3
The Misinformation Age
In New York City, in early August of 1835, fans of the news would have found plenty to talk about.
There was the weather, naturally—a sweltering heat that barely let up all month. There was a serious fire in Lower Manhattan. There was an increasingly tense political climate, dominated by the topic of slavery and the often violent clashes between Whigs and Democrats, in a year that had already seen the nation’s first failed presidential assassination attempt. Among the more scientifically minded, there was giddy anticipation around the predicted imminent return to the skies of Halley’s Comet. And there was a curious exhibit at the popular entertainment venue Niblo’s Garden, put on by an ambitious young chap looking to launch a career as a showman—one Phineas Taylor Barnum—which had caused a sensation since it opened on August 10.
Not only was there a lot of news, but the sheer availability of news was itself a major new development. The city had seen an explosion of penny newspapers being founded in the previous two years: a new class of affordable, mass-market publications, all aggressively competing for stories and for readers.
So, yes, there’d have been plenty to talk about in early August.
By the end of August, the only thing anybody was talking about was the race of bat people who lived on the moon.
It’s important to point out (because I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong end of the stick, here) that the red-haired bat people of the moon were not alone in the lunar landscape. Don’t be silly. As everybody knows, they were part of a vibrant and complex space ecosystem that included—among other things—giant bipedal beavers tenderly carrying their children in their arms, high-speed spherical amphibians that rolled along the beaches of the moon’s vast and bountiful rivers and lakes, and herds of small blue goat-faced unicorns that frolicked playfully among bucolic rolling meadows of scarlet flowers.
These celestial wonders were first revealed, gradually, over the course of a week at the end of that August to the readers of the New York Sun, which reprinted the news of their discovery for its American audience from an account that first appeared in a supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science. They were based on recent observations that had been made across the ocean, at the Cape of Good Hope, in South Africa, with a remarkable new telescope of unprecedented power and clarity, by the great astronomer Sir John Herschel.
The reports of the lunar findings sent shockwaves both through the city and around the world. They drew vast crowds to the paper’s offices, sent rival newspapers scrambling to reprint the news, and dominated both popular conversation and popular culture, including spawning a wildly successful play at the Bowery Theatre that premiered less than a month later. And they helped confirm the Sun—a paper that had been founded only two years previously—as quite probably the biggest-selling newspaper in the world.
But (and please brace yourself, here, for a shock) none of it was actually true.
I know, I know. This is quite a lot of information to get your head around in a short space of time. But please believe me when I tell you that scientists have checked very carefully, and there are in fact no ginger bat-people living on the moon at all. Also, no goat-unicorns.
A French print by the Thierry brothers showing the bat people of the moon.
The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 was not, as the initial stories in the Sun claimed, the work of a “Dr. Andrew Grant,” who had been “for several years past the inseparable coadjutor of the younger Herschel,”49 but of a young English immigrant to the United States named Richard Adams Locke. Locke had been hired as the editor of the Sun just two months earlier. He wasted little time in making an impact.
If you had to point to a single period in history to identify the birth of the modern news industry, the middle of the 1830s in New York would be as good a candidate as any. Newspapers before this time were very different from the ones we buy today (or, more accurately, the ones we don’t buy, but sometimes read the websites of). For starters, they weren’t far off being luxury items, targeted exclusively at the wealthy merchant and political classes, with little attempt made to appeal to a broader audience. New York’s existing newspapers, at the start of the 1830s, cost six cents apiece, well outside the range of affordability for most of the city’s rapidly growing population. Made up of a single folded sheet of paper, they had only four pages, and both the first and last of those—the most valuable real estate for any modern newspaper editor—were given over entirely to a plethora of short advertisements, printed in dense columns of almost unreadably small type.
Thanks to the twentieth-century innovations of Rupert Murdoch, the words “page 3” are inextricably linked in the minds of British newspaper aficionados with photos of topless women. By contrast, page 3 of New York’s newspapers in the early 1830s tended to have long lists of stuff like currency exchange rates and the details of ships newly arrived in port—the kind of information that was vital to merchants but virtually useless as soft-core erotica, unless you had some particularly niche kinks. Any actual news stories were relegated to page 2, a page that any modern newspaper journalist will recognize as “the place you put stuff that people don’t read.”
None of this particularly screams, “Please buy this newspaper!” But the somewhat unenticing format wasn’t really a problem for the sales of these papers, because they tended to rely on subscriptions rather than newsstand sales (which was handy, given that there were no newsstands then). They also relied heavily on patronage—specifically, political patronage. This was the tail end of the “party press” era in the United States, when most news outlets were either owned outright by political partisans or relied on favors from their chosen politicians, like being granted lucrative government contracts in return for their unwavering and full-throated support.
This resulted in what could generously be described as “a vibrant and passionate popular debate on the great political issues facing a young country,” or, slightly less generously, as “a bunch of egomaniacs talking shit about their rivals with no regard for accuracy.”
This, uh, “passion and vibrancy” frequently spilled over into real life. The New York of 1835 was very different from the gleaming metropolis of today. There were no glass skyscrapers, naturally; instead of skyscrapers, they had feral pigs roaming the feces-covered streets. But, nonetheless, the city did have some characteristics that would be very familiar to today’s New Yorkers: it smelled like hell in the summer; it didn’t have a working subway; and it had a small but influential coterie of media professionals who took their interpersonal dramas way too goddamn seriously.
Newspaper editors were very closely identified with the outlets they oversaw, not least because they wrote the vast majority of the copy in their papers themselves. The distinction between the modern roles of the reporter (whose job is to go out and find the news) and the editor (whose job is to sit in an office demanding pictures of Spider-Man) were still kind of fuzzy at this point. As a result, the wild beefing between the partisan outlets was frequently deeply personal—and it was fairly common for rival newspaper editors, when they bumped into each other in the street, to simply beat the crap out of each other. One editor even took to carrying pistols with him after being physically attacked by the same competitor three times in one week.50
It was in this pungent atmosphere that the New York Sun rose in 1833, and changed the game forever. The idea behind the Sun (and the other pioneering outlets of the new “penny press” era) was a radical one: instead of charging the standard six cents, it would cost just one cent. Rather than relying on subscriptions and patronage, it would be independent, sold on the streets by a bevy of newsboys shouting the day’s most dramatic headlines. As such, it would make the bulk of its money from advertising, which could suddenly reach a much wider audience thanks to the paper’s dramatically higher sales. This wasn’t news as a niche, high-end product sold to a small, homogenous in-crowd—this was mass-market, popular and populist, ready to talk to a wide range of readers...and reliant on eyeballs.
In other words, it had hit on the broad-strokes business model that large chunks of the news industry would follow for much of the next 170 years—pretty much up until the last few decades, when a combination of asset-stripping hedge funds and the internet came along to ruin everybody’s lavish expense accounts. (To briefly digress: more than a few people have recently suggested that the news industry right now is desperately scampering back to the previous models, either making subscription-funded products targeted at smaller, elite audiences, or becoming dependent on the patronage of influence-hungry oligarchs. Either way, fun times in Newsville!)
The Sun, quickly hitting on a formula that would stand the test of time—namely, that stories about crime, disasters and human drama drew eyeballs—saw its readership grow to unprecedented heights. In early August of 1835, it boasted of having sold 26,000 copies, far more than even The Times of London—almost certainly the biggest newspaper in the world, prior to the Sun’s arrival.51 This may have been largely thanks to the terrible fire on August 12, a conflagration that razed large portions of the printing district in Downtown Manhattan. This was a two-for-one boost to the Sun’s sales: not only was it a huge and dramatic news story that people were eager to read about, but rather conveniently it also destroyed the printing press of the Sun’s nearest rival, another penny-press upstart named the Morning Herald, which at that point had been publishing for just three months.
As such, the Sun was perfectly placed that August to create a new media sensation. And yet the story of the moon people began small: a brief paragraph on page 2 of the edition that went out on Friday, August 21, titled “Celestial Discoveries.” It noted that, at the Cape of Good Hope, Sir John Herschel had made “astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description, by means of an immense telescope of an entirely new principle.”
This paragraph, it turned out, was just the teaser trailer. The full story began to appear the following week, on Tuesday, August 25. But even then, rather than leading with the most sensational aspects first, the Sun took the time to build the narrative slowly. The first day’s installment was, frankly, a bit dull, consisting mostly of descriptions of how the “immense telescope,” with its seven-ton lens, supposedly worked.
But this approach actually played in the Sun’s favor. Rather than the skepticism that leading with HOLY SHIT THERE ARE BAT PEOPLE ON THE MOON might have provoked, the sober recounting—presented as a reprint from the august publication the Edinburgh Journal of Science—lent the tale an air of credibility and kept the readers coming back for more.
The following day, the Sun began to unveil the moon’s wonders. Wednesday’s installment revealed that the moon was populated with bountiful plant and animal life—including those fields of red poppy-like flowers, the rolling amphibious creatures and the blue goat-unicorns. This was remarkable enough but was nothing compared to day three, which announced the discovery of the upright beavers—animals who were clearly possessed of a degree of intelligence, who carried their young in their arms “like a human being,” and lived in huts “constructed better and higher than those of many tribes of human savages.”
By this point, the story was already a sensation, but the fourth installment, which dropped on Friday, August 28, took it to new heights. That was when the Sun introduced the world to the lunar bat-people: “Vespertilio-homo, or man-bat,” as Herschel allegedly named them; creatures of about “four feet in height,” with “short and glossy copper-colored hair” and yellow faces described as “a slight improvement upon that of the large orang outang.” And, crucially, wings “composed of a thin membrane...lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of their shoulders to the calves of their legs.”
Not only could these humanlike creatures fly, but they were clearly highly intelligent—they were “evidently engaged in conversation” and “their gesticulation...appeared impassioned and emphatic.” And, just in case that wasn’t enough to get people’s attention, the article also noted, “Our further observation of the habits of these creatures, who were of both sexes, led to results so very remarkable, that I prefer they should first be laid before the public in Dr. Herschel’s own work... They are doubtless innocent and happy creatures, notwithstanding that some of their amusements would but ill comport with our terrestrial notions of decorum.” A section describing those “amusements” was rather ostentatiously censored out.
Yep. While the text tiptoes around saying it, the reader could be left in little doubt: my dudes, the bat people of the moon fucked.
The final two installments couldn’t help but be a slight anticlimax after Friday’s revelations, but nonetheless they managed to sustain the by now almost-insatiable reader interest. Saturday brought the discovery of great, mysterious, temple-like buildings built from sapphire on the moon, while (after taking a break on Sunday) the following Monday introduced a new and improved variety of bat people. Described as “the highest order of animals in this rich valley,” shown sitting in circles, having conversations, these better bat-persons were said to be “of a larger stature than the former specimens, less dark in color, and in every respect an improved variety of the race.”
That’s right—the bat people of the moon were in existence for a grand total of four days before someone was extremely racist about them.
The Sun’s office was besieged by crowds of thousands of people demanding updates, and their printing press couldn’t churn out new copies fast enough.
Not only were the crowds keen to learn more, they actively contributed to the hoax. William Griggs, a friend of the hoax’s author, Locke, told of how he heard people in the crowd offer supporting evidence to back up the fiction, in a state of “insatiable credence.” One “highly respectable-looking elderly gentleman, in a fine broadcloth Quaker suit” claimed to have seen Herschel’s fictitious telescope with his own eyes as it was loaded onto a boat at London’s East India Docks; another man “of perfectly respectable appearance” insisted that he owned an original copy of the report in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, and that the Sun’s reprint was faithful. Griggs describes these as acts of “spontaneous mendacity.”52
Benjamin Day, the Sun’s canny publisher, knew when he was onto a good thing and immediately saw an opportunity to cash in. Before the series had even completed, he’d republished the text as a stand-alone pamphlet, which rapidly sold tens of thousands of copies (at twelve and a half cents each). He commissioned artworks depicting the inhabitants of the moon. And he would go on to invest in new steam-powered printing presses to ensure that the Sun never had to run short of copies again. News was on its way to becoming an industry.
That the hoax was widely believed seems beyond doubt. New Yorkers of the time wrote about it in their diaries, and few seem to have expressed skepticism; multiple accounts from contemporary sources state that most people were taken in by Locke’s writing. No less a figure than Edgar Allen Poe would later write that “not one person in ten discredited it... A grave professor of mathematics in a Virginian college told me seriously that he had no doubt of the truth of the whole affair!”53 Poe himself was, at the time, supremely pissed off about the hoax—not because he got fooled, but because he’d published his own hoax story about a trip to the moon a few months earlier in the Southern Literary Messenger and had been planning a sequel before the Sun’s work blew his out of the water.
Eventually, however, people started to express public skepticism—and among the first out of the gate was one James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the Morning Herald. He’d been forced to sit out the first week of the hoax, as his paper still wasn’t able to publish following the fire earlier in the month, and presumably he had been grinding his teeth about the success of his rivals all that time.
Come the following Monday, August 31, however, the Herald was back in business (and had dropped the Morning from its name54). Bennett immediately launched into a broadside against his competitors with an article titled “The Astronomical Hoax Explained”—which noted, among other things, that the real Edinburgh Journal of Science had ceased publication two years earlier, and as such couldn’t possibly be the source for the tale. He would continue in the same vein for weeks to come, calling the Sun’s actions “highly improper, wicked, and in fact a species of impudent swindling,” and accusing them of printing “untruths for money.”55
(In case you’re wondering, James Gordon Bennett is not exactly where we get the phrase “Gordon Bennett” from, but he’s not unconnected. It actually comes from his son, James Gordon Bennett Jr., who inherited his father’s publishing duties at the paper that eventually settled on the name of the New York Herald, the title under which it found the greatest fame. Bennett Jr. was not simply a newspaperman, though: he was also so deeply committed to a wild, louche and very publicly eccentric lifestyle that his name became pretty much a synonym for “holy shit.”)
Was his accusation accurate? Was the Sun telling untruths purely for money? Okay, so, undoubtedly the pressure for sales helped to push Locke toward writing his magnum hoaxus, and Day, as publisher, certainly didn’t hesitate for a second to wring every dollar he could out of the sensation. But Locke seems to have had other motives, as well. In fact, according to his own explanation, when (some years later) he finally confessed to the hoax, he had created one of history’s more famous lies because he was himself annoyed about people spreading untruths. The piece was intended, not as a hoax, but as a parody of “natural theology,” a popular philosophy of the time, in which science was relegated to second-class status in the quest to understand God’s design. As a fan of science and an enthusiast for both geology and astronomy, this way of thinking appalled him. He wanted to show it up for the charlatanry it was.
Locke hadn’t really meant to spread bullshit. He’d just told a very elaborate joke that almost nobody got.
It was a joke that backfired on Locke in unfortunate ways. For the rest of his life, he couldn’t escape the shadow of his moon. He left the Sun a year later and moved to a new newspaper, where he hoped to do work of greater value to the world, but it failed. A few years into that gig, he tried another hoax, about the supposed lost diaries of the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, but nobody cared. His writing was suspect. Locke drank more and more heavily. Less than a decade after his hoax was published, he left journalism entirely and spent the remaining three decades of his life quietly working for the Customs Service.
But what he left behind has lasted to this day. The legacies of the Great Moon Hoax—newspapers battling for circulation, the industrialization of news distribution and the prioritization of sensation over accuracy—are factors that have resonated through the business of recording news for almost two centuries. In the words of that invaluable online resource, the Museum of Hoaxes, Locke’s moon series was “the first truly sensational demonstration of the power of the mass media.”56
And, like Franklin before him, it was a journalist’s joke that just got out of hand. It wouldn’t be the last time either.
I should probably, at this point, confess my own interest here: I am both a journalist and someone who has made jokes that have got out of hand. For many years, recently—thanks to the quirks of new media in general, and to the indulgence of my bosses at BuzzFeed in particular—my job combined both of those vocations into a single, somewhat confusing package. On the one hand, as a journalist, I was reporting about online viral misinformation: helping to expose an unscrupulous news agency, hunting down Russian bots, debunking what felt like an infinite number of photoshopped pictures of sharks swimming down flooded streets. On the other hand, as a humor writer, I was creating elaborate spoofs of media reports on nonexistent events.
Those spoofs, of course, were almost without exception interpreted as real by at least a small subsection of the readership. I learned to my cost that there is basically nothing you can do—short of perhaps writing THIS IS A JOKE, YOU GUYS all over something, which tends to slightly spoil the punch line—to stop someone, somewhere mistaking even the most thuddingly obvious joke for reality. If you’re a fan of questioning your place in the world, there’s not much quite like seeing a gag you created about people credulously sharing nonsense on Twitter being shared as a real thing on Twitter less than a year later.
As such, I would also like to take this opportunity to—for the first time—publicly apologize to the senior BBC presenter Nick Robinson, and to clarify that he did not go to Eton with David Cameron and was never secretly recorded saying, “I hate all poor people.”57 I cannot stress enough that it was a joke and people weren’t supposed to tweet it out of context.
In addition to my lingering shame about traducing Mr. Robinson, this background also means that I have a somewhat divided view of journalism. I will, like all journalists, staunchly and somewhat pompously defend it as a noble and courageous profession, a vital pillar of any democratic society, and an essential tool for uncovering truth and holding the powerful to account. This isn’t simply a posture; every day I am inspired by journalistic colleagues across the world, many of whom risk imprisonment, ruin or death to expose wrongdoing and shine a light in the darkness. They’re heroes.
I am, however, also aware that quite a lot of what the news industry produces is—to varying degrees—rubbish.
Now, this is partly just because the job of finding out facts and writing about them to a tight deadline is actually quite hard. Not necessarily hard in a “working down a mine” kind of way; more, hard in a “trying to find a needle in a haystack, and also the haystack is in a tornado, plus nobody is actually 100 percent sure that the needle was even in the haystack in the first place, the farmer has started referring all questions about the haystack to his lawyer—oh, and the guy from Reuters got here two hours earlier and has already scored an exclusive with the needle’s family” sort of way.
Put bluntly, human events are messy and chaotic, and trying to establish what really happened in even the most minor incident—and then distill it into eight hundred clear and crisp words, all within the space of a few hours—can honestly be fairly tricky sometimes.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the 1904 story of a snake that appeared unexpectedly one day in a New York apartment.
To be very clear up front, this is not, in the grand scheme of things, an important story. No governments fell, no great social movements were sparked, its legacy failed to echo down the years. Precisely zero musicals have been written about it. The only victim in the tale was dead well before the story hit the printing presses—that victim being the snake in question.
The unfortunate snake made its appearance in an inauspicious apartment at Twenty-Two East Thirty-Third Street, in an insalubrious and crime-ridden district of Manhattan (decades later, after being turned into offices, the same address would briefly host the final iteration of Andy Warhol’s Factory). There, a small boy was spotted by his family playing with an unusual-looking new toy. The new toy, a more detailed inspection revealed, was actually a live snake.
The family, rather naturally, freaked the fuck out, and very quickly hacked the snake to death—RIP snake—before carrying its corpse several blocks to the run-down, foul-smelling local police station. From where, we have to assume, one of New York’s finest tipped off the gentlemen of the press that a quirky human-interest story was up for grabs.
You can see why this would be of interest to the newspapermen; it’s the kind of story that local news coverage is made of. The reason this is of interest to us, however, is what happened next: none of the six newspapers that covered it could agree on a single detail of what had actually occurred.
We have to thank Andie Tucher, a former journalist and a historian at New York City’s Columbia School of Journalism, for her exhaustive investigation of the dizzying array of inaccuracies the press managed to wring out of this completely inconsequential story.58 Between the New York Sun, the Herald, The Times, the Tribune, the World, and the American and Evening Journal, conflicting details were sprayed around like ticker tape. They disagreed about the size of the snake (anywhere between three and five feet long), the color of the snake (yellow or brown or green or black, sometimes with spots in various color combinations), the age of the boy (three, four, five or none of the above), as well as the name of the boy (Pierre, or possibly Albert, Jeltrup or Gultrep, or Blanpain) and the name of the neighbor from whose menagerie the snake had supposedly escaped (while they agreed his first name was Gustave, his surname was given as Hurtiland or Svenson, neither of which was right). Furthermore, they disagreed about who killed the snake (father, grandfather, uncle, nurse), what implement they killed the snake with (knife, shovel, hammer, sword), and even how many pieces the snake was in after it had been killed (two, or many, many pieces).
Essentially, every possible detail of the incident beyond “there was a snake” was in dispute. It’s like a weird herpetologist version of Clue.
The point of this is not to rag on the long-dead beat reporters of New York’s nineteenth precinct but simply to highlight just how tenuous the connection between what was real and what was reported has been for much of our history. This was a story, after all, that featured very few of the problems inherent in more serious journalism: none of the subjects (with the possible exception of alleged snake-source Gustave) had any incentive to bend the truth. Nobody was trying to cover anything up, nobody was promoting a movie and nobody was trying to use the snake as political justification for the military invasion of a third world country.
Some of the reporters of the inaccurate snake story may simply have been lazy, or incompetent or simply unlucky. But, then again, they may have just been practicing their trade as best they knew.
Nowadays, the phrase “fake news” is pretty much everywhere—and has seen its meaning rapidly and depressingly shift from “completely fictional copy masquerading as news purely to drive clicks” (2016 meaning) to “stuff printed about a politician that the politician doesn’t like” (2017 to present). But this isn’t the first time the term “fake” has entered the news industry only to see its meaning morph over time; something very similar happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the word first made its appearance in the world of news.
Before this time, the concept of “faking” wasn’t part of the mainstream discourse; it was used as a term of art by only the most deeply disreputable professions, such as thieves and con men and actors. But—as the snake-investigating journalism historian Tucher has written59—by the late 1880s it had made its way over to the newly professionalizing world of journalism. Except it wasn’t necessarily treated as the original sin of reportage—the kind of thing that would get someone drummed out of the industry. According to some authorities, it was seen as an essential job skill.
In The Writer, a magazine launched in 1887 for the burgeoning class of professional scribblers, the editor, William Hills, wrote approvingly of newspapers where journalists must be “able to ‘fake’ brilliantly to do the work well.”60 A few months later, he insisted that “hardly a news despatch is written which is not ‘faked’ to a greater or lesser degree”;61 he describes the act as “the supplying, by the exercise of common sense and a healthy imagination, of unimportant details...[that] may not be borne out by the facts, although they are in accordance with what the correspondent believes is most likely to be true.” The purpose was simply to make the story more “picturesque”; faking, he insisted, was “not exactly lying.”
An example of precisely what those “unimportant details” might be comes in an 1894 training handbook for young journalists, written by Edwin Shuman, a Chicago journalist who also taught a course on how to be a journalist, at a time before journalism degrees were a thing. Shuman warns these wannabe journalists against the “dull and prosy error of being tiresomely exact about little things, like the minutes and seconds or the state of the atmosphere or the precise words of the speaker.”62
If you’re a news editor, there’s a decent chance that you might have just screamed out loud at those last six words. Granted, Shuman was writing at a time when you couldn’t exactly slip a recording device into your pocket (back then, the machines that a decade later would be trademarked as the Dictaphone involved a rather bulky wax cylinder). But, still—the precise words of the speaker are not a “little thing”!
So faking was commonplace. It gave reporters (playing up to the stereotype of frustrated novelists) the chance to flex their literary muscles, and it was a useful way of avoiding being scooped, which was a far greater offense to the gods of journalism. Editors liked it because it ensured a steady flow of sparkling copy; readers liked the product and rewarded it with sales. If news stories that seemed a bit too good to be true continued to pour in—particularly from small or remote locations where the effort barrier to checking them seemed just too great—then nobody was going to do much to intervene.
Such was the career of Louis T. Stone, an ambitious young writer from the small town of Winsted, Connecticut, who quickly rose to become one of the most-read journalists in the country, thanks to the almost insatiable appetite of many newspapers for the dispatches he filed from his hometown. The “Winsted Liar,” as he became known, enjoyed a decades-long career that spanned from 1895 to his death in 1933, during which he produced a steady stream of nonsense that editors couldn’t resist.
Among Stone’s more notable reports, as recorded by journalism professor Curtis D. MacDougall in 1940, were the following: a red, white and blue egg laid by a hen on July 4; a tree that grew baked apples; a cat that whistled “Yankee Doodle”; a watch swallowed by a cow that kept almost perfect time for years in the cow’s stomach because the cow’s breathing kept winding it up; and a bald man who painted a spider on his head to repel flies.63
That’s quite an eyebrow-raising collection of tales at the best of times, but, when they all originated from the same writer in the same small town, you’d think someone would have caught on—either to Stone’s fakery, or to the remote possibility that Winsted was a portal into fairyland. Did anybody actually believe them? MacDougall insists that they were taken as true by “virtually everyone...except wise editors who came to be skeptical of anything submitted by Stone but printed the stories anyway because of their reader interest.”64
None of the skepticism affected Stone’s career; he rose to become the general manager of his local paper, having turned down numerous offers of big-city work, preferring to stay in his small town, where the news could remain weird. When he died, rather than being disgruntled at his fictions, the grateful citizens of his hometown praised him for “putting Winsted on the map,” and named a bridge in his honor—a bridge that crossed a local river named Sucker Brook.
Beyond a bridge and an eternal place in the pantheon of journalistic fakers, not many of Stone’s fancies have left much of a legacy. But the same can’t be said for one of the nineteenth century’s most notable hoaxes: the letters that gave us the legend of Jack the Ripper.
The Whitechapel murders gave us one of the most enduring pop-culture figures of our time, and if it feels particularly grim to describe a suspected mass killer as a “pop-culture figure,” then...yeah. The deaths have been the inspiration for films, TV series, novels, songs, comics, exhibits and at least one fictional musical. On some weekends, it’s almost impossible to walk around certain parts of East London without finding your path blocked by “Ripper tours,” in which precariously employed actors intone spooky stories about dimly lit streets and shadowy figures in the smog to a crowd of eager tourists, all doing their best to ignore the fact that the pub they’re standing outside is now full of advertising creatives doing vape tricks.
But a large amount of what most of us “know” about Jack the Ripper and his victims (quite possibly up to and including the belief that there was definitely a single serial killer responsible for the five “canonical” murders) is based on a slightly hazy mixture of truth, supposition and contemporaneous reporting that wasn’t going to let facts get in the way of a good tale. That includes much of the core mythology of Jack the Ripper himself—most notably, his nickname.
The name “Jack the Ripper” stems from three communications that were supposedly received by the Central News Agency in September and October 1888: the “Dear Boss” letter, the “Saucy Jacky” postcard and the “Moab & Midian” letter. Written in red, they were signed “Jack the Ripper” (“Dont mind me giving the trade name”) and helped set the template for every airport-thriller serial killer taunting the police that was to follow. They gave a motive (“I am down on whores”) and the promise of future atrocities (“My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance”), they mocked the police for not apprehending the culprit (“I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet”), and they described the grisly keeping of souvenirs (“I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle”).
The modern consensus is that these communications were almost certainly the work of a journalist looking to keep the story going. Both handwriting and linguistic analysis suggests that they were written by the same author, and the finger is generally pointed at either Fred Best (a freelancer who supposedly confessed to being the author decades later, although the source of that is more than a little dubious) or Thomas Pulling, who actually worked at the Central News Agency and was responsible for forwarding the letters to the police—and, somewhat suspiciously, only forwarded a transcript of the final letter, with the original nowhere to be found, rather firmly placing it into the “likely hoax” category.
From the turn of the twentieth century onward, the practice of casual faking gradually came to be frowned upon by the increasingly professionalized journalism industry—but that doesn’t mean it went away. The modern history of journalism is littered with prestigious reporters who made up most or all of their work, each time unleashing a torrent of soul-searching within the industry and promises that it could never happen again. Many of the names are familiar: Jayson Blair; Stephen Glass; Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer in 1981 for a fabricated story of an eight-year-old heroin addict called Jimmy. In December 2018, the German magazine Der Spiegel fired its award-winning journalist Claas Relotius, who had been filing fictional copy from the troubled faraway lands of the USA, once again relying on a bit of geographical distance to make checking the lies more difficult.
Again, some of these false stories have irrevocably entered our cultural consciousness. Saturday Night Fever remains an iconic moment in both film and music, something that hasn’t changed much since Nik Cohn—the Northern Irish music journalist who wrote “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Nights,” the New York magazine article it’s based on—admitted he made the whole thing up. As Cohn tells it, he got a taxi out to Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, planning to write about the vibrant disco culture he’d heard was thriving at a club there. The moment he opened the cab door, a man who had been having a fight in the street vomited down Cohn’s leg—whereupon the journalist immediately shut the door and fucked off back to Manhattan, deciding to invent the details of this vibrant disco culture instead. John Travolta’s character, in all its gritty depiction of working-class Italian-American life, is actually based on a mod called Chris whom Cohn had met in London a decade earlier.
Cohn told the Guardian in 2016 that he was surprised, but not shocked, that it got published: “It reads to me as obvious fiction... No way could it sneak past customs now. In the 60s and 70s, the line between fact and fiction was blurry. Many magazine writers used fictional techniques to tell supposedly factual stories. No end of liberties were taken. Few editors asked tough questions. For the most part it was a case of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’”65
It’s not always a question of journalists making stuff up, though. Sometimes, it’s the newspapers who are getting hoaxed—as with the press’s apparently insatiable appetite for stories about Nazis that aren’t true. The most famous of these is of course the Hitler Diaries from 1983, forgeries that were the work of a petty criminal and smuggler of Nazi memorabilia, which nonetheless fooled such august publications as the German magazine Stern and The Times of London, as well as the acclaimed historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. But it would be unfair to overlook the Daily Express’s publication in 1972 of the sensational news that it had “incontrovertible evidence” that Hitler’s deputy Martin Bormann had been found living somewhere in Latin America. The incontrovertible evidence turned out to be a photo of a man who was not, in fact, a Nazi in hiding, but an Argentinian schoolteacher. The Express’s source for the story—an unreliable Hungarian-American historian and Nazi hunter with the unimprovable name of Ladislas Faragó—didn’t let a little thing like that stop him from publishing a book about his search for Bormann, two years later.
The history of newspapers getting hoaxed is a long one. A particularly entertaining example comes (again) from The Times, in October 1856, when London’s newspaper of record published a shocking tale of violence from the state of Georgia in the USA. It describes a lengthy train ride during which, following a series of altercations, at least five deadly duels were fought, leaving six dead once the smoke had cleared. “They fought with Monte Christo [sic] pistols, or pistols that make no report,” The Times solemnly outlined, lamenting the nightmare of savagery that the former colony’s southern states had descended into. “Of the six killed two were fathers and two were their sons, one father killed while avenging his son, and one child murdered for lamenting his father,” it wrote—a little boy apparently having had his throat cut because he wouldn’t stop crying.66
The atrocity, The Times wrote a day later (while insisting that the story was undoubtedly true), should prompt “some rather serious reflections as to the future of the United States, for what we have described appears to be the ‘normal’ state.”67
When this report reached America, a little over a week later, it would be fair to say that the US press were not having it; the tale of the Monte Cristo pistols sparked a right old transatlantic slanging match. The Augusta Constitutionalist and Chronicle & Sentinel, and the Savannah Republican, were among the papers to lay into The Times’s “superlative gullibility” in publishing the “utterly preposterous” tale.68 “A Prodigious Hoax,” the New York Times labeled the work of its London namesake, with its editor writing that the story was “so full of grotesque nonsense and incredible absurdities that we think that the editor of the Times instead of vouching for the sanity and truthfulness of the narrator, should have furnished some evidence of his own sanity in admitting such a farago of nonsense into his columns.”
The dispute rumbled on for months, back and forth over the sea, becoming a major political issue. For much of that time, The Times stood steadfastly behind its story, insisting that it was true, before finally—after a British consul forwarded them a disgruntled letter from the president of the Central Georgia Railroad—coming to acknowledge, in mid-December, that maybe their source might have been “hallucinating.”
The punch line of the whole affair only arrived in the summer of 1857, however, when The Times’s own special correspondent in the United States, a chap named Louis Filmore,69 managed to track down some more details of the story. As he happened to be passing through the area, he interviewed some train passengers, who all denied that any such incident had ever occurred. The tale was a “monstrous tissue of fiction,” Filmore wrote. But his interviewees in the baggage car of the train (which doubled as the favored location for smoking and taking refreshments) did reveal one important detail: that “Monte Christo pistols” was, in fact, local slang for bottles of champagne, and empty bottles of the same were known as “dead men.” Filmore noted, deadpan, that “encounters with the Monte Christo weapon in the baggage wagon are, I understand, not uncommon on the line.”70
Of course, it doesn’t require a deliberate intent to deceive for things to get a bit out of hand. Most of the examples we’ve seen so far have involved outright hoaxes, or at least some willful embellishment of a story. But sometimes there’s no hoax at all—and yet a basically true article can nonetheless get blown out of all proportion, as newspaper after newspaper adds a little bit of extra sensationalism to the story each time it’s published.
That’s what happened in 1910 when, once again, the newspapers of New York turned their gaze heavenward as Halley’s Comet made its first appearance in our skies since those heady days of 1835—and a perfectly accurate report in the New York Times triggered an apocalyptic panic.
The report was a mere three paragraphs, halfway down page 1, with the simple headline of “Comet’s Poisonous Tail.”71 It relayed that astronomers had, using new spectroscopy techniques, discovered that the tail of Halley’s Comet contained a significant quantity of cyanogen. Cyanogen, it reminded us, is “a very deadly poison,” and the article reported that the discovery had prompted “much discussion” among astronomers over what effect this would have on the earth “should it pass through the comet’s tail.” At the end of the second paragraph, the New York Times just casually drops in the opinion of a French astronomer named Camille Flammarion, who believed that it would “impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet.”
In journalism circles, that’s known as “burying the lede.”
The thing is, this was a perfectly accurate report of Flammarion’s opinion. The New York Times even added, in the very next paragraph, that “most astronomers do not agree with Flammarion,” but that wasn’t enough. The idea was out there now, and if there’s one thing humans know how to do well, it’s panic for no good reason.
As Halley grew closer, so did the fear of impending doom. Reports from the time tell us that people were blocking up their windows and doors to keep out the poisonous fumes; sales of gas masks were brisk; some con artists even took to selling anti-comet pills that, they claimed, would protect the public from the effect of the comet’s deadly tail. Another report from the New York Times on May 19, about the reaction in Chicago, is headlined “Some Driven to Suicide,” with the subheading “Others Become Temporarily Insane from Brooding Over Comet.”72
In the end, the comet passed by without any deadly effects, with the exception of a sixteen-year-old girl who fell off a roof in Brooklyn while having a comet-watching party.
It’s this ability to blow things entirely out of proportion, and the dogged refusal to let go of a notion once it’s fixed, that are at the heart of how the press gets things wrong. Even without any deliberate falsification, the collective hive mind of the press—bolstered by reader feedback on what they like to read about—will often center itself on a particular idea from which they cannot easily be shaken. This framing of what’s going on, the narrative that becomes “the story,” has incredible momentum once it gets going—and anything that is not “the story” struggles to see the light of day.
British readers may remember, for example, the terrifying recent tale of the Croydon Cat Killer, a maniac who was supposedly responsible for killing and mutilating hundreds of cats in the Croydon area of South London. Reports of the Croydon Cat Killer first emerged in 2015, after some concerned residents in the area went to the Daily Mail. The rest of the press jumped on the story. When would the Croydon Cat Killer strike next? Why weren’t the police doing more to catch him? We were warned that it was only a matter of time before the sadistic killer turned his attention from felines to humans.
Examples of dead cats from farther afield than Croydon were taken, not as evidence that there are a lot of cats in Britain and sometimes they die, but that “the cat killer—who is believed to have killed more than 100 moggies in the past year—is now thought to be operating on ‘much-wider scale.’”73 He was renamed the M25 Cat Killer; by the time his killing spree had traveled as far as Manchester, he basically just became the Cat Killer. The story was a central obsession of much of the British press for well over a year.
Eventually, in September 2018, the Metropolitan Police announced that they had found the culprit—or, rather, the culprits. The Croydon Cat Killer was...cars and foxes. That’s it. It was just cats who’d been run over by cars, and had sometimes been chewed by foxes after their deaths. It took over two thousand hours of police time and at least $7,000 worth of cat autopsies to establish that, however.74
This ability to create something out of nothing, and for the narrative to then snowball until it becomes unstoppable, is hardly new. The saga of the Croydon Cat Killer is remarkably similar to that of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon from seven decades earlier, in which one small piece of melodramatic wording in a single news article led to a weeks-long panic across the quiet city of Mattoon, Illinois.
The story, at its core, was fairly simple. On September 1, 1944—while the Second World War was at its peak and fears of Nazi attacks were commonplace—a woman named Aline Kearney thought she smelled an unusual odor and shortly afterward suffered some kind of episode, feeling faint and complaining of a paralysis in her legs. The police were called and found nothing suspicious, while she recovered within half an hour. But when her husband returned home about an hour later, he thought he saw a figure lurking near the house, although again the police were unable to find any intruder.
The following day, the Mattoon Daily Journal-Gazette ran it as their top story, with a bold front-page splash headline. “‘Anesthetic Prowler’ on Loose,” it shouted, adding, “Mrs. Kearney and Daughter First Victims.”
You can see what they did there, right? Not only did they take a vague suspicion and turn it into a specific plan—an intruder silently filling a house with anesthetic gas, so that he could break in when the occupants were unconscious—but with the addition of a single phrase, “First Victims,” they primed every single person who read it to expect further attacks.
It was, naturally, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anybody who’d come over a bit faint in the previous weeks suddenly suspected that perhaps they, too, had been an early victim of the Gasser; their stories, eagerly reported by the Daily Journal-Gazette, served only to bolster the certainty that there was a dangerous individual on the loose. Further reports came in over the following days. Within a week, other newspapers in the region had picked up the story, all taking it as a point of certainty that the original reports had been valid.
The headlines kept coming: “‘Mad Anesthetist’ Strikes Again! Visits 2 More Homes in City during Night”; “‘Mad Gasser’ Adds Six Victims! 5 Women and Boy Latest Overcome.” The reports were every bit as sensational as the headlines. On September 10, the Chicago Herald-American described the scenes in Mattoon: “Groggy as Londoners under protracted aerial blitzing, this town’s bewildered citizens reeled today under repeated attacks of a mad anesthetist who has sprayed deadly nerve gas into 13 homes and has knocked out 27 known victims.”75
Even on days when no new reports came in, it was still evidence that the underlying story was real: “Mad Prowler Takes It Easy for Night,” ran that day’s Daily Journal-Gazette headline.
By this point, panic was virtually universal across the town. Crowds surged into the street when someone said they’d spotted the Gasser; naturally, someone then smelled an unusual smell and many in the crowd became convinced they’d been gassed. Some people were hospitalized. The small local police force was overwhelmed.
It was only at this point, a week and a half after the first attack, that the authorities—who previously had accepted the reports as real—began to push back, openly describing the fears as “mass hysteria.” And now that “the story” had changed, so did the behavior of the press; they began to openly mock the panic and interviewed psychologists to explain how people had fallen for the “gasser myth.” In an impressive piece of blame judo, responsibility for the mass hysteria was pinned on chemical gasses from nearby factories.
The role of the press in stoking the panic was conveniently overlooked.
Ultimately, all this would be of limited consequence if newspapers really were, as the old cliché goes, tomorrow’s fish-and-chip wrapper. But they’re not. What the press says has a tendency to stick around. As the other old cliché goes, journalism is the first draft of history. The only trouble with this is that, regrettably often, nobody bothers doing the second draft for ages, if at all.
And we can see that worryingly well in the tale of another journalistic joke that—you’re there ahead of me—got a bit out of hand.
The Great Moon Hoax may be the most famous falsehood in the storied history of American journalism (for unclear reasons, under American journalism rules, it must always be a “storied history,” never just a regular fuckin’ history), but it’s challenged for that crown by the work of someone who, in the extremely storied history of US newspapermen, stands as one of the more notable figures: H. L. Mencken.
Mencken was one of the most lauded writers and editors in the first half of the twentieth century, a wry and frequently savage commentator on politics and society at large, a man described by the New Yorker as “the most influential journalist that America ever produced.”76 A quote from him appeared for several decades in big letters on the office wall of his former employer, the Baltimore Sun. (You can see the wall quote in the confusingly unsubtle final season of The Wire, which is about journalists making stuff up; in 2018, shortly after the paper moved offices, the Sun noted on Twitter that the quote had given the wrong date the entire time it was up.77)
Let us also note for the record that Mencken was a complete asshole: a pissy contrarian, an elitist snob and, above all, just a massive, massive racist. Hated poor people, hated black people, hated Jews. This doesn’t particularly affect what comes after this, but it’s worth mentioning, especially as the other two journalistic hoaxers who get starring roles in this chapter were honestly pretty decent people, by the standards of their time. Mencken was not. Horrible man; lovely turn of phrase.
Anyway. In December 1917, as the First World War raged, Mencken published a gentle and amusing column about the history of bathtubs in the United States, to mark what he described as the “neglected anniversary” of the bathtub first coming to America—the pioneering tub having been installed by an enterprising merchant named Adam Thompson, in his Cincinnati townhouse, in December 1842.
The column was (as Mencken would despondently confess, eight years later) “pure buncombe” and “a tissue of absurdities.”78 There was no Adam Thompson; he had not been inspired by Lord John Russell’s introduction of the bathtub to England in 1828 (which wasn’t true either); and Americans had not belatedly come around to the idea of baths only after President Millard Fillmore controversially had one installed in the White House (this was also bull).
Mencken wrote the piece simply as a joke, “to relieve the strain of war days.” As a fervent Germanophile and an opponent of the USA’s entry into the First World War, he found himself in possession of an unpopular opinion that he was constrained from writing, and he was increasingly grumpy about what he saw as newspaper reports from the war that were full of falsehoods. As he wrote later of the war years, “How much that was then devoured by the newspaper readers of the world was actually true? Probably not 1 per cent.”79 (Which is perhaps harsh on the journalists covering that war—but not entirely off base, as we’ll see in a later chapter.)
The bathtub hoax was merely Mencken’s way of letting off a little steam. Unfortunately, he did far too good a job. The article was filled with myriad details that lent it a superficial but delightful plausibility; it had the bouncy, slightly drunken zigzag gait of authentic history. The reader was told that Thompson’s bathtub was supposedly made from “Nicaragua mahogany,” lined with lead and “weighed about 1,750 pounds.”80 The bathtub sparked immediate controversy, with fears that it would cause “phthisic, rheumatic fevers, inflammation of the lungs, and the whole category of zymotic diseases”; bathing was almost banned in Philadelphia and Boston; Virginia introduced a bathtub tax. Political opponents attacked President Fillmore for his decision to introduce a bathtub to the White House, claiming that his bathing-centric actions seemed disconcertingly French.
Mencken was initially pleased with the column, but (as he wrote in his 1926 confession, titled “Melancholy Reflections”) very quickly his “satisfaction turned to consternation.” People hadn’t realized it was a joke. Other newspapers reprinted the article, or rewrote it. Readers started writing to him, taking his article seriously, even offering supporting evidence for his entirely fictitious history—another example of William Griggs’s “spontaneous mendacity.”
“Pretty soon I began to encounter my preposterous ‘facts’ in the writings of other men,” Mencken continues. “They got into learned journals. They were alluded to on the floor of Congress. They crossed the ocean, and were discussed solemnly in England and on the continent. Finally, I began to find them in standard works of reference.”
Mencken’s admission that the story was entirely false was published in around thirty newspapers on May 23, 1926. The column remains a classic in the field of bullshit studies, with its pointed observations of the news industry’s fallibility. Mencken writes: “As a practicing journalist for many years, I have often had close contact with history in the making. I can recall no time or place when what actually occurred was afterward generally known and believed. Sometimes a part of the truth got out, but never all. And what actually got out was seldom clearly understood.”
Which, all told, was a fairly apt summary of the state of things. But what Mencken couldn’t have known at the time he wrote those words was just how powerful an example of this business the whole saga would become. Because the most remarkable thing about Mencken’s bathtub hoax isn’t that the original spoof was believed, or that people then began to repeat it. As we’ve seen, that pretty much comes as standard.
No, what makes this a banner moment in the history of bullshit is this: an admission from the author in the pages of multiple newspapers that it was all lies did absolutely nothing to stop its spread.
Incredibly, despite Mencken’s belated attempt to put this particular genie back in its bottle, the tale of Adam Thompson’s pioneering bathtub simply refused to die. People just kept on repeating the factoids from it, oblivious or uncaring about the fact it was bunk.
Writing a decade after Mencken’s front-page confession, the not-especially-good Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson recorded in his book Adventures in Error an incomplete list of more than thirty times the false story of the bathtub had been repeated by prominent sources in the ten years since Mencken’s admission.81 These included American papers such as the New York Times, the Baltimore Evening Sun, the Cleveland Press and the New York Herald (multiple times); foreign outlets as far afield as Australia Age in Melbourne and the New Statesman in London; academics, including a medical professor at Harvard and the former commissioner of health for the City of New York; and—perhaps most impressively—two US government agencies, including the Federal Housing Administration, which included it in a fact sheet sent out to newspapers across the country.
Probably pride of place in the roll call of those republishing the admitted hoax goes to the Boston Herald, which printed the bathtub story as a stone-cold fact on June 13, 1926—a mere three weeks after they had published Mencken’s “Melancholy Reflections” admitting it was fiction.
On and on it went, nothing seeming capable of removing this small shard of nonsense that had become lodged in the public psyche.
A few decades after its publication, it had made it all the way to the leader of the free world. In 1951, in a wide-ranging interview that President Harry S. Truman gave to the New Yorker’s John Hersey (which ran over five separate editions, following that magazine’s long-standing tradition of believing that word limits are something for other, lesser outlets to care about), the president repeated the bit about Fillmore installing the first bathtub in the White House.82
The exchange that (as relayed by Hersey) occurred when an aide stepped in to correct the president is worth noting in full, because it’s a pretty incredible baloney lasagna, bullshit sheet piled densely upon bullshit sheet.
“That’s not true,” the aide says. “That’s from Mencken.”
This debunking is not immediately accepted. “The President,” Hersey writes with commendable understatement, “seemed reluctant to let go of his belief.”
Truman insists that it has to be true, because he’s “seen a paper the American Medical Association drew up claiming that the vapors from the tub were dangerous for the president’s health.”
That’s the president of the United States of America, there, insisting that he’s personally viewed a historical document that never existed because the thing it’s about didn’t happen.
“No,” the aide responds, “I’m afraid Mencken invented that, too.”
Which...he didn’t, because that particular lie appears nowhere in Mencken’s article. It’s a completely original falsehood, sprung fresh from the brain of the world’s most powerful man.
The president seems a little baffled by this revelation. “I could swear those AMA fellows didn’t think it was a hoax about the tub,” says the only person in history to order a nuclear attack, attempting to reconcile this new information with the tone of voice that he remembers some imaginary doctors using in a manuscript that his brain invented because a newspaper article from thirty-four years previously has made him believe a lie about baths so fiercely that his mind has had to overwrite reality to accommodate it.
“I feel robbed of a fact too, sir,” the aide concludes, Smithers-like.
Now, of course, we have only Hersey’s account of this conversation to go on, and obviously that could be every bit as inaccurate a recounting of fact as any other piece of journalism mentioned in this chapter. (If we’re completely honest, some of the dialogue sounds a little stagey.) But, nonetheless, I choose to accept it—because, hey, it’s the New Yorker, and at some point you’ve just got to trust somebody. Those motherfuckers have more fact-checkers than I have concerned texts about deadlines from my publisher.
Anyhoo, a year after the New Yorker interview was published, Truman gave a speech in Philadelphia, and he told the bathtub story again.83 The whole malarkey of him being told that it was untrue, and then that conversation being published in one of the most prestigious outlets in the country so that everybody knew he believed an untrue thing...that apparently didn’t do enough to shake his attachment to the tale.
And so, for decades to follow, the bathtub hoax continued to cheerfully reproduce itself down the generations. It even entered the twenty-first century alive and well: in both 2001 and 2004, the Washington Post published articles treating it as real history, before awkwardly having to print corrections.84
Some facts, apparently, are just so good that we can’t allow them to not be true.
What does this all mean for the news industry and its noble pursuit of truth? Mencken may have put it as well as possible in a follow-up article he wrote in July 1926, inspired by the Boston Herald making a tit of itself. His words are a fairly bitter reflection of the business of journalism generally, but they also hit on the central point that falsehood has an inherent advantage over truth, simply because it’s unconstrained by the tedious stranglehold of reality.
“What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull,” Mencken wrote. “The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing. What the actual history of the bath tub may be I don’t know: digging it out would be a dreadful job, and the result, after all that labor, would probably be a string of banalities.
“The fiction I concocted back in 1917 was at least better than that.”85