In age of fake news, would Declaration of Independence still pass muster?

Would writing and signing America’s Declaration of Independence have survived the today’s siege of “fake news?”

Would all 56 signers have been subject to DNA testing to verify their true identification as John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson,or John Adams before signing our vaulted national document?

Would the Transportation Security Administration send over its nanotechnology scanners to attest to the validity of the signers’ signatures?

In 1776, the signing of the Declaration did not take place in one day, at one meeting, and not even at the same location. The document was transported for the signatures from July 2, 1776, to the first week of August. That is a solid five weeks.

Accounting for today’s eworld, there could have been daily “Declaration of Independence-gates.”

Bald eagles would be twitting and tweeting about every signer’s lineage as pilgrims on the Mayflower or the signers’ feather pen preference.

Thoughts of tyranny may drift in with any effort to sully America’s Declaration of Independence, the bulwark of our democracy for almost 250 years.

This ethos of this document has survived a civil war, world wars, presidential assassinations, hundreds of social and political uprisings, women’s suffrage, prohibition, civil rights, Watergate, hanging chads and spam mail.

Fake news — defined in Wikipedia — (of all places) is a type of yellow journalism, deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print, broadcast news media or online social media to mislead in order to gain financially or politically. Wikipedia’s definition clarifies that fake news is not satire or parody, which begs the ageold question, what is real and what is true? Or what is the real news story and who do you believe when catching up on the news?

Such pressing inquiries deserve a bit of research.

Not as a way of consoling, but history can be a comfort to the outrage that fake news has a life of its own in the 21st century. Fake news actually has a long ugly history. For a example of the danger of fake news, in the first century, Roman Gen. Marc Antony committed suicide upon hearing that Cleopatra had killed herself. Turned out, Cleopatra may have had a bad hair day, but it was not worth killing herself over.

It was quite unnerving to discover one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and a Founding Father, has a cloud of fake news over his otherwise valedictory historical setting. Yes, Benjamin Franklin is guilty of fake “newsing” it. Mr. Franklin took the liberty to write and published sensationalized stories that Indians were cohorts with England’s King George III and the Indians were scalping American patriots during our War of Independence from British authority.

Founding Father Franklin, also one of five on the Declaration of Independence committee, did have an alibi. He was just trying to build public support for the 13 original colonies’ revolutionary efforts. It could be argued that Franklin’s fake news eventually went electric with bloody-head images trumping the real Revolutionary protests involving dumped tea bags and empty whiskey bottles.

Will we ever really know if George Washington could not lie, and cut down the cherry tree? Let the blogging begin.

A couple of centuries later, Orson Welles’ whale of a tale of the War of the Worlds in 1938 literally terrified Americans as the country weighed on the heavy decision as whether to join Ally forces in World War II.

This past Fourth of July, NPR broadcasted a reading of the Declaration of Independence. For the past 29 years, listeners of that radio station have heard the declaration’s words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Guess what, NPR received many responses that the station was airing propaganda/fake news, not America’s Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July.

Later, it was reported that Benjamin Franklin was leaving the building with Elvis.