Looking back over the history of printed lies, Ivor Gaber debunks the myth that social media is alone responsible for the rise of disinformation
It’s often said that fake news has only become a major problem because of the rise of social media. But that is fake news about fake news.
Did Moses really part the Red Sea to enable the Israelites to flee the Egyptians or did a star really appear that led the three kings to a particular stable over Bethlehem? Fake news or revealed truth?
But it was the invention of moveable type by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 that made the purveying of fake news that much easier; no longer did the propagandist have to laboriously copy out their fake news by hand.
The most vivid example of this perhaps being the ‘news’ about the 15th Century Romanian ruler Vlad the Impaler. Admittedly, Vlad was no angel – his preferred method of dealing with opponents was to impale them on a rod that went from top to bottom so-to-speak – but in their book The Roots of Fake News (Routledge, 2021), authors Brian and Matthew Winston describe him as ‘only an average sort of Eastern Europeans Fifteenth Century tyrant’.
Many a good newspaper story has been ruined by over-verification
James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald
Vlad’s heinous deeds were greatly exaggerated by a contemporary poet who sold his poems as an early form of news. He learnt about Vlad from a cleric who Vlad had offended (but had presumably not impaled) and, through the new print technology, the fake news about the heinous deeds Vlad spread far and wide. And his notoriety was further ‘enhanced’ when Irish author Bram Stoker took Vlad’s surname Dracule as the model for his gothic horror novel about a deranged vampire. A classic case of the well-known journalistic maxim – ‘if it bleeds it leads’.
In the 19th Century, in the absence of any sense of journalistic ethics, the intense competition between newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic allowed fake news to run rampant. The rationale being summed up by American newspaper proprietor James Gordon Bennett, who, apart from having his name go down in history as an elaborate exclamation mark, declaimed: “Many a good newspaper story has been ruined by over-verification” – or in modern parlance stories ‘too good to check’.
Perhaps the classic such example, according to Winston’s book, being the report in the New York Sun of 1835 that an eminent Edinburgh astronomer had observed wild animals playing on the surface of the moon – the astronomer really did exist, whether the lunar animals did is more doubtful.
Mass Media and Genocide
In the 20th Century, the growth of mass media such as radio and newsreels made the distribution of fake news even easier. The images of animals on the moon was one thing but it took on a far more sinister tone with the rise of fascism – best exemplified by Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels whose creed was: ‘If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.’ Goebbels used fake news to whip up hatred against Jews and many other groups, more effectively than probably anyone else before or since
In more recent times we have had a series of major fake news incidents that did not require social media to make a deadly impact. In 1994, Hutus in Rwanda were told by their government that the Rwandan President’s plane had been brought down by Tutsi rebels; this precipitated the mass violence there that led to the deaths of up to 800,000 Tutsis.
A similar number, or perhaps even more, died as a result of the fake news about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq; a lie that originated in the United States following ‘revelations’ from a former Iraqi spy who was trying to curry favour with the Americas as well as wreak his revenge on Saddam Hussein.
On a far less dramatic level let’s not forget the fake news that emanated from a young Telegraph Brussels correspondent who, among other things, reported on the EU Commission’s plans to insist on bananas having to be straight and that condoms should be of one standard size. Great stories, all ‘too good to check’ and all lies. One wonders whatever became of that reporter – no doubt he got his comeuppance for filing all those fake news stories.
This brings us to Donald Trump. He had no need to exploit what media scholars call ‘the affordances’ of social media to spread his lies. Trump had a history of lying well before the advent of social media and, as his