Why Fake News Flourishes: Emitting Mere Information Is Easy, But Creating Actual Knowledge Is Hard
In America’s founding era, journalism was notoriously partisan and unreliable. Almost anyone could open a newspaper, and almost anyone did. Standards were low to nonexistent. “Editors and promoters, however much they proclaimed their loyalty to truth, more often than not were motivated by partisan political goals and commercial interests in the sensational,” writes the historian Barbara J. Shapiro. Newspapers did not scruple to publish what today we call fake news. In 1835, the New York Sun published bogus reports of life on the Moon; in 1844, it published a fake story—by one Edgar Allan Poe—about a transatlantic hot-air-balloon journey. Fake news was not always harmless. Benjamin Franklin complained that “tearing your private character to flitters” could be done by anyone with a printing press. Press freedom, he groused, had come to mean “the liberty of affronting, calumniating, and defaming one another.” At the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry, a prominent politician, observed bitterly that the people “are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions, by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute.” Pamphleteers were even more scurrilous. “In the decades immediately before and after the American Revolution,” write Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall in their 2019 book, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, “partisans on all sides attacked their opponents through vicious pamphlets that were often filled with highly questionable accusations and downright lies.”
In the latter half of the 19th century, urbanization and breakthroughs in printing technology transformed small presses into mighty urban newspapers, capable of reaching millions every day at the crack of dawn and generating previously unimaginable advertising revenues. Still, newsrooms remained rowdy fraternities following ad hoc rules. Reporting was more a trade than a profession, and coverage was as likely to focus on gossip or sensation as on what today we think of as newsworthy public events. “Faking was a rampant journalistic practice during the final quarter of the nineteenth century,” writes Randall S. Sumpter in his 2018 history of journalism ethics. In his memoir of life as a young reporter at the turn of the 20th century, the American journalist H. L. Mencken nostalgically recounts how he and other reporters made up fake scoops to beat a competitor. They thought it was hilarious. Publishers would do anything to attract audiences, up to and including printing rumors, fake news, and wildly sensationalized articles that helped incite a war with Spain.
