An ascendant cultural phenomenon of recent times is fake news—parodies of real news or factual information based on fictionalized or offbeat sources, courtesy of sources like Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, or the newspaper The Onion. However, the concept of fake news is itself rather old news.

In this country, an early and renowned example of fake news was a story in 1835 that ran in several installments in The New York Sun newspaper (not connected to the current New York Sun) claiming to be an account of life on the moon as observed by the astronomer John Herschel using a powerful telescope in South Africa. As the installments progressed, the discoveries grew more and more striking. Initial reports of the geology of the scenery were later followed by descriptions of the vegetation, until finally the series revealed the existence of moon men, who looked like humans but had bat-like wings and the capacity for flight. John Herschel was indeed an eminent astronomer who was working in South Africa at the time (Charles Darwin visited him during the voyage of the Beagle in 1836). He was not informed about the articles prior to their publication, although he was reportedly amused when he found out about them later on. When the story ran, The New York Sun had a circulation of 19,000 copies a day—the daily paper with the highest circulation in the world at the time.

Another legendary American newspaper hoax was by H.L. Mencken, the famous and influential Baltimore journalist. In 1917 he wrote a column about the history of the bathtub, describing its invention, the early medical controversies on the risks of bathing, the bathtub tax, and attempts at anti-bathing legislation. The article was entirely made-up. Nobody noticed, and although Mencken subsequently wrote a column several years later revealing that it was a hoax, the damage had been done and the fictitious facts refused to die. In particular, his assertion that President Fillmore had introduced the first bathtub into the White House and gave the bathtub “recognition and respectability” is an assertion that can be still found cited to this day (a sad indictment of the lack of alternative notable achievements of Fillmore’s presidency).

An early precursor of the fake news TV program happened in 1957 when Panorama, the high-minded and serious investigative reporting TV program on the BBC, ran a short segment on the bountiful European spaghetti harvest, which showed artisanal workers busily harvesting spaghetti from bushes. The date of the broadcast was, not coincidentally, April 1. In the postwar era when spaghetti was an exotic food for the typical British household, the BBC was flooded with calls from viewers who wanted more information on how to grow a spaghetti tree.

Of course things can also enter a surreal realm unintentionally. In an article published in The New York Times on April 22, 1981, entitled “Exhibitions of Food: Feasts for the Eyes,” Betty Fussell explored the concept of the chef as an artist creating a visual spectacle. Part of the article concerned the chef Michel Fitoussi who held court at The Palace restaurant on 59th Street in Sutton Place—just beside the Queensborough Bridge near The Rockefeller University. The Palace, which has now closed, was at the time one of the most expensive restaurants in the city. In the article, in the midst of descriptions of the chef’s culinary and artistic prowess in making creations including “galleons in full sail from sandwich loaves” and “pizza dough roses,” there was this statement: “Mrs. Lasch and Mr. Fitoussi agree that what the food voyeur is looking for is the unexpected. Mr. Fitoussi astonishes by presenting a live Muscovy duck, its wings wired for flight and its legs wired to stay put, with ducks dead and roasted.” Three days later The New York Times published the most notorious entry ever made in its correction column, which read: “An article about decorative cooking incorrectly described a presentation of Muscovy duck by Michel Fitoussi, a New York chef. In preparing it, Mr. Fitoussi uses a duck that has been killed.”

There have been many other entertaining errors from The New York Times. A 1997 article about shiva, the week of Jewish mourning had several mistakes, and the subsequent correction note concluded, “the article also misstated another funeral custom: mourners’ clothing was rent—that is, torn—not rented.” Not even science is safe. A March 13, 2000, correction noted, “A review about the documentary ‘Homo Sapiens 1900’ misidentified the field pioneered by Gregor Mendel. It was genetics, not eugenics.” In November 1999, a correction for a piece about the scientist who pioneered the use of restriction enzymes apologized that “An obituary about Dr. Daniel Nathans, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, referred imprecisely to the technique he used to analyze DNA. He used chemical scalpels, not actual blades.”

Long before Jon Stewart and colleagues published America (The Book), perhaps their earliest literary predecessor was a twenty-six-year-old New Yorker called Washington Irving, who in 1809 published his first book A History of New York under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker. A History of New York was a satirical mixture of occasional fact and exaggerated fiction that mainly featured the early Dutch settlers. It illuminated forgotten historical facts about the wooden-legged Peter Stuyvesant, and revealed what Master Hendrick Hudson first said when he first glimpsed this island: “See! There!” (Sadly less poetic than Scott Fitzgerald’s view of the old Dutch sailors when, “for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”) The book provided two compelling origins of the name Manhattan. One school of thought was that the name arose because of the Native Americans—on the island the female squaws had a habit of wearing the men’s hats, hence the nickname Man-Hat-On. The other possibility was of scriptural origin and that the island was originally called Manna-Hata, from manna, the heavenly food in the land of milk and honey. A History of New York became one of the most celebrated books of the new American republic. Charles Dickens was reportedly a great admirer of the work.

The idea that facts should never stand in the way of a story is best described in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, a satire about the press written in 1937. A character in the novel describes Wenlock Jakes, the American journalist who wherever he goes becomes the “news capital of the world.” Jakes was best known for having been sent to cover a revolution in the Balkans. However, on the train, “He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window…they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers.” The European newspapers scrambled to send reporters there. “They arrived in shoals. Everything seemed quiet enough, but it was as much as their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in, too. Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny—and in less than a week there was an honest to God revolution under way, just as Jakes had said. There’s the power of the press for you.”

[Editor’s note: Lest the reader should grow too alarmed about the truth of what they read in print, we wish to reassure all our readers that Natural Selections exemplifies the highest possible moral, ethical, and grammatical standards.]

Reference:

Kill Duck Before Serving: Red Faces at The New York Times by Linda Amster and Dylan Loeb McClain