> Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…
Thanks for the quoteinvestigator link... I was likewise reminded of Terry Pratchett's version, also mentioned there:
"A lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on."
It's quite amazing that the researchers essentially quantified those idioms. And it's also somewhat surprising that none of the idioms found their way into the article. :)
Indeed, I went looking for the version I was familiar with ("A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.") in order to correctly attribute it, whereupon I discovered the source of that version is unknown, so I quoted the Swift version since I it's centuries older, sourced, and I liked it best after reading them all.
This was from March but it is a good question. It prompted me to do some spot checks on Facebook virality and Twitter virality as well.
One of the things that stands out in false stories is that because they are false they stay "on message" in their falseness. This contrasts with stories that are more truthful which tend to include questions and unknowns that might later contradict or modify the story.
So for an example, a false story about a series of events leading up to an outcome, there are no events mentioned that suggest randomness or any discussion of alternate ways the outcome could have come about. Where as truthful stories have either tests that were done for counter factual narratives or suggestions for other areas that were not covered as completely.
Basically a common theme in truthful stories was they still included "inconvenient" facts which might or might not be significant and the false stories contain no such facts or even hints.
If I still had an ontologist I could talk to I'd try to figure out if we score stories using an ontological structure score (where perfect scoring is most likely false :-).
> One of the things that stands out in false stories is that because they are false they stay "on message" in their falseness. This contrasts with stories that are more truthful which tend to include questions and unknowns that might later contradict or modify the story.
This is the main barometer that I use to see if I live in an echo chamber or not and orient myself in the world. The people I listen to (Rogan, Peterson, Weinsteins, Rubin, and to a lesser extent Shapiro and Harris) tend not to speak authoritatively except in narrow circumstances and their opponents (and people I disagree with) tend to speak as if their opinions are self-evidently correct and disagreement is out of the question.
Unrelatedly, another tool is to examine my mentors' critic's arguments. It is very telling that Jordan Peterson is equally accused of being far left and far right.
>This is the main barometer that I use to see if I live in an echo chamber or not and orient myself in the world. The people I listen to (Rogan, Peterson, Weinsteins, Rubin, and to a lesser extent Shapiro and Harris) tend not to speak authoritatively except in narrow circumstances and their opponents (and people I disagree with) tend to speak as if their opinions are self-evidently correct and disagreement is out of the question.
I've found it to be a useful tool in other spheres as well.
The further you are from mainstream medicine, the greater the confidence signaling. Doctors tend to express the least confidence, and crackpots the most. This is why alternative medicine thrives.
It's funny how people attribute all sorts of wonderful qualities to the people they agree with and negative qualities to the people they disagree with, independently of whether they actually have those qualities.
This is used in assessing stories from history as well - a story with aspects that reflect poorly on the hero is considered to be more likely to be truthful than one that lauds the hero in all things.
Deep learning! It does everything really well, especially reducing complex problems to a single number. It's well known that anything which doesn't fit in the reals isn't really real, if you know what I mean.
In my observation these fact checking organisations usually fall down on the left's side of things, so either it's predominantly the right that lies, or the fact checkers conveniently ignore controversies that are open and shut bad behaviour on the left, or my perception is incorrect. Though I have to say the whole concept of a single self-appointed authoritative source troubles me, what with its Ministry of Truth overtones.
> the fact checkers conveniently ignore controversies that are open and shut bad behaviour on the left
Could be true, I guess. Everyone has "perspective" about what is important. That still doesn't seem to be a reason to disbelieve a fact checker when they tell you that, say, POTUS is lying, though.
> Though I have to say the whole concept of a single self-appointed authoritative source troubles me, what with its Ministry of Truth overtones.
There are literally multiple competing fact checking organizations. How exactly does that have overtones of centrally enforced authority? How in particular given that the actual central authority in this country has made a habit about calling correct but unflattering coverage "lies"?
The problem I see is that unless these organisations are beyond criticism they can always be accused of bias and all their work dismissed, and then consider the context:
'It is impossible to overstate the degree of daily vituperation visited upon the president in the media. Comics and actors use their non-political programs to attack him, often to the implicit applause of the press. Virtually all coverage outside the conservative Fox News and isolated conservative outlets is negative, often couched in highly hostile terms. Virtually all of the columnists at the New York Times and the Washington Post, America’s two most respected dailies, despise Trump – and that includes nearly all of the conservative, libertarian and Republican columnists too. Trump supporters who follow news at all cannot escape the daily blast of negativity. This has, predictably, hardened the attitudes of many Trump supporters.'
You're conflating fact checkers with "the media", and sort of changing the subject.
Can you explain again why exactly you don't trust answers you get from Snopes or Politifact? Don't tell me what "many Trump supporters" think. Tell me why you don't trust them.
Can you tell me why I should trust them? Shouldn't we approach these organisations that purport to be the single source of truth
with extreme scepticism?
Apart from that in my observation these organisations are not impartial, and I think in the context of the universal anti-Trump media they are easily dismissed as just another group suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.
I should make clear I don't live in the US and so have no direct stake in this and follow it more out of curiosity/amusement than anything else. I'm not going to try to argue Trump doesn't lie, but I think CNN etc are becoming hysterical.
Because they have a years-long(11 for Politifact, 19 for Snopes) history of being right. They're consistently, reliably right. So yeah, I trust them. I trusted them under the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. I trust them now.
Maybe you are the one who needs to re-evaluate priors: maybe, just maybe, the "universal anti-Trump media" environment is driven by some kind of objective (heh) truth about the Trump administration's relationship with (heh, heh) the truth, and not by mere opinion. Maybe.
Bush wrecked a ton of stuff. His administration spun like crazy. They didn't like like Trump lies. No one ever has lied like Trump lies. That's not "opinion", it just is.
You are just asserting here though aren't you? There are those that assert just as forcefully that they are wrong. On what basis am I supposed to choose which is correct?
As a disinterested observer it seems like every couple of weeks the media switch to a new script in a desperate search for something that will stick: Russia! Gun control! Sexist! Racist! Stormy Daniels! on and on yet apparently unsuccessful thus far as polling with his base looks pretty good for him. Perhaps it's all substantive, but even if it is I don't think the tactics are working. Surely better to stand back a little and let Trump make himself look foolish with his never ending ridiculous tweets?
Trump seems more conman than anything else to me, but the media would have us believe he's the Antichrist.
In the first place the post puts words in my mouth, and second it then directs me to answer questions in a not particularly civil manner. And you are borderline gaslighting me by questioning my response!
>>In my observation these fact checking organisations usually fall down on the left's side of things, so either it's predominantly the right that lies, or the fact checkers conveniently ignore controversies that are open and shut bad behaviour on the left, or my perception is incorrect.
it's funny that you mention liberalism because the common understanding of the meaning of "liberalism" has shifted over time. Classical liberalism is much closer to libertarianism than progressivism.
Do you honestly believe this? To what would you attribute the difference - for example do you think that the right are morally corrupted, and the left righteous?
'Publishing Treasury analysis, [George Osborne] said a Leave vote would cause an "immediate and profound" economic shock, with growth between 3% and 6% lower.'
Versus:
'That Immediate Brexit Recession - UK GDP Growth 0.6%, Best In Developed World'
> predicts Gross Domestic Product would grow by 3.6% less than currently predicted. In such a scenario, it suggests sterling would fall by 12%, unemployment would rise by 520,000, average wages would fall by 2.8% and house prices would be hit by 10%.
Sterling fell by pretty much exactly 12% (that's got to be luck though - no way their models are that good).
This drives me nuts that our supposedly best publications still have not developed the habit of linking sources, especially on an article that is concerned with spreading falsities. The irony is overwhelming.
This is an op-ed so in this case I'd say it's more on the author than the publication. In general though I agree, it'd be good to see a well cited news source.
It's quite unfair to compare misinformation campaigns orchestrated by the whole US government and it's intelligence agencies, as was the case with Iraq's WMDs, to online propaganda organized by private individuals to the benefit of various political candidates or their own online circulation.
What happened with Iraq was not just fake news, it was fake governing, it was another order of magnitude. Miller and the NYT were just some of the many useful idiots.
Nah, the backlash we're seeing against mainstream media these days are, I believe, in a large part driven by those reporters that failed to do their due diligence when it came to Iraq. Reporters should expect to be told lies often, when those lies are blindly printed and distributed it does a lot of damage to society's trust. I think with Iraq it went beyond negligence, but likely not at all levels, preferring to hire hawkish reporters is an effective way to keep the train rolling.
That said, singling out NYT as the OP did is sort of hilarious, all the media outlets ran the same terrible stories and often avoided booking guests that would speak against the war.
The definition of lying generally involves intent. Do you think these journalists generally are intending to mislead with statements they know are untrue in the same way the producers of fake news do?
I tend to think intent is an outmoded system of morality. It can be faked easily, even to oneself.
It is always better to judge outcomes. Actions, not words..
Lying, then, should be judged not on level of intent, but on severity. And on this metric, all those reporters involved should feel, and be judged, personally responsible for the deaths in the iraq war and aftermath.
Nobody in this thread suggested that the journalists were lying, just that they were terrible at their jobs. They repeated the official line, without questioning the source.
The title of this article and post presents a question. The first comment in this thread appears to be answering that question by blaming it on the NYT.
Saying the NYTimes spread lies (answering the question in the post title) in a context WMD's or other contexts is not the same thing as saying the NYTimes or journalists were/are lying (with intent).
Right. By blindly parroting the government's line. By failing to do due diligence, or be skeptical of the sources, etc. Those are all different things than lying. They're lapses in professional care, or shortcomings in ability. Straight up lying could also be involved, sure. But lying isn't necessary for blame to be assigned.
This behaviour covers the whole spectrum from deliberate misinformation to honest belief in the lies they were fed. In between you can find journalists that don't care about the truth but are ready to write anything that pays or ones that would lie for the sake of (in their opinion) a greater good, or ones that would spread lies out of sloppiness or ignorance. This applies to producers of fake news too.
I am not sure anyone should bother finding a proper label for each shade of those lies.
Nah, the backlash we're seeing against mainstream media these days are, I believe, in a large part driven by those reporters that failed to do their due diligence when it came to Iraq.
Except that the “MSM is lying” crowd still overwhelmingly supports W. bush and the Iraq war, and didn’t seem to mind what the media had to say for 8 years of his presidency. This whole thing kicked off under Obama when “alt” news was talking about FEMA internment camps and that kind of madness, and later when Pizzagate and other stories weren’t carried in the mainstream.
If your theory were right, you’d expect the Left to be the ones who rejected the media, but that isn’t what happened.
Edit To be clear, I’m saying that this is less about skepticism (healthy) than rejection of media in favor of preferable narratives. It’s the extension of disliking what science education has to say about evolution and seeking to have Creationism taught in schools. When you can’t beat them, avoid them, craft your own narrative and reject reality.
Much of the left were jaded by Iraq; personally, I am probably stuck for life as an institutional news media skeptic, because it all happened when I was growing up.
The left has been angry with the media forever though. Have you read Manufacturing Consent?
When it comes to the Iraq war everyone was lied to. Certainly war hawks might have been happy, but the majority of Americans on both sides of the aisles dislike unnecessary wars. Honestly, participants in the media and those on this message board are likely to be among the less effected by wars but people from the full political spectrum die in combat.
To clarify, though, I didn't meant to say that the right wouldn't be skeptical of the media, it seems like both sides have been more skeptical of news coverage in general which is (mostly) a good thing.
And I do think a lot of people on the left have been disbursed of their enchantment with the media, there was a strong skew in coverage during the 2016 primaries in the democratic party.
> Certainly war hawks might have been happy, but the majority of Americans on both sides of the aisles dislike unnecessary wars.
It doesn’t matter what they like or dislike, it matters who they vote for. For most of the USA’s history, Americans have consistently voted for national candidates who ended up starting or continuing unnecessary war. This is true for both major parties. The country has been involved in voluntary military conflicts for how many years of its history?
As it happens in most things related to media, the left blazed a trail and the right perfected the exploitation techniques.
The internet in the '90s was a fervour of "indie media", "citizen reporting", "the revolution will not be televised", culminating in the Iraq war build-up, which was a watershed of sorts. Now the exact same attitudes are being exploited in a coordinated manner by the right, anti-vaxxers, astroturfers and other special interests.
This is not just a US phenomenon, by the way -- the same can be observed pretty much globally.
Nobody with any capacity for critical thought ever believed there were WMDs in Iraq. The government's disinformation campaign was not sophisticated at all. It wasn't the whole government -it was pretty much just Cheney, Bush, and Rice. The NYT reporters weren't useful idiots - they new exactly what they were doing. Selling papers. They pretty much admitted it later https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...
>It's quite unfair to compare misinformation campaigns orchestrated by the whole US government and it's intelligence agencies
I think you're both right and wrong. Wrong because there are still interesting questions about how falsehoods propagate over networks in the case of Iraq and WMD. But right in the sense that there's an underlying structural difference how and why the falsehoods are being generated in one case vs the other.
It's quite unfair to compare misinformation campaigns orchestrated by the whole US government
Oh come on. The NYT et al have not hesitated or been reluctant in any way to criticise the current US government. They equally gleefully supported the WMD story because it suited them to do so, pandered to them feeling important.
> Do we have reason to believe that the government knew there were no WMDs?
Yes; many of the specific bases of support they pointed to had been debunked before they were publicized by, among others, UN weapons inspectors. While it's far from proof, that alone is reason to believe that they were knowingly fabricating their claims.
Would you be able to link to a source about the UN weapons inspectors or something similar? All I have is pretty much hearsay and I was young enough when the towers fell that I understood "bad guys did it" but not much more.
I wish I could find a TV interview with a German inspector I watched back then. They got some super secret leads from the CIA, went to the locations and never found anything. The response from the US was to cut them off from information and shout even louder that they had all this bullet-proof information.
I don't know if Bush and friends really believed their claims but if you looked at it from a neutral point of view it was very clear that they had made up their minds to invade Iraq and desperately tried and failed to find evidence.
You are putting the burden on the wrong shoulders. Cheney et el claimed to have extensive proof, which was later shown to be made up. Then there were things which were debunked even before we started the campaign, such as the aluminum rods which were supposedly for a nuclear reactor.
They didn't know there were none. It's hard to be sure of a negative like that. They knew the chances were too slim to justify a war without a lot of embellishing.
The joke while I was in Iraq was "We know he has WMD's because we have the receipts from the Iran-Iraq war when we gave them to him."... but we mostly knew what and where they were, their lifespan, etc, and that for the most part, "there was no "there" there". A few older things that had been heavily degraded were found.
I'll never forget being handed the same picture C Powell showed at the briefing and told "this is what we are looking for", given how we found out later that was bullshit.
Iraq was for other reasons. WMD was just one piece of how it was "sold".
It feels like you're implying that NYT should be absolved of this. Make no mistake - no one held a gun to their head and made them print those stories.
"Credible estimates of Iraq War casualties range from 151,000 violent deaths as of June 2006 (per the Iraq Family Health Survey) to 461,000 total deaths as of June 2011 (per PLOS Medicine 2013), over 60% of them violent."
"Other disputed estimates, such as the 2006 Lancet study and the 2007 Opinion Research Business (ORB) survey—which likely overestimate mortality—put the numbers as high as 655,000 total deaths as of June 2006 (over 90% of them violent) and 1.2 million violent deaths as of August 2007 respectively. Meanwhile, body counts—which likely underestimate mortality—put the numbers as low as 110,000 violent deaths as of April 2009"
The Wikipedia summary needs editing. The paragraph has a lot of weasel words. Who decides what is credible? Who decides what is likely an underestimate? And AFAIK, all the estimates are disputed - yet someone will get the impression that the Lancet ones are the disputed ones and not the PLOS one.
> The cost of the NYT's 'disinformation' about Iraq was a war that cost hundreds of billions and thousands of lives.
Are you saying that had the NYT reported things differently the Iraq war wouldn't have happened? That seems unreasonably strong because it implies that the New York Times had a greater responsibility for the war than did the president and congress.
Perhaps if the entire mainstream media had reported things differently (instead of seemingly all of them being blindly in favor of it), then yes, maybe it wouldn't have happened. That is assuming of course that the US government actually cares what the public thinks when powerful government officials want war.
Perhaps you're right, but at the time, most mainstream media was simply reporting on what the executive branch had already claimed was proven: Saddam had WMDs. At the time, there were no government/intelligence officials saying otherwise. The media had no strong reason to doubt the government's claims before the war started, as well as no way to validate or disprove the claims. And it's not like it would've been the most shocking revelation in the world if it were true; Saddam was a despot who had undoubtedly heavily researched, developed, and used WMDs in the past and had motive to continue stockpiling WMDs.
The media certainly should have been more skeptical and critical of the government, but I'd say at that early stage, the blame mostly falls on Bush and his advisors. If you were working at one of these news outlets at that time, I bet you would have reported it similar to the rest of the mainstream media, too.
The media is not supposed to simply parrot government talking points, at least not in a free society.
Even if Saddam did have WMDs, so what? So does North Korea and other hostile regimes, and so does the US. Couldn't the media have questioned whether or not that was a valid excuse for war?
That's the type of thing Phil Donahue of MSNBC did, and his questioning of the war got him fired.
History is important, too, but apparently not to them. Was it ever mentioned in the mainstream media that the US itself had provided billions of dollars in military equipment and support to Saddam, including dual use technologies used for chemical and biological weapons?
You're right, but I think hindsight is 20/20. This was one of the events that let us know to be much more skeptical of government intelligence and military claims.
It wasn't like they learned their lesson, either. They've continued to staff up with morons and to report a lot of falsehoods and distractions in the years since the Iraq War days.
I can't tell if you're just using sarcasm here, but there's nothing "treasonous" about not trusting intelligence agencies that throughout history have not been very trustworthy.
You should also stop using "treason" incorrectly. Here [1] is a great debate between Glenn Greenwald and James Risen where Glenn breaks down how important it is to not use Treason in an incorrect manner, and explains (sourced) exactly what Treason is defined as under US law with examples throughout history.
It's nice to see someone say that when a person would be hounded to no end online if they showed any skepticism of intelligence agencies' assertions that Russia meddled in the 2016 elections
Interesting to have Greenwald define treason. Is he trying to keep himself out of that illustrious crowd? Guess living in a foreign country makes one braver than usual.
whether I am addressing this to you or the audience: it has come out in the years since that in fact the US intelligence community agreed there was no credible threat of WMDs in Iraq, but they mostly kept their mouth shut when the Bush administration claimed otherwise.
That's also my impression. I followed that closely.
It's also my impression that the US intelligence community tried to warn the Bush administration about the 9/11 attackers, but that Condoleezza Rice blew them off.[0]
> It's also my impression that the US intelligence community tried to warn the Bush administration about the 9/11 attackers, but that Condoleezza Rice blew them off.
Nah, the official report from the CIA was FOIAed. IMO this meme that the CIA saw it all right is just Washington internal politics leaking out.
But it wasn't just the CIA. I've read that the NSA had intercepts.[0] And regarding the NSA, I tend to trust Bamford. I also gather that NSA staff didn't want to reveal too many specifics, to avoid compromising methods etc, and that their reticence proved counterproductive.
The FBI were reportedly also close to the hijackers.[1] And they also have lots of data on Saudi connections.[2]
Also, there used to be an article on salon.com about a team of Mossad agents that was tracking the 9/11 hijackers. But now I don't find it. As I recall, there were connections to young Mossad agents in the US, who posed as artists, selling their work door-to-door.[3] I've also read that it was rather a rite of passage for young agents. With the US being relatively safe for training.
Costs of those wars are going to be, at the final tally, around $6 billion. Most of it will be through deserved veterans benefits, as was/is the case with Vietnam. Trump has recently been claiming $7 billion, although I haven’t seen evidence for that.
Personal attacks and name-calling will get you banned here regardless of how wrong someone else is. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on.
Edit: actually, since you've done this repeatedly after we warned you, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
There's no "propaganda trolling" here. The newspapers & media conglomerates pay a big role in lying to the American public to manufacture consent, with the help of the US government and intelligence agencies. They work together.
Indeed. It's called "Operation Mockingbird". I'm sure it's a different name by now, but all these people talking about this subject, I usually do a ctrl+f "mockingbird" and when I see nothing I know they aren't getting to the heart of the issue.
Another thing no one talks about? The massive consolidation via mergers and acquisitions in the media/journalism world. It's been show multiple times that ownership is used to influence those things, but when those ownerships become monopolies owned by fewer and fewer oligarchical uber-rich, there are less and less voices in the wilderness speaking truth.
What I do is find a truth teller and read all his or her stuff. Robert Fisk, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, Steve Coll, Matt Taibbi, Michael Hastings (assassinated), Gary Webb (assassinated), Jeremy Scahill, Richard Grove, and John Perkins are just a few on my list.
This pretty much quantifies one of my core beliefs about human behavior: people are dishonest by nature.
The reward mechanisms for our world are clearly optimized for dishonesty and deception. This isn’t to make some kind of statement about our culture, rather it’s an observation about reality. Dishonesty and falsity are everywhere, and you even find it in nature and animals.
I don’t think it has anything to do with good or bad per se, as it does with the path of least resistance; a lie is almost always more connvienent than the truth. People who are most successful tend to be those that are the most dishonest and are also very good at knowing how to tell fact from fiction which they then use to create more elaborate offensive and defensive models of the world.
If you think about it this way it doesn’t seem that odd, as even nature and evolution are constantly truth testing, it’s like at some level you must assume everything is a lie until proven otherwise, and even that evidence may itself be just a more elaborate falsehood.
People rarely go to the movies to be entertained by the truth.
Things are probably more nuanced than that. People are also honest by nature.
Telling the truth has way less cognitive load, and people generally aren't going to be stupid enough to get stuck in weaving an elaborate net of lies just to support that one original lie that they refuse to come clean on.
But there's also certain levels of dishonesty or lies by omission etc that people will do at a social level. Sometimes it's even beneficial for greater harmony between people.
I bet game theorists have studied this type of stuff quite a bit.
IIRC, the research (or some research) shows that altruism is an adaptive behavior, an evolutionary advantage. We're social beings; we survive or die as groups.
If you think about it, most people are honest most of the time. Most comments in this discussion are honest; if I go to the store, the salesperson doesn't lie to me. My coworkers and family don't. There are exceptions, but honesty is pretty normal.
You know what else spreads online? Truth that the mainstream media wont touch, or would rather suppress. Take for instance this smug, misrepresentative Washington Post editorial on a documentary about the geopolitically significant Magnitsky Act, a film which western audiences would probably never see if it wasn't for the internet.
After reading about all this "fake news" phenomena, I came across this TEDx talk by Sharyl Attkisson: How Real Is Fake News? [1]. She's a former reported for CBS News [2] and in the video, she explains where the term comes from and what the long-term consequences are. If you have 10 min of free time, give it a listen.
Come on. Sheryl Attkisson is now a reporter for Sinclair - the local news equivalent of Fox. Her integrity was compromised at CBS News and it's now non-existent.
Her talk is a carefully crafted piece of propaganda (which is consistent with her career as a right wing ideologue who is quite selective of who and what she chooses to investigate). The reality is that, for about 2 weeks in 2016, the term "fake news" was used to refer to the sort of manufactured lies that were spread by Russian bots on Facebook ... before the right wing coopted term to refer to actual news stories from legitimate news organizations, and to this day Trump and the right wing routinely dismiss true stories as "fake news".
(And of course some right winger was quick to downvote this.)
Edit: it looks like you've been doing this a ton, as well as posting uncivil and unsubstantive comments repeatedly. We ban accounts that do this. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
I know the authors suggested and found some evidence for novelty being the reason why false news is so compelling, but might it not be that it fits whatever narrative or agenda is being promoted? You can make up whatever false news you want, but you can't make up facts, so false news will always be more likely to fit the narrative.
Another possible reason is that if you tell your friends something is true, and later find out from a more reliable source that you were deceived, you then look gullible believing it in the first place, and even if you don't tell them, you'll feel gullible unless you hang on to your original belief.
I ran across an intance of this from a few years ago ... 1892: the J.P. Morgan and the Bankers' Manifesto hoax.
This turned up as a meme, but it seemed a litle too good to be true.
Still, the story had legs, getting passed around progressive-party newspapers of the late 19th centuries (or at least the ones with snoozing or unscrupulous editors who didn't denounce the author), in books, and by Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. (father of the aviator) on the House floor in Washington, D.C.
And in contemporary Internet memes 125 years later.
The denunciations are piquant. This from The advocate and Topeka tribune. (Topeka, Kan.), 14 Sept. 1892:
In an editorial note last week calling attention of editors of reform to the so-called Wall street circular fake first published in the Chicago Daily Press, we wrote that "the thing originated in the fertile brain of T. W. Gilruth, who held a position for a time on the editorial staff of the Press." The compositor transformed the name into Gilmore. We desire to make this correction lest there be somebody named Gilmore who might object to the charge, and because the fraud should be placed where it belongs. Gilruth is a snide, and if anyone who knows him has not yet found it out, he is liable to do so to his sorrow.
That corrects an earlier account which misstated Gilruth's name:
The Great West and one or two other exchanges reproduce the Chicago Daily Press fake purporting to be a Wall street circular. The thing originated in the fertile brain of F. W. Gilmore [sic: should be T. W. Gilruth], who held a position for a time at the Press. He has been challenged time and again to produce the original if it is genuine, and has failed to do so. The thing is a fraud and so is its author, and neither of them is worthy of the confidence of the people.
Interesting to read that fake news is just part of our culture. It seems like a real problem now is the hyper-awereness that the internet has brought us all.
tl;dr = lies spread faster because they're more shocking
And not, I think, just because they're more shocking. Also because they're more interesting. And more validating. Because they simplify complexity and ambiguity.
While it's unfair to single out NYT's role, the Iraq War was indeed a major propaganda effort. It worked, I think, because it helped many people deal with 9/11. But the largely unasked question has been "Whose propaganda effort?" Except, ironically enough, for stuff that many would call "fake news" or "conspiracy theory".
I suspect that much of the "fake news" that mainstream liberals are upset about now is driven by Russian propaganda. Back in the day, Russia targeted mainly the radical left. But by the mid 80s, they were focusing more on the radical right and libertarians. And for those that remember Joseph McCarthy, that is extremely ironic.
You may believe you are being downvoted because you said something about Clinton, but it’s likely actually because you are quoting statistics without understanding how they work.
But the thrust of my message was about the misunderstanding of statistics, so the actual numbers (correct or otherwise) are irrelevant to the point I was making. Replace the numbers in my comment with the correct ones and the meaning remains the same.
Sigh. I know the thrust of your statement; that's why I said "duh". But I made a different point. See, you're not the only person on the planet with points to make. And again: your assumption was unwarranted. That's a mistake on your part, but it seems that you have no interest in whether you make mistakes.
Given that you've started casting aspersions on my character, at this point it's hard to imagine that you're not acting in bad faith. But who knows, maybe it is possible to salvage this.
I don't understand what was so objectionable about my assumption. Sure, I could have fact-checked the numbers on the comment I was replying to, but they were irrelevant to my point, and it's not exactly a news article where such rigour would matter. I don't really feel a stronger defence is necessary. I also acknowledged your correction of the statistic.
You say you're making a point, but what actually is it? The most meaningful moments of my life have been when i've realised i've been wrong about something, so seriously, if I've made a big mistake I genuinely want to know what it is. But ultimately, for me to recognise when I'm wrong, the mistake needs to be highlighted.
Jonathan Swift (1710)
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/