The Weak Leading the Crazy
6th September 2018
ZMan pulls back the curtain.
The fake news phenomenon is nothing new. It’s been a part of the business since William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer invented it in the United States. They are the two credited with inventing yellow journalism and using it to get the US to declare war on Spain at the end of the 19th century. It probably goes back further, but it was these two who figured out how to make it work in the age of mass media. It’s not an accident that the two men who created fake news have journalism awards named after them.
More recently, the gold standard of fake news is the fake human interest story. This is where the fake reporter would find some fake people to write about, placing them into a canned narrative. Sometimes the people would be real, but their story was fictionalized and their quotes created by the fake reporters. Mike Barnacle had a long career at the Boston Globe writing fake human interest stories. He was eventually found out and fired, but people always knew he was a faker. He’s now a regular on MSNBC as a fake guest.
People think that ‘fake news’ is some sort of aberration, some falling away from some sort of journalistic ideal. It’s not. It’s their business model.
This week we may be seeing fake news merge with mass hysteria to set off a panic among the Cloud People. First we have fiction writer Bob Woodward out with his latest collection of ghost stories. Woodward is the guy who used former CIA director Bill Casey as a source, while Casey was in a coma. That’s right, he claimed to have spoken to a man while he was in a coma. His Watergate writing was similarly full of fabrications. There is a great book on that topic and all else related to Watergate called Silent Coup.