Soldiers from the 42nd Infantry Division, several of whom read newspapers, stand aboard the U.S. troop transport USS President Lincoln in October 1917. US NAVY/INTERIM ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
Do Americans even want the news media to tell them the truth? After reading journalist and historian Andie Tucher’s important new history of fakery in U.S. journalism, I’m not so sure.
From the very first American newspaper in 1690, sham journalism—for power, profit, politics, entertainment, or mischief—has held center stage in U.S. media. Permutations varied from the penny press in the 1830s, to the yellow press in the 1890s, to the tabloids in the 1920s, to much of Fox News today—all feeding entertainment, propaganda, and sensational conspiracy theories to a hungry public.
Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History, Andie Tucher, Columbia University Press, 384 pp., $28, March 2022
As the United States faces an ongoing pandemic, reverberations from an insurrection, and a devastating war in Europe, the stakes for democracy could not be higher. More than 100 years ago, journalist and critic Walter Lippmann lamented that “the present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis of journalism.”
He may as well have been speaking of today. The overwhelming volume of misinformation these days might feel like an aberration, but as Tucher makes clear, it is not. The U.S. public has always been all too eager to consume narratives that titillate, distract, or accord with what they want to believe—true or not.
False news almost entirely dominated the media market for the first 200 years of the U.S. press. It was not until the turn of the last century that something we might recognize as responsible journalism in the public interest took hold.
False news almost entirely dominated the media market for the first 200 years of the U.S. press. It was not until the turn of the last century that something we might recognize as responsible journalism in the public interest took hold.
Tucher tells lively anecdotes from the 19th and 20th centuries, clearly relishing the more outrageous fictions masquerading as news. Along the way, we learn some surprising tidbits about the history of U.S. journalism, such as the birth of the interview: an American media invention that dates back only to 1836 when the New York Herald, covering the murder of a prostitute, featured a verbatim conversation with a local madam.
Unfortunately, like much of the media at the time, the reporter’s goal was to be as sensational as possible. When the madam proved not quite salacious, he filled his piece with made-up quotes. READ MORE...
