The following part widens the scope of fake news to provide more historical context for many of the issues that have been discussed thus far. This group of chapters suggest that the sorts of partisan deceptions, conspiracy theories, and related contemporary phenomena are not all that new and have been deeply ingrained within Western societies. Taken together, the authors provide both cautionary tales and critical road maps that can help us navigate our tricky media landscape—so that we won’t get fooled again, and again, and again.
The first chapter in this part, “A Prehistory of Fake News in America,” is written by coeditor Kembrew McLeod, a media scholar and media practitioner who has produced documentaries and published pieces within popular press outlets, including the New York Times. Beginning with Benjamin Franklin and the early days of newspaper publishing in America, this chapter traces the evolution of journalism from the partisan press that flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and concludes in the early twentieth century with the emergence of new codes of journalistic professionalism and objectivity. During this later period, at a time when there was mounting faith in empirical facts and social scientific inquiry, newspapers were being reimagined as instruments that could foster a healthy democratic society. This understanding of mainstream news outlets held sway throughout the following century, but in retrospect this “objective” school of journalism may have been just an anomalous blip, one that was bookended by the fake news age of today and the sorts of deceptions that had previously proliferated for three centuries.
In the second chapter in this part, “Beware the Theory in Conspiracy Theories,” media historian Benjamin Peters unpacks the concept of conspiracy theories, with a focus on both conspiracy and theory. In many discussions of conspiracy theories, theory is often left uninterrogated, when, he argues, it is perhaps the most significant ingredient that helps them spread. The cognitive appeal of conspiracy theories is their sweeping explanatory powers that can account for a wide array of phenomena, which in turn highlights the weakness of theory in general, especially when theories are divorced from evidence. Using examples from the ancient past (Philolaus) and the present (#Pizzagate), Peters argues that theory allows us to see beyond what is directly in front of us, something that is “both a telltale weakness in modern inquiry and part of the tall tales informing conspiracy theories.”
In the third chapter in this part, “ ‘The Intel on This Wasn’t 100 Percent’: Fake News and Concerns over the Modern Democratic Project,” media scholar Mark Brewin uses one of the examples that Peters focuses on—#Pizzagate—as a jumping-off point to historicize many of the themes that run through present-day conspiracy theories. Contemporary confusion over how to determine what is real and what is not, Brewin observes, did not begin with the rise of social media memes such as #Pizzagate (which prompted a true believer to open fire inside the Washington, D.C., pizza hangout at the center of the conspiracy theory). Instead, Brewin turns our attention back to the seventeenth century, when an alleged Catholic plot to kill the English king Charles II was uncovered by two Protestant ministers. Belief in this “plot” relied on the use of the same cognitive tics that drove #Pizzagate, just as today’s fake news contains echoes of a different case study Brewin examines from the nineteenth century: the famous Great Moon Hoax, perpetrated by the New York Sun. This “penny press” newspaper often published sensationalistic news stories—if it bled, it led—that were designed more to sell copies than to uncover the truth. Well over a century later, as we currently swim in a sea of clickbait, it is clear that some things never change.
David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010).
James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1988).
James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 2008).
Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
Kembrew McLeod, Pranksters: Making Mischief in the Modern World (New York: New York University Press, 2014).