicked the cracking sound of branches around the Tree of Crakow in Paris, where people gathered in the same way the English did at St. Paul’s Cathedral. St. Paul’s, where pamphlets were sold and gossip exchanged, was called “the mint of all famous lies.”

A hinge point in fake news came in the 1620s, when London printer Nathaniel Butter published the first serialized English-language commercial newspaper, “The News of this Present Week.” As soon as it and others like it appeared, discerning critics ridiculed the emergence of “buttered news.”

Butter’s newspaper could not have appeared without moveable type and the printing press, but this technology had been around for some time. What changed was the emergence of a growing middle class who could read and had disposable income to spend on news – even news of dubious provenance.

Butter and those who joined him in the newsbook business were only beginning to understand journalism. They sometimes published the oldest news first, as if to keep things in order. The British crown constrained them by forbidding the publication of domestic news. Forced to go abroad, they relied on second-hand reports, the spicier the better. A typical article read, “A strange apparition at Rome, of two mighty armies,” whose battle in the air was followed by a storm of “blood and fire from heaven.” According to one historian, “Roughly one-tenth of these early newspapers contained some sort of apparition, vision, or monstrous-birth item,” such as boy-girl twins born to a Swiss cow.

Not all falsehood is fake

We need to be clear about definitions. Fake news is intentional falsification. A factual error in a newspaper is not fake news. It is a mistake. A mistake may be due to sloppy newsgathering or an accidental slip. It may call for firing the reporter. But the author did not aim to deceive. It wasn’t a hoax.

Politicians find it convenient to overlook these definitional niceties. They discredit factual news that makes them look bad by calling it “fake news.” They become the fakers.

The term fake news was routinely splashed across the pages of American newspapers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Each day readers were greeted by headlines like these: “Malicious Fake News.” “Fake News Again.” “Bit of Fake News.” “Concerning Fake News.” “More Fake ‘News.'” “Fake Stories Afloat.” “Fake News. Pope Has Died Twenty-Two Times in Five Years.”

The faking habit waned as the 20th century rolled on. First, the cost of starting a new newspaper soared, so it was more difficult for scallywags to wade into the gutter. Second, the intense competition for readers drove the least profitable newspapers out of business. Those that were left found they earned more money by competing on the basis of reliability. Balanced fact-based reports attracted more readers than partisan news. Advertisers preferred to see their products promoted in credible publications.

Of course, some newspapers were outliers. The New York Graphic billed itself as offering “Nothing But the Truth” and then made a merry practice of lying. Long before modern technology made it easy to fake photographs, the Graphic pasted real-life faces on posed bodies. These appeared alongside made-up lonely heart stories.

Many years later fakes still appeared newspapers. In 1980 the Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for “Jimmy’s World,” a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict fabricated by reporter Janet Cooke. A fake in the New York Times the next year was eerily similar to William Mannix’s in Cuba. Freelancer Christopher Jones, hired by the Times magazine, invented a detailed story about spending a month with Khmer Rouge guerrillas, who were in hiding in Cambodia. He never left Spain.

But ethical standards had set in by that time. The Graphic went bankrupt in 1932. Its debts amounted to millions. The Post issued a lengthy mea culpa and returned the Pulitzer Prize. When the New York Times realized that Jones might not have been on the up and up, the executive editor assigned three reporters to determine conclusively that the story was a fabrication and then apologized profusely.

We are now back to the buttered days of journalism for the opposite reason we left them behind. The legacy media, as the old established media are called, carry on, albeit in smaller numbers and with generally lower profits. Meanwhile a tidal wave of new, irresponsible media has emerged. The costs of entry are low, and ethics is often considered a nuisance. These news outlets are as eager to fake as Nathaniel Butter and William Mannix were.

Our attraction to fakers like these will be the subject of Part II.

John Maxwell Hamilton, an RCP columnist, is at work on a biography of the journalist-faker William Francis Mannix. His recent book Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda won the Goldsmith Prize.