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Fake News

History and Commentary from a Prairie Perspective
wardill

I am a columnist. Those who write columns for publication have the right to express their opinions about real events, real, people and real things. We are not entirely free, however, to write whatever we wish. If we cannot restrain ourselves from making libellous statements or exceeding the limits of good taste, or if we make careless errors in grammar, syntax or spelling, there are editors who sanitize our errors and indiscretions.    

As a wordsmith, my first tool was a manual typewriter. That was back in the days when small-town weeklies were purveyors of “all the news which is fit to print.” Editors were also publishers and the tools of their trade could be only a few galleys filled with hand-set type and a small flat-bed press. The more progressive print shops might have second-hand Linotype of Intertype machines and a type caster for producing hand-set headlines and graphics. The moral character of the newspaper was not in the mechanical processes that produced it, but in its content – in the news that was there and in the news that wasn’t. Small-town publishers were well aware that they endangered the financial health of their paper by printing stories that their advertisers wouldn’t like. If the dismissive term “fake news” had been in use then, it could only have referred to accounts of factual events that never appeared in print. This was self-censorship.

Everyone with a knowledge of history knows about censorship in wartime, about the truths which cannot be revealed and the lies which must be. In wartime, governments put a free press into a strait jacket to function, knowingly or unknowingly, as part of a hidden propaganda machine  This has been going on for as long as humanity has been cursed by warfare. Perhaps the publishing of falsehoods began when the first cave dweller decorated his wall with more and bigger hairy mammoths than he had ever killed.

     The Crusades were a victory for ecclesiastical propagandists that concealed a treasure hunt by their blue-blooded associates. Whether or not the men of the nobility were complicit in the true cross trade is an open question. Certainly the many supposed fragments of the true cross that were sold would have more than filled Noah’s ark. There were scammers in those days. They dealt in untruths.

When the USS Maine blew up in Havana harbour because of spontaneous combustion in a coal bunker, propagandists turned it into a sneak attack by Spain. The Spanish-American War resulted. The United States gained territory and role of Spain in the Americas was diminished.

Historians know that the propaganda machine of the United Kingdom was of vital importance in both World Wars. The uninformed public could be fed on a diet of untruths so long as factual information hidden in secret files was not disclosed. Britain, and other combatant nations, still have secret files recording diplomatic and military activities during both World Wars. 

Call it whatever we will – lies, propaganda or fake news – it is intended to conceal factual history and promote belief in unreality. The term “fake news is insidious. It casts aspersions on the courageous people of the Fourth Estate who are doing their jobs as best they can. Reporters discover the facts; the media publishes them, columnists analyze them. They are defending the bastions of democracy.