Disinformation is not something new

The big topic of the day is disinformation. This is nothing new.

What is new is the ease with which individuals can spread their opinions. Be it YouTube, Instagram or even Twitter/X, anyone with a computer can create content and maybe even gather a following.

In the past, such power was reserved for newspapers, radio, television and entities that had a lot of money to broadcast their opinions.

Typically, the advent of a new form of communication creates uncharted territories where creativity can explode.

The first popular penny newspaper was The New York Sun that dawned Sept. 3, 1833. Until then newspapers generally were more expensive and directed at the business class.

The Sun was not even two years old when history was made with The Great Moon Hoax. This was classic journalistic disinformation, a series of six articles reporting the discovery of a civilization on the moon. Naturally daily circulation got a boost.

This actually may have been satire that got out of hand because there were may serious astronomical claims at the time that eventually fizzled out.

Today circulation is measured in clicks and likes instead of newspaper sales, but the trend continues.

They say truth is the first casualty in wartime, so there is not enough space here to describe reporting excesses on both sides of the Civil War.

William Randolph Hearst was no stranger to journalism excesses. The newspaper baron is well-known for his 1897 telegram to Frederic Remington, his artist in Havana, Cuba: “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” And that he did including with sensationalized coverage of the explosion that destroyed the U.S. warship Maine while it was in Havana Harbor in Feb, 15, 1898.

Fast forward to the early days of radio and there was the invasion from Mars, a retelling of the classic H.G. Wells novel. That was Oct. 30, 1938. In modern terminology, newspaper reporters tried to cancel Orson Wells, whose adaptation appeared on Mercury Theater of the Air. Radio was relatively new and like online advertising today, airwave ads were taking money from newspaper publishers.

Newspapers at the time and a researcher at Princeton University claimed the show sowed fear in the population. Such claims may have been overstated. Yet the novelty certainly generated hostility toward Wells and his actors.

Television was in its childhood when it endured the first of many scandals. The secret assistance given to quiz show contestants even generated a congressional investigation.

Tobacco advertising is the most obvious of the harms television lies foisted on the public.

Newspapers, radio and television were easy prey for people like U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy who parlayed Cold War fears and a compliant media in the early 1950s into a litany of allegations of Communist influence in all quarters of American life.

Disinformation also can be by omission. Reporters deliberately failed to report on the physical condition of President Franklin Roosevelt. He suffered from the effects of polio. News photographers toed the line and only showed the president sitting down or in a way that failed to show he was in a wheelchair.

Reporters also failed to report on the open secret that President John Kennedy used to entertain young ladies in the White House swimming pool when his wife, Jackie, was otherwise occupied.

Much has been written about the collusion between the press and the military to exaggerate successes in the Vietnam War. Then there was the obviously incorrect reporting on both Gulf wars, not to mention the failure for the news media to correctly characterize the truth in Afghanistan.

Today access to the internet has elevated all sorts of characters from flat-earthers to neo-nazis to pop psychologists, religious nut cases and even Medium authors.

The governments again are reacting and at the same time pushing their own programs, medical, social and scientific, in an effort to monopolize the conversations. The easy access of the online platforms complicates their propaganda efforts.

Government officials claim speech is violence and that their version is the only truth.

If history is any guide, the public will be smart enough to identify incorrect information and outright fraud because the base of democracy is the ability to hear all points of view to make serious decisions.

This article, now slightly modified, appeared in A.M. Costa Rica, the English Language daily in the country’s cpaital city of San José.