Detail from 'The fin de siècle newspaper proprietor' by Frederick Burr Opper 1894. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. Some rights reserved.Of course, fake news, disinformation and dissembling is nothing new. It was the stock-in-trade of the Yellow Journalism in nineteenth century America, or the New Journalism pioneered by W.T. Stead in Britain at the same time. William Randolph Hearst used his New York Journal to pump up support with fake news for a war with Spain, prompting Charles Foster Kane (as played by Orson Welles) to state on celluloid forty years later, ‘Dear Wheeler: you provide the prose poems. I'll provide the war.’ And, as Robert Darnton shows in a recent article titled ‘The True History of Fake News’ in the New York Review of Books (13/2/17), fake news reached a peak somewhat earlier in mid- to late-eighteenth century London.
In 1788, London was awash with ephemeral publications – ten daily newspapers, eight tri-weeklies, nine weeklies, and sundry broadsheets and cartoons. Many stories in these publications consisted of only one paragraph, and ‘paragraph men’ would frequent coffee houses to pick up whatever gossip they could before writing a few lines which would then be hastily taken to a printer-publisher. A few of these paragraph men received payment, but many were apparently quite happy to manipulate public opinion for or against a public figure or a recently published book or play. This was a pre-echo of our own twitter sphere, and quite different from the politically charged counter public sphere that emerged during the turmoil of the English Civil War, when the world was genuinely in danger of being turned upside down.
However, the current problem is that the ‘intelligent’ news media is ill equipped to comprehend or interpret the groups attacking the liberal consensus and by extension liberal democracy itself. The self-serving nature of this consensus and the liberal elite which has benefited from it in many ways have been architects of their own failure. What some on the Left, and the Right, seem to have in common is a hatred of democracy and its ‘free press’. Their weapons of choice are varied but importantly focus on some algorithms few people understand or are even aware of. A recent piece of excellent investigative journalism by Carole Cadwalladr for The Observer (26/2/17), ‘Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media’, shows how big money is combining with state of the art software applications or ‘bots’ to dowse the media sphere with rightwing propaganda, which may take the form initially of long-form investigative journalism (Breitbart), PR cum Psyops operations like Cambridge Analytica, and machine-generated twitter and other social media feeds that demand, demand, demand to give the little guy a fair deal. And it’s working. Public sentiment has changed. When White House aid Kellyanne Conway replied to reports in America’s media that the crowd at President’s Trump’s Inauguration was not as big as the administration claimed, she offered the US media, and by extension the world, some ‘alternative facts’. And why not? Who can people believe when politicians can’t be trusted and journalists are held in such low esteem that even second-hand car salesmen are having a bonanza ... which they are apparently. In January 2017, the UK Parliament launched an inquiry into ‘fake news’.
