‘THAT’S FAKE NEWS!’
On a rainy morning in May 1917, residents of Boise, Idaho, opened their city’s newspaper to see column after column of World War I dispatches. One report stood out from the rest. It topped page 4, next to the comics, and offered so many explicit details that it couldn’t help but prick the conscience and arouse patriotic conviction.
“Now comes the crowning tale of ghoulish horror from the west front in Europe,” reported the Idaho Daily Statesman — “a tale of how the Germans are using the bodies of their dead soldiers for the manufacture of meal, fertilizer, lubricating oil and other more repulsive products.” The article described how the fighters’ corpses were strapped into bundles and transported by rail to a factory hidden by thick forest and surrounded by electric wire. Masked workers in oilskin overalls reportedly handled the bodies with long hooked poles, ushering them toward steaming cauldrons that broke up the fat.
“The report would be incredible,” continued the Statesman, “if it were not given credence by such publications as the London Times, Daily Mail, Paris Temps, Edinburgh Scotsman and many Belgian, French, and Swiss newspapers of standing.”
Americans across the country were reading about the same atrocity. “The story [seems] well authenticated,” reported the Louisville Courier-Journal, which said it was hard to fathom “that a civilized people would treat the corpses of gallant soldiers as a mere commodity.” In North Carolina, the Greensboro Daily News said that, if true, “the German soldier is expected to fight on as usual, in company with the reflection that, today a hero of the Fatherland, tomorrow he may be lubricating oil, soap, and pig feed.”
The story, in modern parlance, had gone viral. It was also completely false. British and Belgian propagandists, along with English newspaper baron Lord Northcliffe, had spun it from improbable eyewitness accounts, an article in a nonexistent Dutch newspaper, and some willful mistranslation. The story contained just enough truth to be plausible: Some German factories recycled dead animals and had the word Kadaver in their name. But when German authorities explained that the word referred to animal carcasses, not human ones, newspapers like the Statesman dismissed that translation as “deliberately untrue.”
More than a century later, viral falsehoods have permeated America, and indeed the whole world. We’re deluged with deceitful reporting, such as that the COVID-19 vaccine will implant a microchip inside you, or that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a gun-grabbing hoax. And since the invasion of Ukraine began last February, state-controlled Russian media have
