The Star Malaysia

Before Trump, the long history of fake news

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IN capital letters and with an exclamatio­n mark, “FAKE NEWS!” may have been popularise­d by Donald Trump in hundreds of his tweets but the concept has existed for centuries.

For the US president the term refers to what he claims are lies masqueradi­ng as news in the mainstream “Fake News Media”.

Generally, it means “false news released in the media with full knowledge of the facts”, says French communicat­ions expert Pascal Froissart, from University of Paris 8.

This existed long before Trump became the 45th president of the United States in 2017 and way ahead of the emergence of social media.

Here are some examples through history.

Dubious Byzantine ‘Anecdota’

Early versions of fake news are found in the sixth-century Anecdota of prominent Byzantine scholar and writer Procopius, says Harvard University historian Robert Darnton. Known as Secret History in English, these texts contain “dubious informatio­n” on the purported behind-the-scenes scandals of the reign of Emperor Justinian, Darnton says. They were kept secret until Procopius’ death and contrasted with his official writings about the ruler.

Pharaonic fibs

French researcher Francois-Bernard Huyghe finds traces of fake news even further back in time, during the period of the Egyptian pharaohs before the birth of Christ. For example, Ramses II’s claimed victory over the Hittite people at the battle of Kadesh towards

1274 BC, which is celebrated in bas-relie efs and Egyptian texts, was ini reality a “semi-defe at”, he says. The real succes ss was “that of propaganda, of the sculptors and scribes”, Huyghe says.

Half-true ‘libelles’

In 18th c century France libe elles were short satirical or controvers­ial texts that mixed truth and fiction in an “early form of fake news”, historian Robert Zar retsky, from the University of Houston, says. One item published in London in 1771, concerning scandals in the French court, even warned readers that some of the content is “at the very most plausible” and some an “obvious falsity”.

Rags, fabricatio­ns

Sold in the streets of France during the same period, “canards” were popular newssheets that often carried made-up news, for example, reporting around 1780 the capture of an imaginary monster in Chile Chile. The word has moved into the English language to mean an unfounded rumour or story.

Elaborate hoaxes designed to sell newspapers emerged in the US press in the 19th century.

The New York Herald, for example, gave in 1874 an account of a bloody escape of wild animals from the Central Park Zoo but wrapped up with: “Of course the entire story given above is a pure fabricatio­n.”

It is around this time the term “fake news” seems to have appeared, says US journalist Robert Love in the Columbia Journalism Review.

It was a period “when a rush of emerging technologi­es intersecte­d withh newsgather­ing practices during a boom time for newspapers,” he says.

Operat tion INFEKTION

During g the Cold War, a calculated Sovie et tactic was the “deliber rate spreading of false informa ation to influence opinion and weaken an enemy”, in this case the West, according to Huyghe. An emblematic case was the KGB’s Operation INFEKTION, aimed at making people believe that HIV/AIDS was a biological weapon created in US army laboratori­es. It started with the publicatio­n in an obscure Indian newspaper in 1983 of an anonymous letter making such claims, which were eventually spread more widely.

Media hoaxed

In late 1989, as the communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu tottered in Romania, images were published of mutilated bodies dug from mass graves near the town of Timisoara. They were said to be victims of the regime’s security forces. The pictures went around the world, galvanisin­g public opinion against Ceausescu who was executed by the end of the year. But the corpses turned out to be of people who had died from illness or accidents before the unfolding revolution.

The repetition of false reports by other media was what Huyghe called an “autointoxi­cation” in his 2016 book on disinforma­tion, La Desinforma­tion: Les Armes du Faux. — AFP

 ?? — Reuters ?? Nothing new: The concept of the ‘Fake News Media’ has existed for centuries, say scholars.
— Reuters Nothing new: The concept of the ‘Fake News Media’ has existed for centuries, say scholars.

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