And now the fake news they trumped up earlier
Exhibition reveals how despite president’s claims, untruths have been spread for many decades
DONALD TRUMP famously claimed that he had “invented” the phrase Fake News, but he evidently had not been reading the old Daily Herald.
The president, whose frequent use of the term to describe any coverage he does not like has seen it named Word of the Year by the Collins Dictionary, was fond of overstating the numbers who watched his inauguration ceremony on Washington’s Capitol Mall, despite photographic evidence to the contrary.
But it has now emerged that someone with a paintbrush and a similarly exaggerated approach to storytelling used the same tactic 84 years earlier.
The original artwork has been plucked from the Daily
Herald archive for an exhibition in Bradford that tells the “real” story behind fake news.
It was in 1933 that bus drivers and conductors staged a walkout during a dispute with London Transport whose origins are lost in the mists of time.
The left-wing Herald, which ceased publication in 1964, sent a photographer to the depot and chose a shot showing about 11 uniformed workers manning the picket line. But a casual glance at the picture makes it look much busier – and only a sharp eye can spot that the serried ranks of peaked caps behind the front line have been drawn in.
Another Herald picture from the period shows a policeman watching over a shopkeeper posting a notice in his window advising that “German agents cannot be interviewed”. A closer inspection reveals that the PC has been cut out from elsewhere in the picture and glued in place.
The deceptions would have been invisible to readers, given the low printing resolution of the time. However, the facts may have been less black and white than the pictures, one of the curators at the National Science and Media Museum pointed out.
“We don’t know if there were only 11 bus conductors there – we just know that the picture editor deemed that the photograph didn’t tell the story they were trying to tell,” said John O’Shea, who has put together the exhibition in Bradford.
“It could well be that the angle of the photograph just didn’t show the crowd as it really was,”
He added: “The Daily Herald is by no means the only culprit, but what we’re showing is the slippery slope where you might crop an image because there’s something irrelevant in the frame, or change the background because it’s distracting.
“Every story is constructed and this demonstrates that you should never put all your stock in one source of information. If something is important it needs to be corroborated and seen in perspective.”
The Bradford museum holds about 3m images from the
Herald’s library, but its fake news exhibition traces the phenomenon back even further, to a celebrated photograph taken 100 years ago in Cottingley, near Bingley, which appears to show fairies playing in a garden.
It was intended as a practical joke, but the picture came eventually to the attention of the author and spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used it as evidence of the existence of the creatures in an article he wrote for The Strand magazine.
Mr O’Shea said: “He wanted to believe in the existence of the supernatural – and who doesn’t want to believe in fairies?
“In those days it took perhaps four or five years for the story to circulate to the national papers. Now, with social media, it happens in minutes.”
If something is important it needs to be corroborated. John O’Shea, who put together the exhibition in Bradford.