There’s nothing new about “fake news” and it’s always circulated faster than the real thing.
Want proof? There’s recorded history of “dubious information” collected to smear the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century!
In 1835, the New York Sun newspaper published a six-part series chronicling the discoveries of an English astronomer studying life on the moon. Not only did he find woods and streams, he found creatures that looked human and that could fly. The writer, Richard Adams Locke, later said he wasn’t trying to fool anyone. He was just writing satire and ““underestimated the gullibility of the public,” Kirsten van der Veen told Smithsonian Magazine.
“A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on,” said the English preacher C. H. Spurgeon in the 1850s. The essayist Jonathan Swift had a similar take more than a century earlier, writing in The Examiner, “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late.”
In 1925, Harper’s Magazine published “Fake News and the Public,” calling its spread via new communication technologies like radio “a source of unprecedented danger.” And here we are, almost 100 years later, with social media and the web spreading falsehoods faster than ever.
If you want to figure out where you’re going, it helps to know where you’ve come from. If you’re teaching about “fake news,” check out this new resource from ICFJ. “A Short Guide to the History of “Fake News” and disinformation provides a timeline of hoaxes and fakes and includes readings and assignments. It’s free to download.
