Faking it
NEVER LET FACTS GET IN THE WAY... Fake news continues to crop up in the headlines, even if what exactly is meant by this term remains somewhat nebulous: does it refer to outright untruths presented as news items or to coverage of objectively ‘real’ events in which the presentation of the ‘facts’ doesn’t fit the confirmation bias of the reader? Examples of both are plentiful, but the waters have become muddied to the point where the cry of ‘fake news’ now rings out whenever a newspaper publishes a story someone else – whether politicians or particular interest groups – objects to.
Covering the wilder shores of news reporting, Fortean Times has long been aware of manufactured news items. The material to be found in American newspapers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, runs the gamut from what appear to be obvious hoaxes dreamt up on slow news days or the descendants of the ‘tall tales’ of frontier life to seemingly credible bits of forteana giving names, dates and places. Some of these appear to offer tantalising hints of genuine mysteries; often enough, they turn out to be either unverifiable or simply fabricated. It’s the kind of material that our own Theo Paijmans, in his regular ‘Blasts from the Past’ feature (taking a breather in this crowded issue), does a fine job of unearthing and investigating.
Then there are the knowingly absurdist stories concocted by tabloid ‘newspapers’ such as the Weekly World News in the US or the Sunday Sport in the UK, featuring a World War II bomber on the Moon, a bat child found in a cave and headlines like “Jeremy Corbyn Sex Dwarf Eaten by Otters”. Is fake news necessarily reprehensible or dangerous when both its producers and consumers know it to be a kind of simulacrum produced solely for the purposes of material profit and idle amusement? Or, in the Ballardian and Baudrillardian world in which we now appear to live, does this growing elision of entertainment and information compromise public discourse to the point that the entire notion of truth simply breaks down and life becomes a kind of infinite, uncheckable news feed full of fake stories, dodgy infomercials and propaganda?
The website Snopes.com has always been a useful tool for checking up on stories that appear to be (and usually are) nothing more than urban legends, but over the course of the recent US presidential campaign it also started debunking what purported to be news items, such as those suggesting that Pope Francis supported Donald Trump. Snopes was cited as a possible third- party source of expertise to help Facebook factcheck some of the dubious material appearing on its news feeds, but itself came under a form of attack from the Daily Mail, who while reporting on alleged sexual and financial improprieties at the website seemed to be subtly undermining the notion of ‘fact checking’ itself; or so the Guardian suggested last year (16 Dec). A couple of months later (15 Feb), the same paper reported that the UK government had apparently hired advertising agency M&C Saatchi to combat “the increasingly widespread influence and propaganda of the so-called ‘alt right’”. It seems darkly ironic that the powers that be wish to save the world from the rising tide of post-truth by employing the dark arts of the hidden persuaders; we really must be in trouble.
This month, we grapple with this slippery contemporary issue by showing that, despite the contemporary obsession with fake news, we have most certainly been here before. David Clarke examines the way the British government, intelligence services and media spread false stories about the existence of German ‘corpse factories’ during World War I (p34), while Mike Dash looks at how the growth of true-life ‘confessional’ magazines in the 1920s led to a number of classic fortean cases being elaborated, exaggerated or even invented and the ways in which this has continued to bedevil fortean research ever since (p40). On a lighter note, as this is our April issue, Rob Gandy celebrates the fun side of fakery in a round-up of the best fortean April Fool hoaxes perpetrated by our truth-loving media over the years, from the Wiesbaden Martian to the Tasmanian Mock Walrus (p28). And if you believe that the Red Baron shot down a flying saucer 100 years ago this April, perhaps you should turn to Nigel Watson’s Forum piece on p55. Meanwhile, not forgetting that this is also our Easter issue, Ted Harrison sets out for Jerusalem to find the site of Golgotha (p46); or at least he tries to. It seems no one can agree on where it really is...