Not Your Grandpa's Hoax: A Comparative History of Fake News

ABSTRACT

Fake news is hardly new in journalism, and a sense of historical perspective is clarifying. A thumbnail history in Columbia Journalism Review pointed to some superficial similarities in hoaxing over the ages “in editorial motive or public gullibility, not to mention the blurred lines between deliberate and accidental flimflam.” It cautions that “the great fake news panic of 2016” is an overreaction to “macro-level trends” that do not indicate real, significant changes in the media. But before agreeing to shrug off the significance of the 2016 spate of hoaxing, it is worth reviewing the history more carefully.

Notes

1 Craig Silverman et al., “Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False and Misleading Information at an Alarming Rate,” BuzzFeed, October 20, 2016. https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis?utm_term=.lnn1PJpX9#.pulP7wZbl.

2 Results of a national Nexis news search corroborates this chart produced by a Google Trends search for “fake news”: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%2012-m&q=%22fake%20news%22 (accessed March 2017).

3 David Remnick, “Obama Confronts a Trump Presidency,” New Yorker, November 11, 2016.

4 David Uberti, “The Real History of Fake News,” Columbia Journalism Review, December 15, 2016.

5 “Facebook and the Digital Virus Called Fake News,” New York Times, November 19, 2016.

6 Norman Howard Sims, “The Chicago Style of Journalism” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1979), p. 32. On the invention of news in the 1830s, see Michael Schudson, Chapter 1, in Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978).

7 David Uberti, “The Real History of Fake News.”

8 Jonathan M. Ladd, Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters (Princeton University Press, 2011), 6.

9 Dan Tynan, “How Facebook Powers Money Machines for Obscure Political ‘News’ Sites,” The Guardian, August 24, 2016. Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander, “How Teens in the Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters with Fake News,” BuzzFeed, November 3, 2016. Samantha Subramanian, “Inside the Macedonian Fake News Complex,” Wired, February 15, 2017.

10 Andrew Higgins, Mike McIntire, and Gabriel JX Dance, “Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: ‘This Is All about Income,” New York Times, November 26, 2016.

11 Laura Sydell, “We Tracked Down a Fake-news Creator in the Suburbs. Here's What We Learned,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, November 23, 2106. Laura Bradley, “Samantha Bee Tracked Down a Fake-news Mogul to Ask, ‘What the F**k?,’” Vanity Fair Hollywood, December 6, 2016.

12 Chris Fleming and John O'Carroll, “The Art of the Hoax.” Parallax 16, no. 4 (2010): 45–59.

13 Edson C. Tandoc Jr., Zheng Wei Lim, and Richard Ling, “Defining ‘Fake News’: A Typology of Scholarly Definitions.” Digital Journalism (2017): 1–17.

14 Lynda Walsh, Sins against Science: The Scientific Media Hoaxes of Poe, Twain, and Others (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 18; Fred Fedler, Media Hoaxes (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989), 3–5.

15 Benjamin Franklin, Satires & Bagatelles (Detroit: Fine Book Circle, 1937), 22–24.

16 Fedler, Media Hoaxes, 10–11.

17 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaal,” in The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition Table of Contents and Index of the Five Volumes, 2008. See note 1 at the end. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25525#download.

18 Walsh, Sins against Science, 50–97; Fedler, Media Hoaxes, 17–33.

19 Ulf Jonas Bjork, “‘Sweet Is the Tale’: A Context for the New York Sun's Moon Hoax.” American Journalism 18, no. 4 (2001): 13–27; David A. Copeland. “A Series of Fortunate Events: Why People Believed Richard Adams Locke's ‘Moon Hoax.” Journalism History 33, no. 3 (2007): 140–50.

20 “Awful Calamity,” New York Herald, November 9, 1874.

21 Fedler, Media Hoaxes, Chapter 6.

22 William R. Gillis, Memories of Mark Twain and Steve Gillis, 2nd ed. (Sonora, CA: The Banner, 1924), 78–79.

23 Norman Howard Sims, “The Chicago Style of Journalism,” 35.

24 “Empire City Massacre,” Museum of Hoaxes, accessed March 31, 2017, http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/empire_city_massacre.

25 Fedler, Media Hoaxes, 47.

26 Dorothy Thompson, “On the Record: Mr. Welles and Mass Delusion,” New York Herald Tribune, November 2, 1938, p. 21.

27 Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994). Rushkoff is often credited with inventing the media term.

28 “Railways and Revolvers in George,” (London) Times, October 15, 1856, p. 9.

29 Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler. “Misinformation and Fact-checking.” Research Findings from Social Science, Media Policy Initiative, New America Foundation (2012). Science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert summarizes some of the broader research in “Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds,” New Yorker, February 27, 2017.

30 Norman Howard Sims, “The Chicago Style of Journalism,” 39.

31 William MacAdams, Ben Hecht: The Man behind the Legend (New York: Scribner, 1988), 14. See also Hecht's own account of picture chasing in A Child of the Century (New York: Primus, 1985).

32 Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century (New York: Primus, 1985), 134–35.

33 Norman Howard Sims, “The Chicago Style of Journalism,” 34–39.

34 Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days: An Autobiography, 7th ed. (New York: H. Liveright, 1922), 152–53.

35 A. A. Dornfeld, Behind the Front Page: The Story of the City News Bureau of Chicago (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1983), 39, 119–20; George Murray, The Madhouse on Madison Street (Chicago: Follett, 1965), 189; Wayne Klatt, Chicago Journalism: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 125; Ben Hecht, The Front Page: From Theater to Reality (Hanover, NH: Smith & Kraus, 2002), footnote #170, 153–55.

36 Vincent Starrett, Born in a Bookshop; Chapters from the Chicago Renascence (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), 101.

37 Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days, 77–78; May Mann, Going Hollywood column, Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner, December 5, 1940, 9; “Muscle Journalist” (obituary), Time, March 31, 1941, 40; Murray, Madhouse, 194–201; Klatt, Chicago Journalism, 119.

38 Matthew C. Ehrlich, Journalism in the Movies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 22; Klatt, Chicago Journalism, 77.

39 Klatt, Chicago Journalism, 72–74, 83.

40 Michael Lesy, Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 306–07. Lloyd Wendt, Lords of the Levee: The Story of Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943), 294.

41 Murray, Madhouse, 178.

42 Ben Hecht, Gaily, Gaily (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 213–14.

43 David Uberti, “Fake News and Partisan Blowhards Were Invented in the 1800s,” Splinter, October 6, 2017. https://splinternews.com/fake-news-and-partisan-blowhards-were-invented-in-the-1-1819219085 (accessed January 2018).

44 Talk of the Nation, “As Media Lines ‘Blur,’ We All Become Editors,” Neal Conan interview with Tom Rosenstiel, National Public Radio, September 1, 2011.

45 Adrian Chen, “The Fake News Fallacy,” New Yorker, September 4, 2017.

46 Ibid.