Julien Gorbach. American Journalism. Volume 35, Issue 2, 2018.
On October 20, 2016, BuzzFeed broke the story of a twenty-first century media phenomenon that appeared to be as disturbing as it was transformational: the onslaught of “fake news” during a presidential election. At first, BuzzFeed‘s report garnered little attention. But the election of Donald Trump three weeks later, followed within forty-eight hours by CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s assertion that it was “a pretty crazy idea” to suggest Facebook had delivered Trump’s victory, opened the floodgates. Hundreds of articles and editorials over the next two months clanged the alarm that fake news was the Gotterdammerung of democratic societies in the Information Age.
In an interview with the New Yorker, President Barack Obama decried a media ecosystem where “everything is true and nothing is true,” in which the capacity to spread lies and wild conspiracy theories and to caricature political opponents without any rebuttal made it nearly impossible to have a rational discussion. That ecosystem “seems to have evolved into a near-perfect environment for fake news to thrive,” New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said in December. “This year, the adage that ‘falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after it’ doesn’t begin to describe the problem,” the New York Times editorial page noted abjectly. “That idea assumes that the truth eventually catches up.”
Yet fake stories are hardly new to journalism, and a sense of historical perspective is clarifying. Fiction disguised as fact dates back to what some media historians consider the very birth of the journalistic report in 1722, when readers mistook Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year to be a true memoir. Perhaps the most wildly successful hoax in American history caught fire just as the Penny Press of the 1830s was first introducing “news” as we now understand it—as everyday stories written for popular consumption.
Writing for Columbia Journalism Review in mid-December of 2016, David Uberti surveyed this history and cautioned doomsayers to take a deep breath. “A little bit of brake-tapping may be in order,” he wrote.
It’s worth remembering, in the middle of the great fake news panic of 2016, America’s very long tradition of news-related hoaxes. A thumbnail history shows marked similarities to today’s fakery in editorial motive or public gullibility, not to mention the blurred lines between deliberate and accidental flimflam. It also suggests that the recent fixation on fake news has more to do with macro-level trends than any new brand of faux content.
To drive home the point that there is nothing new under the sun, Uberti quoted an 1807 letter from the original champion of the American press himself, Thomas Jefferson: “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” Sure, Uberti argued, people now recovering from the shellshock of the 2016 election are alarmed about today’s “polluted vehicle”—that great powerhouse known as “the media” of the twenty-first century. It is true that wild conspiracy theories whip between social networks at the speed of light. But this is really just a return to a longer-term norm, to life without a mainstream media controlling the conversation. “The existence of an independent, powerful, widely respected news media establishment is an historical anomaly,” Georgetown Professor Jonathan Ladd wrote in his 2011 book, Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters. “Prior to the twentieth century, such an institution had never existed in American history.”
Months later, Uberti was eager to walk back his anodyne assessment, but it is still worth testing his original hypothesis. Is all this hand-wringing an overreaction? This essay offers its own thumbnail history to reveal three key insights. First, in contrast to other incarnations of fake news—or hoaxes, as they have traditionally been known—the flood of it in 2016 was of a far more deliberate than accidental kind of flimflam. Second, comparably dark periods in American media history illustrate why our recent and ongoing fake news is a highly toxic cocktail of the worst spirits we have seen, and thus poses a multiplicity of threats to democracy. Finally, and most crucially, while Uberti stressed similarities to the past, it is also worth considering the difference in stakes now: Nineteenth-century societies did not have to reckon with the same risks of global catastrophe.
While one might naturally have assumed that political ideology was the driving force behind the recent spate of what BuzzFeed called “hyperpartisan” fake news, investigative reporting by the Guardian, Wired, and other outlets revealed that from Macedonia to California, profit was the primary motive. Another theme common among the entrepreneurs, however, was: “I don’t call it fake news; I call it satire.” Denver Guardian creator Jestin Coler, who said he pays twenty to twenty-five writers, claimed that he started out intending to expose the extremism of the alt-right. In other words, according to some culprits, spreading fake news is a way of telling the truth. But if that was the case, why was so much investigation required to track down Coler and the others and get them to come clean?
Analyses of fake news published both before and after 2016 have emphasized a distinction between more innocent varieties and outright fraud. In a 2010 study titled “The Art of the Hoax,” Chris Fleming and John O’Carroll argued: “One useful way of dividing varieties of hoax is in terms of their relationship to deception. We call anything that seeks to deceive a hoax, despite the fact that some are structured to make a point (and can only do this by being revealed or discovered), whereas others are more akin to fraud, and are designed to conceal their very existence from discovery at any stage.” As for the former, more benign variety: “The hoax lies in order to tell the truth.” Similarly, “Defining Fake News: A Typology of Scholarly Definitions,” published in 2017, identified six varieties of false news that had been examined in thirty-four studies since 2003 and distinguished between high and low levels of “intent to deceive.” Fabricated stories and propaganda rate high in deception, for example, whereas parody and satire rate low.
Whether the intent to deceive is high or low, however, money is always a primary motivator. Given the rich tradition of parody and satire in journalism, literary hoaxing is, at first blush, clearly distinct from more naked grabs for profit. The humorous and curious stunts of such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain would seem to bear little resemblance to the notorious journalistic frauds perpetrated by Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, and Jayson Blair or phony sensations concocted to sell newspapers. The six-part moon hoax of 1835, which is possibly the most successful ploy in history and certainly among the most legendary, was a straightforward bid for newsstand sales, the pre-digital, print-era version of clickbait. But, in fact, the literary hoax was also a purely commercial endeavor, even if the most talented writers were able to make readers forget that. Franklin, Twain, and Poe all straddled the line between journalism and literature, and hoaxing was their stock and trade.
Profitable or not, some of the earliest known examples of hoaxing were also actually impressive feats of truth-telling. To expose London astrologers as charlatans, eighteenth-century British satirist Jonathan Swift soberly prophesied the imminent death of the city’s most prominent seer, John Partridge. While Partridge angrily insisted that he was very much alive, the popularity of Swift’s comical soothsayer, Isaac Bickerstaff, flourished across Europe. Benjamin Franklin’s career as a hoaxer started in much the same vein. His “Witch Trial at Mount Holly,” published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on October 22, 1730, reported dancing sheep and Psalm-singing hogs to ridicule superstitions about witchcraft.
Franklin, a man with peerless business acumen, achieved a fortune through hoaxing, stealing a page from Swift in doing so. He adopted the Bickerstaff-like identity of impoverished scholar Richard Saunders to pen Poor Richard’s Almanack, in which he foretold the demise of rival almanac author Titan Leeds. Like Swift’s poor victim astrologer, Leeds furiously protested that he was not dead, while sales of Poor Richard’s brought Franklin wealth and fame. Franklin directed the same caustic satire at business rivals to build the Pennsylvania Gazette into the most popular newspaper of the colonies.
In the nineteenth century, hoaxes would prove an effective means of generating both cash and the right kind of notoriety. Edgar Allan Poe devised six hoaxes for income, but although they displayed his genius for macabre storytelling, his record of monetary success was mixed. Few people were fooled by his moon hoax, perhaps because as he later admitted that it was “a sketchy trifle,” written “in a tone of banter.” But he was also the victim of bad luck. After Poe’s June 1835 installment of “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaal” appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger, the rest of the series never made it to print, because in late August, Richard Locke’s moon hoax created an unprecedented sensation. As Poe himself acknowledged, Locke’s hoax caught on because it was a far more cunning contraption: Even to the modern reader, the careful, realistic details of the early installments made it seem believable.
By the time the story grew truly outlandish, readers were hooked. Sun publisher Benjamin Day had anticipated a huge demand for Locke’s moon hoax story, but the first installment quickly sold out—a copy could not be found at any price. The press was soon running at full capacity, ten hours a day, as sales increased with each new installment, and it still could not keep up with the demand. The world’s first penny paper, the Sun had originally achieved a circulation of four thousand in 1833, outpacing all other New York papers. By the time Day published the article describing an alien race of bat-men fornicating on exotic moon tundra, circulation had shot up to 19,360, making it the most popular newspaper on Earth. The rival and more respectable six-cent papers were embarrassed and rushed to catch up with the important story, reprinting it without crediting the original. European newspapers picked up the news as well, thus exciting and deceiving “almost the whole reading world.”
The Sun confessed to their ploy by mid-September, and until the end of the century, newspaper hoaxers seemed to have mostly maintained faith with the public. A comparably effective ruse by the Herald contained an admission of guilt within the story itself. The November 9, 1874, headline announced: “AWFUL CALAMITY,” “The Wild Animals Broken Loose from Central Park,” “TERRIBLE SCENES OF MUTILATION.” In 10,000 words of white-hot prose, the story reported carnage that ensued after an enraged rhinoceros broke free from his cage, trampled and impaled zoo keepers, and smashed open dozens of other cages. Police and crowds fell back as herds of deadly beasts assaulted them. Elephants went on rampages, monkeys clinging to their backs. The National Guard was called in. The story included a tally of casualties: thirty-two people killed, eighteen injured, and fifty-nine animals slaughtered. Then the final paragraph of the lengthy article explained: “Of course, the entire story given above is a pure fabrication. Not one word of it is true.” The Herald warned, however, that the zoo was in such poor condition a true calamity might happen at any time.
If the moon story had shown the tolerance of readers for a good-natured hoax, the zoo story revealed their capacity to forgive. It also demonstrated the power of fake news to sow chaos. The Herald‘s tacked-on justification in the name of public safety had hardly made a difference, as the paper learned a new lesson: People rarely read to the bottom. Managing editor Thomas B. Connery found that his own wife had kept his children from school that morning as panic swept the streets. One of the writers, Joseph I. C. Clarke, recalled mothers rushing to take crying, terrified children from school. The police were overwhelmed by calls. Fury rained on the newspaper, but despite the criticisms and vows to cancel subscriptions, the Herald did not lose a single subscriber, and circulation actually increased.
The Herald‘s Central Park Zoo misadventure may have been wildly irresponsible, but in these final years of the honorable literary newspaper hoax, pranksters were stunned and often horrified by the extent of their own successes. This was even true for Western tall-tale pioneer Mark Twain, who along with close friend Dan De Quille, spun them for the Virginia City Enterprise in the early 1860s. The humor was absurd, but also sardonically reflective of the culture of fraud, swindle, and violence that had mushroomed with the California Gold Rush and subsequent silver boom of Nevada’s Comstock Lode.
Twain cooked up hoaxes as jokes on friends and co-workers, but naturally found himself the butt of them as well. After an editor broke his nose in a boxing match, he was so embarrassed that he left town, and in Twain’s absence, De Quille published stories about his face. One reported that a huge bloody red nose had attempted to jump aboard a stagecoach, terrifying the passengers.
Twain’s hoaxes were equally outrageous, yet first to his amusement, and then shock and dismay, they caught fire like a torch to desert sage. Just a few weeks after joining the Enterprise, he reported that a roughly one-hundred-year-old petrified man had been discovered in the mountains. The image was meant to mock a local fascination with petrifications. Twain maintained that he had never meant to fool anyone, but one paper after another began reprinting it. The news spread despite Twain’s strong clue that it was bogus: The stone-faced man was holding one thumb up to a nostril with fingers splayed out—literally thumbing his nose at posterity.
Twain’s “masterpiece”—though he hardly saw it as one—was the “Empire City Massacre.” It reported that a man named P. Hopkins rode into town on horseback with his throat slit from ear to ear, carrying the dripping scalp of his murdered wife, and then collapsed dead at the door of Magnolia saloon. Back at Hopkins’s house, a sheriff’s posse discovered six of nine children butchered with an axe. Once again, Twain thought he had left plenty of clear indications of a hoax, but instead the vivid, gory details alarmed locals and non-locals alike.
“Well, in all my life I never saw anything like the sensation that little satire created,” he later recalled. “It was the talk of the town, it was the talk of the territory.” Nevada papers angrily denounced the story as “cruel and idiotic” and in “shockingly bad taste.” Twain published a contrite retraction titled “I take it all back.” He was upset about the incident for weeks and, according to De Quille, had trouble sleeping. “Mark,” De Quille advised him, “never mind this bit of gale. It will soon blow itself out. This item will be remembered and talked about when all your other work is forgotten.” And in Nevada at least, that turned out to be true.
Sixty years later, columnist Dorothy Thompson argued that Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater should be awarded a Congressional medal for demonstrating the power of the hoax in the age of mass media with their “War of the Worlds” broadcast. “They have shown up the incredible stupidity, lack of nerve, and ignorance of thousands,” she wrote. “They have proved how easy it is to start a mass delusion.” Yet the hoaxes of the previous century had already exposed the remarkable gullibility of the public and the capacity of absolute bunk to “go viral,” long before mass media or the Internet ever existed.
The reasons hoaxes succeed have remained the same. Many tell people what they want to hear, and fictional stories are often more compelling than the truth. Some reinforce what people already believe, as was the case with an 1856 London Times report about a train trip across Georgia that became a bloodbath. It drew great excitement because many Brits were already convinced Americans were violent savages. Recent reports about Hillary Clinton assassinating an FBI agent or operating a sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor went viral both because they offered far spicier details than typical news and because they affirmed people’s opinions. As in the days of the Georgian train ride from hell, other journalists debunked the hoaxes, but, perversely, that only made the tales more popular and powerful. Studies of fact-checking and debunking have documented this phenomenon, known as “confirmation bias.”
Where Twain had seen cause for alarm, others in increasingly urban, competitive, and cynical newspaper markets saw opportunity. By the late nineteenth century, the journalist that Norman Howard Sims has called “the backwoods sketch artist” and the literary hoax were dying out. This was nowhere more evident than in Chicago of the 1890s, where, as Sims observed: “The hoax took a twist. It became invisible. Or else it was a joke which could be detected only by a few fellow reporters. Instead of a perfectly visible absurdity, the hoax actually became an unrecognizable deceit.”
This “twist” was driven by market competition that grew increasingly intense over the next thirty years, the apex of the Industrial Revolution. During the early twentieth century, Chicago newspaper reporters distinguished themselves with a roguish and wild approach to journalism that the writer Ben Hecht immortalized in The Front Page, his 1927 hit Broadway comedy. By then, the American Society of Newspaper Editors was adopting a code of ethics that would stamp out the hellfire of the Chicago press.
Hecht recalled in his autobiography that as a sixteen-year-old “picture chaser” for the Journal, his first job in journalism had been to beg, borrow, or—mostly—steal newsworthy photos, and this he did with talent and a sense of mission. After his Aunt Chasha sewed large pockets into his jacket to conceal burglary tools and the loot, Hecht “clambered up fire escapes, crawled through windows and transoms, posing when detected as everything from a gas meter inspector to an undertaker’s assistant,” recalled one friend. Soon Hecht graduated to part-time cub reporter and full-time professional hoaxer. Collaborating with photographer Gene Cour, he delivered splashy scoops on police pursuits of riverboat pirates and the Great Chicago Earthquake, which tore a terrific fissure through Lincoln Park. His career came to an end, however, with publication of a riches-to-rags tearjerker about a Rumanian princess found slinging hash on Wabash Avenue. Journal publisher John C. Eastman was laughed out of his smoking club for running the photo of a well-known local prostitute—Hecht’s “princess”—on the front page.
Though they seem fantastic, Hecht’s tales explain the traditions of Chicago journalism through a kind of narrative shorthand. The idea that newspapers paid young men to break into homes and steal photographs may seem hard to believe, but Theodore Dreiser and Vincent Starrett cite it as a common practice in their own memoirs. Hecht’s claim that his promotion to reporter afforded the opportunity for a short-lived, madcap career as a hoaxer recalls this other dubious journalistic sport that Chicago reporters adopted and made peculiarly their own.
The Chicago hoax went beyond being a mere genial prank: it became one more ploy in the reporter’s bag of tricks, put to use in the bare-knuckle fight for scoops. In the 1890s, Finley Peter Dunne of the Herald and Charles Dillingham of the Times brought it into play against the Tribune‘s Frank Vanderlip, their competitor on the hotel beat. The hapless Vanderlip could not understand how his rivals kept grabbing exclusives with famous and exotic personages who stopped in town overnight and then vanished without a trace. Unable to keep pace, Vanderlip was fired for incompetence, without ever realizing that these extraordinary hotel guests had never come or did not exist. In Chicago, the hoax was now a hustle pulled on the competition and public alike.
Ironically, the same bottom line that compelled a swarm of young men to gather facts also honed their talents for deception and misdirection, creating the cutthroat culture portrayed in The Front Page. “‘Get the news! Get the news!’—that was the great cry in the city editorial room,” recalled Theodore Dreiser, who was struck by the “pagan or unmoral character” of newspaper work.
Don’t worry much over how you get it, but get it, and don’t come back without it! … Don’t let other newspapers skin us—that is, if you value your job! … While a city editor might readily forgive any form of trickery he would never forgive failure. Cheat and win and you were all right; be honest and lose and you were fired. To appear wise when you were ignorant, dull when you were not, disinterested when you were interested … these were the essential tricks of the trade. … And I soon encountered other newspaper men who were as shrewd and wily as ferrets.
Tales of scooping are legion. Reporters were known to toss false tips that sent the competition on wild goose chases. Collier’s celebrated Harry Romanoff of the Herald & Examiner as Chicago’s greatest telephone reporter because of his talent at impersonations. Once calling a barroom where a murder had occurred, Romanoff identified himself as Sgt. Donohue of the coroner’s office. “That’s funny,” said the voice on the other end. “So is this.” Stepping things up a notch, City News alum and Her-Ex editor Frank Carson staged a collision of two circulation trucks in front a police station, a diversion that enabled his operatives to steal the diary of the alluring murderess Ruth Randall out of the evidence room. Sometimes reporters planted evidence. “If it occurred to us that a janitor’s missing mother-in-law might have been lured into the janitor’s furnace, and the clues did not fit that attractive hypothesis,” wrote Starrett, “we helped the story to headlines by discovering incinerated bones that somehow the police had missed.”
When Chicago crime reporters were not breaking into places or pulling a con, they were busy deputizing themselves with the local law enforcement. “Murder mysteries fascinated readers, and the reporters, not the police, would solve them,” wrote John J. McPhaul. Papers supplied badges that reporters would flash to pass themselves off as detectives or assistant coroners. Carson, who was always ready to push things to an extreme, invented “muscle journalism,” manufacturing phony badges, warrants, and other documents and installing wiretaps.
Much of this roguish behavior is amusing in hindsight, but it is worth also keeping in mind that these were grim days for news, and for the city of Chicago. Determined to gain an edge on the local competition with the launch of the American in 1900, William Randolph Hearst hired Max Annenberg, an immigrant from East Prussia and a Chicago West-Sider, to organize crews of sluggers who strong-armed newsboys into ditching stacks of rival newspapers. The Tribune and Daily News soon rose to the challenge, and what started with knives and brickbat brawls between gangs of neighborhood toughs evolved into shooting sprees that claimed the lives of newsboys and residents alike. In 1921, Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick testified that twenty-seven newsboys had been killed in the violence between 1910 and 1913. More than a dozen of the young thugs hired by the Circulation Department would later graduate to become the gunmen of the Al Capone era, after the passage of Prohibition.
Another casualty of the newspaper wars was real news. During the same period when Max Annenberg and his brother Moe first signed on with the American‘s circulation department, the city’s ten dailies ignored fire code violations in the graft-ridden First Ward that routinely had lethal consequences. Finally, on December 30, 1903, a blaze at the Iroquois Theatre claimed some six hundred lives, mostly children. Over the next three years, it would take a series of exposés in The Lancet, a British journal, to break arguably the biggest story in the city’s history: the disgusting and dangerous conditions of the stockyards, which became the focus of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle.
The city was so corrupt that each year, the alderman of downtown’s First Ward would parade with underworld bosses, common criminals, pimps, and prostitutes at a Gangster’s Ball. With the ascendance of Al Capone in the 1920s, “the parasite that had once been the Levee had begun to consume the city that had once been its host,” noted historian Michael Lesy. In the face of all this, the cynicism of the press was summed up neatly by Walter Howey, the reigning Hearst editor whom Hecht and Charles MacArthur immortalized as the Machiavellian genius Walter Burns in The Front Page. Howey collected dirt on all the officials in the city, but he used the material as leverage for access rather than for crusading news stories. As Herald-Examiner veteran Charles Murray explained of his boss: “Howey knew that such exposés would do no good, as far as reform is concerned. He was under no illusions about the intelligence of the ordinary citizen, or his capacity to remember from one day to the next which politicians are gypping him and how they are going about it. … Howey did not operate his paper by any code of ethics dreamed up at journalism school in an ivory tower full of idealistic professors. He ran it on the same basis as other businesses in the community operated.”
Hecht thought that the best example of public obliviousness was the support for Capone’s toady, Mayor William Hale Thompson:
Every paper was a bloodhound baying after Thompson. The headlines never let up during Big Bill’s long roost in the city hall. Scandal on scandal was ‘bared.’ The looting of the city’s treasury was constantly exposed and documented. Tales of thievery by Thompson and his henchmen, of collusion between the city hall and the town’s ‘inferno of vice and crime’ were offered daily to the citizenry. In the teeth of this constant exposure as a political ogre, Thompson offered himself biannually as a candidate for mayor—and was elected five times.
Chicago’s Front Page Era is instructive not just because of its pivot toward devious hoaxing, but also because of its Hieronymus Bosch panorama of shenanigans and mayhem. Similarly, fake news was not the only disturbing feature of the recent presidential contest, and context is crucial. Observers have since offered at least two other historical comparisons to 2016, and what is most striking and disturbing is how well all of these combine and apply. Eleven months after the election, David Uberti no longer scoffed at “the recent hyperventilating.” Adopting a dourer view, he likened today’s media to the Partisan Press, that era of vicious mud-slinging and tribal truth-twisting so distasteful that it drove President John Adams to sign the Alien and Sedition Acts, rolling back the First Amendment only a decade after the Constitution had been ratified. Uberti no longer shrugged off “a shift back to historical norms” but instead now wrote that the disintegration of a dominant twentieth-century news media establishment had sucked us down a wormhole, into a fragmentary, illusory realm with few agreed-upon standards, shadowy actors, and evaporating trust. “No one really knows what’s out there or where it comes from,” he concluded. “Professional journalists, bullshit artists, advertisers, and foreign propagandists all exist on the same plane. … It’s chaos, in other words, and some dynamics mirror those of the nineteenth century.”
The fragmentation also most benefits those from Macedonia to California ready to cash in on the targeting and tribalism. Back in 2011, Tom Rosenstiel had observed the emergence of a “neo-partisan press.” He called some of the cable news and radio talk shows the “journalism of affirmation” because they profit by reinforcing their audience’s preconceptions, though he noted that this was actually a marked change from the original Partisan Press, which did not exist to make money.
In other words, today’s media is even more toxic, because divisions and subterfuge are further distorted by greed. It is also worse than that of the Front Page Era, because Chicago’s madness had not been ideological. And it is more corrupt than even the partisan and Chicago eras added together, because neither was also warped by the cunning manipulations of authoritarian apparatchiks. The goal of Russian propaganda, according to those who have studied it, is not so much to convince anyone of their side of a story, but rather to create an environment where, to return to Obama’s phrase, “everything is true and nothing is true.” Putin’s trolls kick up enough dust that the truth feels unknowable. One telling example of the topsy-turvy, disorienting reality we inhabit today is President Trump’s denunciations of fake news. So routine that we hardly even register the outbursts anymore, he pollutes our atmosphere with fake news that mislabels real news as fake.
The specter of totalitarian propaganda inspired Adrian Chen’s comparison in the New Yorker to the radio days of the 1930s. “The Fake-news Fallacy” begins with a montage of images—recently the object of scrutiny—of panicked listeners to the Orson Welles broadcast: a seventy-six-year-old millworker grabbing for his shotgun; thirty men and women rushing for cover at the West 132rd Street police station; two people who reportedly suffered heart attacks; a man in Pittsburgh who claimed he just barely stopped his wife from gulping poison. Dorothy Thompson was among those who had immediately drawn the unnerving connection to the demagogues then so effectively tapping into the new technological power of radio: Hitler, Father Charles Coughlin, Huey Long. Similarly, Chen argues:
Trump used Twitter less as a communication device than as a weapon of information warfare. … Yet the Internet didn’t just give him a megaphone. It also helped him peddle his lies through a profusion of unreliable media sources that undermined the old providers of established fact. Throughout the campaign, fake-news stories, conspiracy theories, and other forms of propaganda were reported to be flooding social networks.
Chen adds that, as with debates about radio, we are experiencing a similar freefall from our original utopian hopes for the Internet to dystopian fears. Struck by the new mass medium’s reach from the inner-city slums to remote ranchlands, John Dewey had proclaimed radio “the most powerful instrument of social education the world has ever seen.” But intellectuals soon grew alarmed by the skill with which dictators bent America’s pioneering advertising techniques to their ends. In recent years, observers of the Arab Spring hailed Twitter and Facebook as great gifts to democracy, until ISIS YouTube videos and online chats began luring Western teenagers to Syria. Google was supposed to unlock the vast stores of knowledge in the world’s libraries; now the tech companies have been shutting down neo-Nazi websites, while they struggle to dam up the electronic torrents of deception.
So which of the historical comparisons—the Partisan Press, Chicago, 1930s radio—is the most apt? None of them, and all of them. American media historians should recognize the fake news of 2016 as a witches’ brew of the worst elements from the very blackest episodes of our past. Between the multi-pronged meddling of Russian intelligence, the armies of trolls and bots, the Wikileaks hack and strategic dumps, the hyperpartisanship, memes, filter bubbles, flame wars, Pizzagate, and other conspiracy theories spun by professional cranks like Alex Jones, the bullying tweets and neo-Nazi retweets, the false narratives and pathological lying of a reality television demagogue, and the unregulated flood of advertising money in the new, post–Citizens United era, in addition to the customary corporate cynicism, superficiality, short-sightedness, blind spots, distortions, and sundry other failures that we have come to expect from American election coverage, the media of the presidential race served up a smorgasbord of demonic delights, as if Lucifer had invited Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini over for potluck. It succeeded in nothing so well as to completely unmoor the American public sphere from rational argument, reality, and truth.
All this has happened at a time when clear thinking and smart stewardship are needed more than ever to solve the world’s increasingly complex and intractable problems, as the stakes could not get higher and the margin for error gets narrower. I write this from Hawaii, “the endangered species capital of the world,” which like every mile of United States coastline faces an uncertain future of hurricanes, floods, and rising sea levels. Early on a sunny day in January here, our phones lit up with the warning of an incoming North Korean missile attack. One scene in an apartment that morning suggests the range of panic detonated by this recent fake news broadcast, from the comic—a student told me he desperately tried to tape his windows shut, as if duct tape could shield against a thermonuclear attack—to the tragic: his roommate meanwhile sat weeping in the other room, saying her goodbyes to her mother over the phone. Finally, a bit of fact-checking broke this spell of mass delusion.