Nothing New About Fake News

There have always been hoaxes.   in Ancient days, many were written in newspapers or spread as rumours.  Today, we think there is something ‘new’ about them,  but that is because we don’t know history.

We don’t even know that in 2009, right after Barack Obama was sworn in as President of the United States, a hoax, a complete library of fake news, was packaged in the ‘Ulsterman Report’ and did very well in the Adsense department, although from word first to last, it was nothing but Fake News.

One of the most famous, and most unknown examples of Fake News happened way back in 1917.

In that year, the most influential newspapers in England published a story that today is named “the master hoax.”

What happened was simple.  Britain wanted China to enter World War I on the Allied side.  A story claiming that the German’s Kaiser’s forces were “extracting glycerine out of dead soldiers” appeared.

There was an article about how corpses of soldier were taken to this factory and the glycerine was removed for use in bombs.

There had always been rumours about how dead bodies of the ‘enemy’ would be ‘processed’  but there had not be a direct source.   Not until The Times ran a story about the German a ‘corpse factory’.

As is usual in Fake News there was the quoting of an unnamed Belgian source,  who, in more than gruesome detail, relayed how corpses were processed by the Germans.

Of course,  the German government protested these “loathsome and ridiculous” claims.  But they were not believed.  After all, the article had been in The Times!

The Chinese, believing every word, declared war against Germany on 14 August 1917.

In 1925 a Conservative Member of the Parliament name John Charteris, who had been head of intelligence admitted he had fabricated the story.   The New York Times took it up, and revealed captions from photographs found on captured German soldiers were transposed.

So, here was an example of Fake News, way back… One Hundred Years Ago, which people believed.  Believed so strongly, they joined a war.