Monsters and hatpins: There’s been fake news ever since there’s been news

It is the conceit of our times that we invented fake news, alternative facts, post-truths. There is a distinct note of humble brag when we talk of the fragmented realities of the internet age and information fatigue, as if these are post-modern sophistications available only to us. India’s information and broadcasting ministry seemed to be under that impression as it drafted rules to crack down on fake news earlier this week.

But ever since there has been news, there has been fake news. Indeed, today’s watery offerings cannot match up to the robust fare of the past. As Robert Darnton points out, broadsides known as “canards” and hawked on the streets of Paris in the 18th century convinced readers that a monster from Chile was being shipped to Spain. It had the face of a Fury, the tail of a dragon, the wings of a bat and scales in between. Beat that, Breitbart.

A few years before the French Revolution began, an English newspaper salaciously remarked that the French queen, Marie Antoinette, was “partial to the English”. It went on to note that a certain “Mr W’ who had left England in straitened circumstances was now fitted out in style at the French court. Journalists have always been a no-good, scurrilous lot.

Fact and fiction

Facts only turned sacred in the 20th century and even then not so much. The slippery relationship between fact and fiction became apparent when Orson Welles’s radio drama War of the Worlds reportedly set off mass panic among an audience convinced that Martians were about to attack. Reports about the panic spread so wide even Hitler warmed up to the theme, taking a pot shot at the “decadence...of democracy”.

It is now believed that the news about the fake news may have been fake news. Reports about the panic were overstated and not many people had tuned in to the radio show to begin with. But when did that get in the way of a good story? Fake news has always been the dark alter ego of journalism.

Perhaps because the roots of the profession lie in rumour, gossip and myth. Darnton mentions the “nouvellistes” of 18th century France, who picked up gossip on the aristocracy and wrote it down on pieces of paper exchanged in cafes or left suggestively on park benches. Nouvelliste, incidentally, also means “short story writer”, and the French word “nouvelle” or “new things” travelled through Italian into English to become “novel”.

The 18th century British press relied on “paragraph men” who sent in pithy pieces based on the word in the coffee houses. These were places where ardent spirits gathered to discuss the events of the day but also where newspapers and caricatures were circulated.

In the ecology of the early European press, pamphlets coexisted with newspapers, news articles slid into propaganda and jostled for space with satire, doggerel and caricature. Gossip seems to have been the primary source. Facts as we understand them today, verified, cross-checked and attributed to specific sources, would have been quite a novel idea to the 18th century press.

For King and country

The word on the street being transmitted into print unleashed radical energies in the public sphere but the press could be used by both sides. For centuries, the patriotic press has been deployed in the interests of king and country rather than to keep the public informed.

If Donald Trump cries “fake news” at articles that criticise him and tries to banish reporters who ask inconvenient questions, he is only following a tradition laid down by the diseased 17th century British monarchy. Tired of “scurrilous gossip” being passed off as news, the crown prohibited reports on all subjects except those it approved of: events abroad, natural disasters, official royal declarations and the “most sensationalist of crime reporting”. Trump would be interested to know that this policy might have backfired. In 1649, King Charles I was tried for high treason and beheaded.

What emerged from the turmoil of the interregnum, the restoration of the monarchy and the Great Plague of 1665 was the Oxford Gazette, eventually known as the London Gazette. By its own definition, the newspaper became an authoritative source of news, “which served the purposes of both the Crown and the executive well”. Less charitable articles have compared it to the Pravda, the great Soviet mouthpiece.

In the late 18th century, as revolution spread across France and England feared contagion, newspapers became the theatre of a propaganda war between two camps. While radical presses flourished, those criticising government were tried for sedition. Conservative, royalist publications carried harangues about “jacobins” and raised fears about a French invasion of England.

Furnishing a war

Speaking of propaganda wars, Arnab Goswami could take tips from his illustrious predecessors in the 19th century, who seemed to have provided enough verbal ballistics to start off an actual war.

In the better organised and funded media of the 19th century, misinformation became more deliberate. In America, it was often powered by rivalries between newspaper moguls. Most often, they traded in stories of lurid misfortune and dubious provenance. In 1874, The New York Herald published a story about animals that had escaped a city zoo and gone on a rampage, devouring 49 people.

But then the newspapers found the most lurid misfortune of all: war. In 1861, soon after the American Civil War broke out, the Herald published a story saying George Washington’s body had been removed from his tomb. Patently untrue, it was calculated to heighten tensions between the North and the South and increase the newspaper’s circulation.

The competition between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal made the term “yellow journalism” popular, possibly because colour from the newly introduced comics section bled into the rest of the paper in a yellow wash. At first, Hearst printed the regular fare: the boy who bit into a stick of dynamite, the girl whose hair was set ablaze.

Then he scented blood in the nascent revolution in Cuba, still under Spanish rule. Hoping to engineer American intervention in Cuba, he played up stories of Spanish cruelty and those supporting the revolutionary cause. When a bored illustrator in Cuba cabled to say all was quiet and there would be no war, Hearst is believed to have told him “you furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war”. Weeks later, when the American ship USS Maine exploded in Havana harbour, the Journal blamed Spain, based on scant evidence. It then coined the slogan that would cheer the country on towards war: “Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain”.

Hatpins and washing machines

Apart from cooking up wars, newspapers at the turn of the century would come in handy discrediting those who disturbed the status quo. Suffragettes, for instance, or just women who dared defend themselves against the advances of predatory men, or “mashers”.

It started in 1903, with the story of a woman who jabbed a foot-long hatpin into the arm of a masher. As similar stories gained ground, and were taken up by working women’s groups and suffragettes, another kind of report started to do the rounds. These generally featured sudden deaths involving hatpin-wielding females. They led to a proposal to ban hatpins over nine inches long.

If the Indian government or the “patriotic media” was trying to get rid of those pesky JNU students, it could do better than a few doctored videos showing “azadi” slogans. But the fake news industry in India is still in its infancy. For years, it has largely stuck to reports of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose sightings.

More recently, there has been fake praise for the government from Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the standard issue video of violence by Muslims, claims that Sangh Parivar workers are being systematically eliminated, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi peering out of a helicopter into flood ravaged plains although he may well have been peering into a washing machine.

This is tame stuff, given the resources and technology now available to governments and media moguls. Let there be monsters, let there be solid diamond commodes, let there be a feminist plot to bring down government, let there be radioactive cornflakes used as ammunition, let there be governments sucking out 86% of a country’s currency at five minutes’ notice.