MODULE 3, UNIT 2
The History of Fake News 
Fake narratives, fake visuals, and strategies of disinformation  

Goal: Define authentic news, articulate the historical underpinnings of fake news and visual trickery, and relate today’s disinformation to past examples.

Defining Authentic News

In the previous chapter, we discussed five of the ten elements of journalism articulated by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in their classic The Elements of Journalism. The first item on the list is journalism’s obligation to the truth”^[1]

Journalists are on the front lines of trying to tell a verifiable and accurate news story. But, journalism is a process: Legendary Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke the story about the Watergate scandal that led to Richard Nixon resigning the presidency in 1974 described their method as reporting the “best obtainable version of the truth”^[2] – a notion that there is often more work to do, more angles to cover, more information to uncover and verify. In this way, journalism models the habits of skepticism and contingency at the heart of scientific method. Yet the adherence to truth-finding, verification, loyalty to community members, and independence from power are what make telling news stories different from other kinds of storytelling, including public relations, advertising, or fictional stories.

Real news is written by trained journalists who work for news operations that practice the journalism of verification. It is informed by a professional  code of ethics, and often by news organizations’ own standards and ethical guidelines that are publicly shared. Authentic news is written by journalists who are loyal to citizens and are committed to keeping them informed. Journalists writing real news do not embellish, exaggerate, or represent the talking points of a political party, corporation, or private entity. Real news’s commitment is to the public good, not private interests. Real news calls out the machinations of power.

Defining Fake News

 “Fake news” is a phrase you might have heard. Can you think of all the times you have heard someone use it? What was the phrase used to describe? For a history of the term “fake news,” see this BBC story. 

In our review of recent public discourse, we have found there are two main ways in which the term fake news is typically used.

1. An allegation: Someone calls authentic news “fake” in an attempt to undermine news reporting that is critical of their power. A common example would be a politician discrediting a news story they don’t like because it is damaging to their reputation: “That’s fake news!” they say. Rarely, though, is this accusatory speech act followed by any evidence that the news in question is actually fake.  In this example, fake news is authentic news labeled fake.
2. Misleading information by design: A non-journalist creates and disseminates information that is purposefully (rather than accidentally) false and misleading. This kind of disinformation pollutes the public sphere and notions of journalistic truthmaking. Philosophy professor Axel Gelfert, who has written widely about attacks on both journalistic and scientific truth, defines this type of “fake news” as “the deliberate presentation of (typically) false or misleading claims as news, where the claims are misleading by design.”^[3] When we use the term in this handbook, we are using it in this sense: Fake news is intentional disinformation.

Here is an example that illustrates both kinds of “fake news”:

In 2018, President Trump delivered a speech at the United Nations General Assembly that exaggerated his administration’s success rate (“In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country”). The U.N. audience snickered in response to this statement. Journalists throughout the world reported the moment as an unprecedented form of disrespect from Trump’s audience of global leaders. In response to the stories, at a press conference the next day Trump told journalists “Well that’s fake news.”^[4] President Trump didn’t like the way the news media framed him in a truthful but embarrassing way (see the ABC News report in Figure 1), so he labeled the accurate news reports fake (see Figure 2).

In the same news conference, Trump then created a false claim about the reaction to his U.N. speech (the second kind of fake news) by redefining the laughter as positive rather than negative, misleadingly reclaiming the narrative in his favor.

Figure 1                                                         Figure 2
https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/president-laughed-              https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=179026069660247 
delivering-speech-58080328

“Our country is stronger than it ever has been before, it’s true,” he said. “I mean it is true, and I heard a little rustle, and I said it’s true, and I heard smiles, and I said ‘Oh, I didn’t know it would be that kind of [reaction], and they weren’t laughing at me, they were laughing with me, we had fun.” He continued: “So, the fake news said people laughed at President Trump. “They didn’t laugh at me. People had a good time with me. We were doing it together. We had a good time. They respect what I’ve done.”  Trump sought to create a story that was demonstrably false.

By creating an alternative narrative, Trump’s lie (his reinterpretation of the laughter) attempted to undermine the real reporting that took place at the U.N. Indeed, fake news always undermines the construction of truth. However, these tactics are not new; they go back at least as far as ancient Greece and they have been part of U.S. media culture for centuries.^[5] 

History of Fake News

In the United States, disinformation in the form of fake news has been around since the beginning of U.S. politics and, in fact, defined a good part of the early partisan press. A notable example was the 1800 presidential election – a rematch between the incumbent President John Adams (of the Federalist Party) and Vice President Thomas Jefferson (of the Democratic-Republican Party) who nearly won the presidency four years earlier. This election was America’s fourth, and at this time in U.S. history, the runner-up in the presidential election became the vice president (a process which ended in 1800). The two bitter rivals, neck and neck once again, were supported by a highly partisan press that  engaged in propaganda smear campaigns.^[6] 

As the presidential campaign of 1800 grew more inflamed, some Federalist newspapers (Adams’ party) published fake stories that Jefferson had died in Monticello following “an indisposition of 48 hours.”^[7] The snail-like pace of newspaper distribution of the time meant that the fake news spread before confirmation came that Jefferson was very much alive. Ultimately, the ruse failed, the truth prevailed, and Jefferson won the election and became the nation’s third president.^[8] 

Another illustration of American fake news was during the penny press era, beginning in the 1830s. This time fakery was about selling more papers, not outlandishly undermining a particular candidate. Newspaper owners began targeting mass audiences (possible because papers cost only a penny) and filling them with sensational (and sometimes completely fabricated) stories, and selling copies on busy corners and newstands. In 1835, the  New York Sun ran a six-part series that began as a satire on what were contemporary scientific theories about life on the moon. But the satire turned into what is now known as the Great Moon Hoax, as  Sun writer Richard Adams Locke concocted an entire moon world filled with magical creatures, including what he called “Man-Bats,” which had curly orange hair, yellow faces that resembled smart-looking orangutans, and large wings made of thin membrane.^[9] The Man-Bat story was fake news crafted to sell many papers, and it did. But by the fourth article in the series, the public had begun to catch on to the hoax. Note, here is where the goal is not information dissemination for the public good, but personal profit for the owners of the outlet.

Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Reproduction number LC-USZ62-2310 (b&w film copy neg.). In the Public Domain.

Types of fake news

Over time, at least five types of fake news stories have arrived on the media scene in the United States and around the world. These five types constitute a continuum, ranging from more helpful to democracy to more harmful to democracy.^[10] These include satirists, hoaxers and hucksters, opinion entrepreneurs, propagandists, and information anarchists.

Satirists are more helpful to democracy because satirical  irony and sarcasm is very often a useful form of social criticism. Literary critic Northrop Frye defined satire as “poetry assuming a special function of analysis, that is, of breaking up the lumber of stereotypes, fossilized beliefs, superstitious terrors, crank theories, pedantic dogmatisms, oppressive fashions, and all other things that impede the free movement of society.”^[11] News satire uses research and humor to expose the foibles and errors of the news media and the powerful. News satire in the U.S. includes the online newspaper The Onion,  “Weekend Update” segments and politics sketches on Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Seth Meyers’ “A Closer Look” segments on his Late Night program, The Babylon Bee, and millions of memes. Satirists may create fake news stories (like The Onion does), but do so in an ironic way that audiences clearly understand the story is fake, although sometimes people misinterpret satire as authentic news. Satire is intentional, playful disinformation. Ultimately, it’s not trying to confuse the audience, but instead lead them to a critical reading of the news or news subjects or events.

Hoaxers and hucksters generally aren’t aiming for political power, but instead are trying to make money by promoting stories or products of dubious quality and authenticity. Famous hoaxes include the forged Hitler Diaries, the Bigfoot film clip, and the image of the Loch Ness Monster (which sustains a robust tourism business at the Scottish lake). Ripley’s Believe it or Not! museums in tourist locations around the world are hot sites for hucksterism, displaying odd items that – as the name suggests – may be believable, or not.

In 2023, a hoax proliferated across social media and news media showing a fictitious Donald Trump being pursued and then surrounded by New York City police, purportedly after a court appearance. Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat (a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group) used artificial intelligence to create the phony images. Higgins wasn’t trying to profit from the hoax. The point was to illustrate the dangers of AI in creating fake news, he said.

Source: Screenshot of public X account by Bettina Fabos, October 30, 2024.

Other hoaxes featuring global political figures, as well as the Pope, have similarly been created for fun and discussion. Some of the hoaxes, however, are skillfully done and might be believed by people not paying attention.

Opinion entrepreneurs are creators at media outlets – ranging from memes and social media to websites, talk radio, cable news, and podcasts – who seek to place and amplify false or inaccurate stories in the mainstream media to gradually change the way people in a society think about certain topics. Researchers Peter Dreier and Christopher R. Martin identified opinion entrepreneurs as “non-elite individuals, businesses, and quasi-political organizations who, often by virtue of a web page or blog, work outside the traditional definitions of those who influence the news and public agenda. . . . Their influence is magnified by the fact that they work collaboratively, as part of a network, echoing the same message.”^[12] 

Opinion entrepreneurs strive to get their opinions published in the mainstream media and accepted as legitimate. For example, in 2022, several opinion entrepreneurs, including podcaster Joe Rogan and certain politicians and anti-LGBTQ groups posting on social media, spread the false rumor that several school districts across the country put litter boxes in bathrooms to accommodate students who dress as animals and identify as “furries.” School districts in Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Michigan debunked the claims, yet some opinion entrepreneurs still persisted.^[13] The barrage of false claims puts authentic media in a difficult position, because as they reveal the claims as false through verified reporting, they also give more exposure to ridiculous and often harmful disinformation. Today, opinion entrepreneurism proliferates on social media sites such as X, Facebook, and YouTube, where both plausible falsehoods and factual stories and events circulate. The Daily Caller, Epoch Times, and The Blaze are well-known opinion entrepreneur websites.

The headline of a Politifact article that debunks false claims by opinion entrepreneurs.

Source: Screenshot of Politifact, by Christopher R. Martin on Dec. 4, 2024.

The danger is that in recirculating the story in order to debunk it, news outlets may add to its believability. The problem of fake news circulating, and hence gaining credibility as it circulates, was studied by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) which researches civic online reasoning. They found that people in the United States “of all ages, from digitally savvy tweens to high-IQ academics, fail to ask important questions about content they encounter on a browser,” retweet links without reading them first, and over-rely on search engines by incorrectly thinking what appears higher in results is more accurate.^[14] As bad data circulates in the form of fake news and others repeat it people become more willing to believe the fake news the next time they see it.

The contemporary media environment makes the issue of fake news more problematic than the historical examples. MIT researchers have found that on Twitter, “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information . . .”^[15] Fake news spreads more than authentic news. When looking at how fake news circulated, researchers found bots accelerated the spread of fake and true news at the same rate. This means it is humans, not bots, who are circulating fake news. Researchers found people are more likely to retweet fake news than authentic news.^[16] The difference in circulation patterns means it takes true stories six times as long to reach the same number of people as fake stories. Thus, the likelihood that people see fake news stories is magnified. And, as they see fake news more often, they tend to believe it more.

Propagandists are official government purveyors of disinformation who spread partisan messages meant to propagate a certain point of view. The governing regimes in North Korea, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are among the most easily identifiable propagandists, each with a secure political lock on major national media outlets (by owning them outright or by influencing them through coercion) and a network of news and media that supports the goals of the regime both within the country and outside its borders. Propagandists can also work through indirect, hard-to-trace routes to spread disinformation, often through counterfeit opinion entrepreneur sites and identities.

Russia, for example, uses official sites like the news agency Sputnik and its global television channel RT (carried by cable TV systems and platforms like YouTube) and corresponding “international” websites to communicate its propaganda.

A screenshot from Russia’s RT International website, Oct. 26, 2024. The one-sided “news” site supports only the point of view of the Putin administration (Russia’s ruling party).

RT also uses covert networks of fake news sites and thousands of phony social media profiles (with images generated by artificial intelligence) to spread disinformation in local languages throughout Western Europe and the United States.^[17] In the United States, Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, the social medium X, and other conservative news organizations also serve as propaganda outlets, in this case for Donald Trump and the Republican Party.^[18] When the party is in power, they doubly serve as government propaganda organs. (For example, Elon Musk, who owns X, also works for the Trump administration and is a top advisor and the largest campaign contributor to Trump. In the case of the social medium Truth Social, Donald Trump is the majority owner.)^[19] As Donald Trump’s administration was set to begin in January 2025, he had appointed or nominated at least 18 former Fox News personalities to serve in his administration.^[20] The U.S. Democratic Party has no equivalent media system.^[21] 

 Finally, the most harmful threat to democracy are people who are Information Anarchists. These are people who wish to create disorder and undermine the legitimacy of shared truth, creating the notion that truth may never be determined. Information Anarchists sow doubt and mistrust – something called gaslighting.

The term “gaslight” comes from a 1938 British play called Gas Light and the 1944 American film adaptation Gaslight. In the film, Charles Boyer plays Gregory Anton, an evil husband who tries to convince his young wife, Paula (Ingrid Bergman), that she is going mad. Each night Gregory secretly searches the sealed attic for jewels he wants to steal. When he turns on the gaslights in the attic during his secret searches, the gaslights in their home dim. When he later comes home, Gregory convinces Paula that the dimming of the gaslights and the sounds in the attic are all in her imagination. Of course, she was correct, and he was attempting to gaslight her.

A frame from Gaslight, 1944, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer and directed by George Cukor. Used under Fair Use exemption to U.S. Copyright law.

Today, Internet trolls – who often meet on X, Reddit, and message boards like 4chan and 8kun – take delight in gaslighting and creating disruption. Many operate independently, enjoying the power that comes from creating social chaos. Other gaslight trolling comes from state propagandists in Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, who want to add to the anarchy in order to destabilize Western democracy. In this way, information anarchy is part of the cyberwarfare toolbox.^[22] 

Information anarchy came to Springfield, Ohio (population 58,000) in 2024 when a Facebook user posted a baseless rumor about Haitian immigrants stealing neighbors’ cats and eating them. Information anarchists like X handles @Pismo_B and @ConservBrief (below) spread the disinformation, which amounted to an attack on all immigrants in Springfield.

Source: Screenshot of Pismo and Conservative Brief public Twitter accounts, October 30, 2024 by Bettina Fabos.

The disinformation was so successfully pushed across social media and propaganda sites, including cable TV network Fox News, that former President Trump presented the fake story as fact during the September 2024 presidential debate against opponent Kamala Harris. Information anarchy led to actions on the streets. As The Guardian reported, “armed neo-Nazi members of Blood Tribe – a hardcore white supremacist group, according to the Anti-Defamation League – flew flags bearing swastikas and marched through a prominent downtown street [in Springfield] while a jazz and blues festival was taking place nearby in August.” They pointed guns at cars and yelled “go the fuck back to Africa.”^[23] (Haiti is on an island in the Caribbean.)

Unfortunately, as we have mentioned earlier, research has shown that social media posts that are divisive and trigger anger at out-groups and political opponents tend to drive the most “likes” and “shares.”^[24] Thus, what is bad for society is good for the social media business.

In a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and angry. Back then, in 2018, there was an upper limit to the amount of “shit” available, because all of it had to be created by a person (other than some low-quality stuff produced by bots). Now, however, artificial intelligence can enable the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. For example, the AI program GPT-4 can work from a short prompt about a topic and a tone and spit out as many essays, posts, or stories as one wants, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence. Thus, creating propaganda can be automated. Then, uncritical audiences circulate that information as though it was true.

The History of Photographic Truth

Like any text, images can be easily manipulated and have a long history of fakery. Sometimes people are not depicting something that actually exists. When photography was first invented in the 1840s, French daguerreotype inventor Hippolyte Bayard pretended he was dead in one of the first selfies ever taken. According to the story, Bayard was angry that another daguerreotype inventor, Louis Daguerre (who the process was named after), was getting more attention than Bayard, and so he was making a point.

One of the first examples of fake photography: Hippolyte Bayard pretending to be drowned, 1840.

Source: Hippolyte Bayard, “Self Portrait of a Drowned Man,” October 18, 1940. Public Domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hippolyte_Bayard_-_Drownedman_1840.jpg.

Even today, photos can create false inferences or impressions. How many times have you smiled as you posed for a photo, when you actually were not feeling happy at all? In earlier times, people did not smile or act relaxed, often because early photographic processes required them to sit or stand still for 15-20 minutes, or because they were terrified of the brand new technology and of being “captured” or “shot” by a camera, or because smiling in the late 19th century felt vulgar. As literary theorist Roland Barthes pointed out, people act differently in photos when they know we are being surveilled with a camera, even if the photographer is attempting to capture reality.^[25] It wasn’t until the early 20th century that corporate mass producers of cameras and film like Kodak began advertising campaigns to encourage subjects to smile and say “cheese,” as a way to make everyday photography common and fun.^[26]        

Photographers also have a long history of altering the objects and people in a photograph. During the Civil War, a photojournalist seeking to bring more battlefield drama to a photo would move corpses or cannon balls around. Early photographers also added props (sometimes dangled by an imperceptible string), or asked people to pose in a specific manner.
 

While photography may have offered people assurance that a photo’s subjects actually existed, photographers have a long history of faking reality. Early examples include the Cottingly Fairies from England in 1917, a series of five photo manipulations created by Elsie Wright (age 16) that featured her cousin Frances Griffith (age 9) and various cardboard fairy cutouts. The fairy series was published a few years later in a British magazine; some people believed they were real fairies.

    
Three of the five photographs,taken by Elsie Wright in 1917 depicting fairy scenes with her 9-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths. Source: Wikimedia Commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cottingley_Fairies_1.jpg; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CottingleyFairies2.jpg; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CottingleyFairies3.jpg. All are in the Public Domain.

Examples of visual trickery span the entire history of photography, first with over a century of negative and print retouching, followed by the era of digital manipulation via Photoshop, followed by today’s image manipulation through AI. This photo composition of General Ulysses S. Grant on his horse in front of American Civil War troops at City Point, Virginia was a composite made to look real, created in 1902 from three different 1860-era photographs.^[27]

 
1902 photographic composite by Levin C. Handy based on three Civil War-era photographs.

Source: Library of Congress: Handy, Levin C. , Copyright Claimant. General Grant at City Point. Virginia Fishers Hill United States, ca. 1902. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2007681056/.

Today, these kinds of composites can be made in seconds using Photoshop or AI. Manipulating photographic images is standard for the fashion magazine and media industry, leading to criticism of the industry creating unattainable beauty standards, since few human images depicted by the fashion industry are ever real. Retouch artist Ken Harris explains in the video Sex, Lies and Photoshop that a single magazine photo typically goes through at least 20-30 rounds of touch ups before being approved for publication. Arms are smoothed out, necks elongated, freckles removed, washboard abs created, frizzy hair toned down.^[28] The final image of a fashion model is often a composite of three or four other models. Public relations  professionals and political propagandists routinely manipulate photographs as part of their jobs as well, adding people who weren’t there, deleting objects that make a company or politician look bad, adjusting a photo to intentionally make a competitor look bad, and altering visual truths.

With photo editing tools baked into today’s social media apps, anyone can routinely touch up their own photos before posting them, adding to the manufactured visual presentation of reality. After 2015 with the advent of AI, digital fakes proliferated through AI image and video-generating tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, Adobe Firefly and Runway.

AI-generated fakes were initially easy to detect because many in generated photos, details, like hands or the bodies in a crowd looked muddled; videos looked jittery, especially lip movement when people talked.^[29] Today, this is no longer the case. AI image generation is incredible, a powerful means for constructing deep fakes.^[30] Part of reading images today, then, means considering the likely possibility that any digital image or video has been digitally altered.