Fake News: Old Story

One of the big factors to have emerged from 2016 has been the 'rise of fake news.' This is approaching a moral panic now; it is being blamed as one of the chief factors behind the election of Donald Trump. We now live, we are always told, in a 'post-truth' environment.

I would contend that this is actually as old as the hills. Here are some examples:

Popish Plot

Britain in the 17th century was a dangerous place to be a Roman Catholic. Barely a century before, the actions of Henry VIII had brought the English Church crashing out of communion with the Pope. Scotland had followed suit. Since then, Catholicism had become the national stock-villain.

Which made it perfectly believable that there was a plot afoot to murder King Charles II, and that this plot was being orchestrated to put Charles' Catholic brother, James, on the throne. From 1678 until 1681, fear and tensions gripped the country. A man called Titus Oates claimed he had discovered an attempt by the Jesuit order to murder Charles.

The reaction was near hysterical. Five Catholic lords were imprisoned and nearly impeached by Parliament. 22 people were executed for their role in the plot. A Bill was introduced to try and remove James from the line of succession. A new Act made it illegal for Catholics to sit in the Houses of Parliament. All across the country, Protestant noblemen and gentry armed themselves against the anticipated Catholic uprising. Panic and alarm reached a fever pitch.

You may have guessed by now that Oates had in fact made the whole thing up. He was a serial fantasist. Charles II was pretty sure that Oates was lying through his teeth. Eventually, with no assassin forthcoming, and protests of innocence all round, Oates' credibility collapsed. But Charles was unable to calm fears of a Catholic plot against the Crown. The legal restrictions placed on British Catholics remained in place until 1829, all thanks to a murder plot that never existed.

Not only is the news fake, but that is not a catchy headline...

Zinoviev Letter

It is easy to forget just how scared many people were of socialism in the early 20th century. The spectre of a mass workers  revolution had actually come true, and the old Russia was being subsumed jnto the Soviet Union. In Britain, in late 1924, these fears were reaching a fever pitch. A few months earlier, the Conservative government of Stanley Baldwin had fallen in the House of Commons. Amidst near national hysteria, and political machinations to lock them out of power, the King, George V, had turned to Labour, and entrusted Ramsay MacDonald with forming the first ever Labour government. But MacDonald, running a minority government well short of a majority, knew an election had to come soon.

As polling day approached, many feared that Labour would be returned with a working majority. And so it was, four days before polling, that the Daily Mail published a letter. It claimed to be from Gregory Zinoviev, the head of Comintern and a senior Soviet politician. It called for closer relations between the UK and the Soviet Union, which would help to ensure the success of a communist revolution in Britain. Amidst the ensuing storm, Labour lost 40 seats, and the Conservatives swept back into power.

Not a word of the letter was true. The Soviets issued an immediate denial, with Zinoviev himself saying he had never seen it before. In 1998, Robin Cook launched an investigation, which found the letter was a fake. While the electoral impact of the letter is hard to gauge (Labour's vote rose by 2.6% even as it lost seats), the psychological damage to the Labour party was devastating. Their first spell in office, and chance to win outright, had been sabotaged by a downright lie.

It's nice to see the Daily Mail headline writer was still working for them in 1924...

Nixon's Dirty Tricks

The year is 1972. The Democratic primary in the United States is getting underway, as various candidates jostle to try and eject Richard Nixon from the White House. Foremost is Edmund Muskie, a Senator from Maine, who'd been the Vice Presidential pick in the razor's edge defeat of 1968. Muskie is the only Democratic candidate that the polls show has any chance of defeating Nixon.

The New Hampshire primary was fast approaching when disaster hit the Muskie campaign. A letter was delivered to the Manchester Union Leader, which said that Muskie and his staff had used insulting terms about French-Canadians. Given New Hampshire's proximity to Canada, this caused a storm. The Union Leader also reported that Muskie's wife had a drink problem, and also swore and insulted minorities. Although Muskie denied these claims, his campaign was badly damaged. When he spoke to defend his wife, he appeared to break down in tears, although he claimed it was snow melting on his face. Muskie was defeated by George McGovern in the primary, and McGovern went on to be hammered by Richard Nixon in the general election.

Much later, during the revelations around the Watergate burglary, it transpired that the letter and stories in the Union Leader newspaper had come from the Committee to Re-Elect the President. They had invented the whole thing. Tricky Dicky had been working to knock out the only Democrat capable of unseating him. Had the burglars never been caught, who knows whether we would ever have found out how Nixon tried to corrupt the election of 1972.

Muskie, either crying or fighting back the snow, 1972 New Hampshire primary

Iraq and *those* weapons of mass destruction

It really is easy to forget that the reason given for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, which he would use to threaten other countries. I was 12, and I remember Tony Blair assuring the House of Commons that Saddam could use the weapons against Britain within 45 minutes.

And as a twelve year old really interested in weapons and stuff, I knew that was wrong. There are only a handful of countries that could deploy weapons of mass destruction against the UK in less than an hour. We are close allies with two of them, and the other two wouldn't even dare (thanks mainly to their fear of the other two). What Blair actually meant was that British interests could be hit in 45 minutes. He meant the bases in Cyprus. And even that turned out to be false.

From 2002 until 2003, an enormous amount of falsehoods were flung around the media about Iraq. There was a German intelligence asset who had worked on the mobile chemical factories. There were the stories of the Iraqi agents sent to buy uranium from Africa. Or links were drawn between the Baathist regime and Al-Quaeda, at a time when America was still reeling from the destruction of the World Trade Centre.

All of it was complete rubbish. The man in Germany was an Iraqi exile, who was saying what he needed to in order to get asylum in the West. The CIA quickly rubbished the reports of Iraqis buying yellowcake in Niger, only for Bush to go and use it in his State of the Union speech. And Baathist Iraq was possibly the most hostile of any Arab nation to Al-Quaeda.

The problem was, the Bush administration had decided it wanted to go to war with Iraq long before 2003. It had really been spoiling for a fight with Saddam since day one. Being handed an excuse to use America's military muscle by 9/11 certainly helped prepare the ground. But to really convince people, these stories were dug up and given much greater prominence than they deserved. And then they wondered why everyone was very, very cross when it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction, and we'd broken international law for no real purpose...

Colin Powell, showing the UN more lethal material than Saddam possessed in his entire country...

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To be honest, I could go on. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Hitler Diaries, satanic abuse in children's homes, the Ashley Todd mugging, the Great Fear in Revolutionary France, the Red Scare and McCarthyite witch hunts in the USA. Even the Black Legend put out by the earliest Protestants against the Inquisitions of the early modern Catholic Church. All are examples of fake news, put out there to try and sway public opinion.

These are not new. What is new is that the internet, and social media, has made it much easier for these stories to spread without going through the traditional gatekeepers of the newspaper press. But this doesn't make it a new problem.