News Trolls

If there's one thing that the left and the right can agree on, it's that the news is inaccurate, biased, and is more likely to cement popular prejudice than to uncover uncomfortable truths. So there's a certain satisfaction in deliberately planting absurd fiction among all the news that's fit.

Edgar Allen Poe, for instance, on deciding that he was a better fiction writer than a newspaper reporter (but that news paid better), wrote a news story about two people who crossed the Atlantic on a hot air balloon that was printed in the New York Sun.

The wreckage of The Maine
Another fine hoax on (of?) the 19th Century New York Sun was the announcement that life has been discovered on the moon, seen through a very powerful telescope, and resembling bipedal bats.

Luther Blissett of San Luis Obispo, California -- home of the agricultural finishing school and day-care center known as Cal Poly -- created a mythical fraternity called Lambda Sigma Delta (get it?) and suddenly letters-to-the-editor started appearing in local papers about the frat's magnanimous activities.

A group of Italian cultural terrorists spoofed a tabloid TV "missing persons" show called Chi l'ha visto? with a report of someone who was so missing that he never even existed. "We did not want only to throw discredit on the show," reported the pranksters, "but also put their inquiring eyes off the track and make them waste their time following a nonexistant person, so that the real runaways might remain anonymous and uncontrolled."

Letters-to-the-editor are a good place to get started. Peter van der Linden forged an editoral from the attorney general promoting the use of illegal drugs, and sent in a silly letter allegedly from a group called The Society for Making English Grandeur More Accessible (a.k.a. S.M.E.G.M.A.).

Rorvik's clone hoax
In 1983 a tape recording of a telephone conversation between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was sent anonymously to newspapers; a cover letter claimed that the recordings were the result of a crossed line. London's Sunday Times and the San Francisco Chronicle covered the story, with the Times following the lead of the U.S. State Department, which described the tapes as part of "an increasingly sophisticated Russian disinformation campaign." The tapes were actually the work of the punk rock group Crass who made them by splicing together bits of speeches made by the two leaders that were recorded from news broadcasts.

These politically-oriented pranks get their own section elsewhere. If you're interested, check out our Guerilla Hacks page.

In 1978, well before the recent sheep cloning, a fellow named David Rorvik reported that the cloning of human beings was already being accomplished at a remote laboratory, spurred on by a California millionaire desiring a cloned heir.

How many times has a country gone to war in the midst of a frenzy whipped up by disinformation planted in the media? You might as well just ask how many times has a country gone to war. The answer's the same. Remember The Maine? Or the Tonkin Gulf Incident? Or the babies thrown out of incubators in the neonatal units of Kuwaiti hospital by barbaric Iraqi troops? (And that's just a few examples from my country!)

Joey Skaggs
One reporter tells the story of how he bought into the whole Church of Kurt Cobain hoax in the media feeding frenzy that followed the suicide of the latest jukebox hero.

Speaking of dead people, Princess Diana (before she died) was impersonated by an actress who was caught on film cavorting in her bra -- it was all over the papers the next day.

More recently... remember how Pierre Salinger was convinced that the U.S. Navy shot down TWA flight 800? He read it right here on the internet! And Seymour Hersh almost got taken in by documents proving that Marilyn Monroe was paid hush money by JFK to hide their affair.

Two hard-working modern masters of the media hack are Joey Skaggs and Alan Abel. Skaggs has conned the press with such silliness as a phony technodildonics company and (in the wake of the O.J. Trial), a computer that can replace trial judges. Abel, for his part, founded the anti-animal-nudity activist group "Society for Indecency to Naked Animals" and a school for professional panhandlers among his many media stunts.
Alan Abel (not dead yet)

I should probably also mention Orson Welles' and Howard Koch's 1938 radio play The War of the Worlds which was interpreted by many listeners as being a news broadcast, to their horror. This was shadowed more recently by Jing Huiwen, whose news of the Sibuxiang beast spread alarm in China.

A Sweedish internet marketing agency put together what they later called "an artistic experiment... aimed at learning something about [how] the net and... the media work together" -- a news hoax claiming that Cambodian Nastyfellow Pol Pot had arrived in Sweeden seeking political asylum.

Some media hacks are not the product of deliberate hoaxers, but are virtually autonomous and contagious baloney, urban legends like the LSD Tattoo warning, or the ongoing media portrayal of the United States as a free country.

A couple of Tampa Bay comedians created a group called "Citizens Concerned About Barney" that claimed that the purple dinosaur of kids TV fame is introducing children to Satanism, witchcraft, cocaine, gang violence, pornography, abortion, homosexuality "and maybe even marijuana." News of the group spread locally, then nationally as CNN picked up the story and ran with it..

Arm the Homeless on KSBY
Want to try this sort of thing out at home? Form a chapter of the activist group Arm the Homeless in your community. The press can't seem to resist biting when you throw them bait as good as this tasty blend of left-wing homeless activism and right-wing firearm advocacy.

The healthiest thing I've ever seen come out of a journalism class was a class experiment in media gullibility in which students sent out 35 fake press releases to see how many newspapers checked the facts before running the story.

Michael Born, a freelance documentary producer in Germany, made up the news as he went along, creating German KKK rallies, interviewing Albanian "Kurds" and German "Austrian terrorists," and following a domestic cat hunter he hired to stalk some cute fluffy thing with a rifle to report on this alarming trend.

The tabloid TV shows have been fooled so many times, and are so complicit in their own dupage, that it would be almost like shooting fish in a barrel to point out the many examples.

You might also be interested in the related categories of Forgeries, Impostors, and Invented Persona, which have their own pages.