By
Jacob Soll
The fake news hit Trent, Italy,
on Easter Sunday, 1475. A 2 ½-year-old child named Simonino had gone
missing, and a Franciscan preacher, Bernardino da Feltre, gave a series
of sermons claiming that the Jewish community had murdered the child,
drained his blood and drunk it to celebrate Passover. The rumors spread
fast. Before long da Feltre was claiming that the boy’s body had been
found in the basement of a Jewish house. In response, the Prince-Bishop
of Trent Johannes IV Hinderbach immediately ordered the city’s entire
Jewish community
arrested and tortured. Fifteen of them were
found guilty and burned at the stake. The story inspired surrounding
communities to commit similar atrocities.
Recognizing a false story, the papacy intervened and
attempted to stop both the story and the murders. But Hinderbach refused
to meet the papal legate, and feeling threatened, simply spread more
fake news stories about Jews drinking the blood of Christian children.
In the end, the popular fervor supporting these anti-semitic “blood
libel” stories made it impossible for the papacy to interfere with
Hinderbach, who had Simonino canonized—Saint Simon—and attributed to him
a hundred miracles. Today, historians have catalogued the fake stories
of child-murdering, blood-drinking Jews, which have existed since the
12th century as part of the
foundation of anti-Semitism. And yet,
one anti-Semitic website still claims the story is true and Simon is
still a martyred saint. Some fake news never dies.
Over the past few months, “fake news” has been on the loose
once again. From bogus stories about Hillary Clinton’s imminent
indictment to myths about a postal worker in Ohio destroying absentee
ballots cast for Donald Trump, colorful and damaging
tales have
begun to circulate rapidly and widely on Twitter and Facebook. In some
cases they have had violent results: Earlier this month a man armed with
an AR-15 fired a shot inside a Washington, D.C., restaurant, claiming
to be investigating (fake) reports that Clinton aide John Podesta was
heading up a child abuse ring there.
But amid all the media handwringing about fake news and how
to deal with it, one fact seems to have gotten lost: Fake news is not a
new phenomenon. It has been around since news became a concept 500 years
ago with the invention of print—a lot longer, in fact, than verified,
“objective” news, which emerged in force
a little more than a
century ago. From the start, fake news has tended to be sensationalist
and extreme, designed to inflame passions and prejudices. And it has
often provoked violence. The Nazi propaganda machine relied on the same
sorts of fake stories about ritual Jewish drinking of childrens’ blood
that inspired Prince-Bishop Hinderbach in the 15th century. Perhaps most
dangerous is how terrifyingly persistent and powerful fake news has
proved to be. As Pope Sixtus IV found out, wild fake stories with roots
in popular prejudice often prove too much for responsible authorities to
handle. With the decline of trusted news establishments around the
country, who’s to stop them today?
***
Fake news took off at the same time that news began
to circulate widely, after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing
press in 1439. “Real” news was hard to verify in that era. There were
plenty of news sources—from official publications by political and
religious authorities, to eyewitness accounts from sailors and
merchants—but no concept of journalistic ethics or objectivity. Readers
in search of fact had to pay close attention. In the 16th century, those
who wanted real news believed that leaked secret government reports
were reliable sources, such as Venetian government correspondence, known
as
relazioni. But it wasn’t long before leaked original documents were soon followed by fake
relazioni
leaks. By the 17th century, historians began to play a role in
verifying the news by publishing their sources as verifiable footnotes.
The trial over Galileo’s findings in 1610 also created a desire for
scientifically verifiable news and helped create influential scholarly
news sources.
But as printing expanded, so flowed fake news, from
spectacular stories of sea monsters and witches to claims that sinners
were responsible for natural disasters. The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755
was one of the more complex news stories of all time, with the church
and many European authorities blaming the natural disaster on divine
retribution against sinners. An entire genre of fake news pamphlets (
relações de sucessos)
emerged in Portugal, claiming that some survivors owed their lives to
an apparition of the Virgin Mary. These religiously inspired accounts of
the earthquake sparked the famed Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire to
attack religious explanations of natural events, and also made Voltaire
into an activist against fake religious news.
There was a lot of it in that era. When, in 1761, Marc-Antoine Calas, the 22-year-old
son
of a respected Protestant merchant in Toulouse, apparently committed
suicide, Catholic activists spread news stories that Calas’ father,
Jean, had killed him because he wanted to convert to Catholicism. The
local judicial authorities posted signs calling for legal witnesses to
corroborate the account, successfully turning rumors into official
facts, and, in turn, official news.
Jean Calas was convicted on the rumor-fueled testimony and
was publicly and gruesomely tortured before being executed. Horrified at
the atrocity, Voltaire wrote his own counterattacks dissecting the
absurdity that young Calas would have a full understanding of the
meaning of conversion and that his peaceable father would hang him for
it. The Calas story eventually sparked outrage against such fake legal
stories, torture and even execution. It became a touchstone for the
Enlightenment itself.
Yet even the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment
could not stop the flow of fake news. For example, in the years
preceding the French Revolution, a cascade of pamphlets appeared in
Paris exposing for the first time the details of the near-bankrupt
government’s spectacular budget deficit. Each came from a separate
political camp, and each contradicted the other with different numbers,
blaming the deficit on different finance ministers. Eventually, through
government leaks and more and more verifiable accounts, enough
information was made public for readers to glean a general sense of
state finance; but, like today, readers had to be both skeptical and
skilled to figure out the truth.
Even our glorified Founders were perpetrators of fake news
for political means. To whip up revolutionary fervor, Ben Franklin
himself concocted propaganda stories about murderous “scalping” Indians
working in league with the British King George III. Other revolutionary
leaders published fake propaganda stories that King George was sending
thousands of foreign soldiers to slaughter the American patriots and
turn the tide of the War of Independence to get people to enlist and
support the revolutionary cause.
By the 1800s, fake news was back again, swirling around
questions of race. Like Jewish blood libel, American racial sentiments
and fears were powerful in producing false stories. One persistent
“cottage industry” of fake news in antebellum America was
stories
of African-Americans spontaneously turning white. In other instances,
fake news reports of slave uprisings or of crimes by slaves, led to
terrible violence against African-Americans.
Sensationalism always sold well. By the early
19th
century, modern newspapers came on the scene, touting scoops and
exposés, but also fake stories to increase circulation. The
New York Sun’s “Great Moon Hoax” of 1835 claimed that there was an alien civilization on the moon, and established the
Sun
as a leading, profitable newspaper. In 1844, anti-Catholic newspapers
in Philadelphia falsely claimed that Irishmen were stealing bibles from
public schools, leading to violent riots and attacks on Catholic
churches. During the Gilded Age, yellow journalism flourished, using
fake interviews, false experts and bogus stories to spark sympathy and
rage as desired. Joseph Pulitzer’s
New York World published exaggerated crime dramas to sell papers. In the 1890s, plutocrats like William Randolph Hearst and his
Morning Journal used exaggeration to help spark the Spanish-American War. When Hearst’s correspondent in Havana
wired that there would be no war, Hearst—the inspiration for Orson Welles'
Citizen Kane—famously
responded: “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” Hearst
published fake drawings of Cuban officials strip-searching American
women—and he got his war.
One silver lining in this long and alarming history of fake
news is yellow journalism and its results—from civil violence to
war—caused a backlash, and sent the public in search of more objective
news. It was this flourishing market that sparked the rise of relatively
objective journalism as an industry in turn-of-the century America. For
the first time,
American papers hired reporters to cover local
beats and statehouses, building a chain of trust between local, state
and national reporters and the public.
While partisan reporting and sensationalism never went away
(just check out supermarket newsstands), objective journalism did become
a successful business model—and also, until recently, the dominant one.
In 1896, Adolph Ochs purchased the
New York Times, looking to
produce a “facts”-based newspaper that would be useful to the wealthy
investor class by providing reliable business information and general
news. Ochs showed that news did not have to be sensationalist to be
profitable, though the paper was
accused of being a mouthpiece for “bondholders.”
Of course, the objective journalism consensus had its hiccups.
With
the advent of World War II, and in light of the Nazi and Communist
propaganda machines, there was concern about the U.S. government’s
wartime involvement in producing news propaganda. In the 1950s, Joseph
McCarthy was accused of manipulating reporters like “Pavlov’s dogs,” but
a
New Yorker article from the period insisted that reporters
should report and not “tell readers which ‘facts’ are really ‘facts’ and
which are not.” By the 1960s, a new generation of reporters signed on
to report on “non establishment” stories. Many of these reporters
questioned the very ideal of objectivity, yet, nonetheless, hewed to the
basic guiding principle of reporting based on verifiable and reputable
sources.
***
It wasn’t until the rise of web-generated news that
our era’s journalistic norms were seriously challenged, and fake news
became a powerful force again. Digital news, you might say, has brought
yellow journalism back to the fore. For one, algorithms that create news
feeds and compilations have no regard for accuracy and objectivity. At
the same time, the digital news trend has decimated the force—measured
in both money and manpower—of the traditional, objectively minded,
independent press.
The Pew Research Center’s “State of the Media 2016” paints a
grim picture for most serious news organizations. Advertising revenue
is down; staffs continue to get cut; the number of newspapers has
declined
by 100 since 2004. Between 2003 and 2014, with the decline of the
printed press, the number of professional statehouse reporters
dropped
35 percent. Professional local beat reporters are also a dying breed.
These figures, trained in basic journalistic principles, were locally
known and trusted. They could be found in bars and local schools and
acted as the human link between statehouses, Washington, D.C., and the
U.S. population. They were seen as local heroes. (Jimmy Stewart often
played truth-obsessed newspaper reporters in films, like the 1948
thriller
Call Northside 777.) But today, these popular role
models and societal links are gone, and with them, a trusted filter
within civil society—the sort of filter that can say with authority to
fellow local citizens that fake news is not only fake, it is also
potentially deadly.
Real news is not coming back in any tangible way on a
competitive local level, or as a driver of opinion in a world where the
majority of the population does not rely on professionally reported news
sources and so much news is filtered via social media, and by
governments. And as real news recedes, fake news will grow. We’ve seen
the terrifying results this has had in the past—and our biggest
challenge will be to
find a new way to combat the rising tide.
