The history of the hoax

How Hollywood tackled ‘ fake news’ nearly a century before Trump Calum Marsh

Here’s a crisis you hear a lot about lately: an insatiable appetite for web traffic has come to govern the news. The problem, it seems, is basically two- fold: publications, particularly on the web, feel compelled to make content available as quickly as possible in order to maximize its visibility, often at the expense of time-consuming old media niceties like fact- checking or original research. More insidiously, publications on the web have no incentive to prevent misreported stories from being published.

It has every characteristic of a modern predicament. However, this trendy surge of alarmism isn’t really so new. Indeed, the movies have covered this ground for 90 years. Diminished standards, ethical bankruptcy, the easy propagation of mistruths and fake news – we like to imagine these are ills unique to newfangled modern journalism, but in truth this concept is as old as scoops and headlines.

In 1928, former reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote The Front Page, a hugely popular Broadway comedy that satirized the unscrupulousness of the newspaper business. The play concerned the efforts of Walter Burns, the ruthless editor of a big-city daily, to orchestrate the last- minute exoneration of a criminal sentenced to be hanged, which he hopes will both secure his paper a landmark exclusive and convince his former star reporter to return to the masthead once more. Its best- known adaptation, His Girl Friday, would arrive at cinemas in 1940 courtesy of Howard Hawks. But Lewis Milestone’s 1931 film version remains perhaps the more influential: its success ushered in an era of like-minded newspaper comedies, setting a precedent of satirical vigour which would prove inexhaustible.

To be a reporter, or “newspaperman,” on screen in the early 1930s was to be calculating, underhanded and altogether amoral – the title soon became shorthand for the corruption of its bearer. A reporter could be charming, but only as a function of his duplicity; he could aspire toward romance, but always in conflict with his natural careerism.

This proved true even in films not expressly about the newspaper industry. Clark Gable twice played a newspaperman assigned to chroni cle his own blossoming affair: first in It Happened One Night, in 1934, in which he becomes enamored of the wealthy heiress he’s agreed to escort and interview, and again two years later in Love on the Run, in which he surreptitiously reports on his affair with a well-known millionairess who remains none the wiser.

Joan Crawford, the lead in the latter, has been contending with the news world’s “buzzards” her entire life, and to her the vocation is beneath contempt. “I feel sorry for anyone who has to make his living that way,” she reflects. “No self- respecting man could accept money for prying into people’s lives.” Gable agrees: “No, no, and they don’t earn very much at that.”

One of the finest newspaper comedies of the era was Jack Conway’s Libeled Lady, from 1936, a breezy screwball romance that reunited William Powell and Myrna Loy after their success together in The Thin Man two years before. Here the inciting incident is the sort of misreported story you could imagine making headlines today: a young high-society girl, played by Loy, is reported in the New York Evening Star as having been seen cavorting with a married man at a party which, it turns out, she never even attended. When she sues the paper for millions in libel, the editor reasons that her case won’t stand if he can catch Loy cavorting with a married man for real – and he thus conspires to send his most irresistibly attractive reporter on a mission to seduce and destroy. It’s a frothy comedy, but Libeled Lady is not without bite: it proposes that journalism lacks even a pretense of integrity. The only thing preventing newspapers from printing outright fabrications is the threat of legal action – and occasionally even that isn’t enough to deter them.

This suggestion is echoed in two other films from the same period, and, taken together, the pair provide a useful illustration of how journalism was perceived in the popular imagination at the time. The first is Nothing Sacred, William Wellman’s pitch- black comedy from 1937. Written, once again, by Ben Hecht. The film deals with an overzealous reporter whose desire to break a sensational true story leads to the accidental publication of a fake one. What distinguishes Nothing Sacred from the bulk of its contemporaries is its reconfiguration of the central lie: here it belongs not to the unscrupulous reporter, but to the subject he vaults to celebrity, a healthy woman who claims to be suffering from a terminal illness. Hecht and Wellman regard everyone as complicit – not only the reporters and editors all too eager to seize an opportunity for a hot lead, but the people so desperate for the spectacle of news that they’re willing to accept whatever they read on the front page.

In the film the hoax is soon found out – the publishers catch on to their mistake. But the fervour the story has provoked proves too appealing for the paper, and they find they can’t abandon it just because it isn’t true. Wellman knows that, given the proper incentive, everybody is willing to participate in a scam, and he therefore spares no one from the film’s satirical sweep.

An interesting counterpoint to this sensibility presents itself in Meet John Doe, Frank Capra’s comic drama from 1941. Another newspaper story centered around a runaway hoax, Capra’s film proceeds from a familiar premise: a big- city reporter, played by Barbara Stanwyck, publishes an incendiary letter by a fictitious American everyman, whose instant popularity requires that she find someone to play the part of her made-up John Doe. The difference is that Meet John Doe isn’t really interested in satire. Stanwyck’s reporter, for one thing, isn’t unscrupulous – she’s an otherwise moral person who invents her everyman on her last day of work as payback to the boss who fired her, and, when she’s rehired, she resolves to use John Doe’s platform for good.

John Doe himself, played by real- life everyman Gary Cooper, seems the very embodiment of goodness, and the drama of the film emerges when his goodness (and Stanwyck’s) is threatened by the corporate interests who run the paper. Capra finds in the hoax itself the capacity to effect positive change: the influence of John Doe over the lives of the American people comes to be a force of good even when it’s revealed that it isn’t true, which suggests that perhaps even the sins of journalism can be redeemed.

Where Meet John Doe and Nothing Sacred converge is in their conception of the good a lie can sometimes do. They both suggest that an inspiring, moving, or uplifting hoax is one that may prove positive despite its mistruth; the moral centre of a story can resonate with people even if it isn’t entirely accurate.