News Trolls

"The media can never deny coverage to a good spectacle. No matter how ridiculous, absurd, insane or illogical something is, if it achieves a certain identity as a spectacle, the media has to deal with it. They have no choice. They're hamstrung by their own needs, to the extent that they're like a puppet in the face of such events."

- Mark Pauline

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.

Stephen Glass, an associate editor for The New Republic and a writer for many other magazines and newspapers, was discovered in 1998 to have been writing fiction in the form of news articles and features. He even set up a fake website to cover his tracks.

This ought to remind you of Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her (alas, fictional) story of Jimmy, the 8-year-old heroin addict. Last spotted, Cooke was working retail, but had signed on to a movie project about the hoax. (See also, Mike Barnicle)

Inspired by all of this media mayhem, and dismayed about journalism standards, Paul Maliszewski operated under a number of aliases to plant bullshit and satire in The Business Journal of Central New York:

How many fake writers did I invent? About as many as the months I spent working at The Business Journal full-time.

In my spare time I manufactured whole companies. They emerged from my head wildly profitable and fully staffed with ambitious assistants obeying the bidding of sage bosses. If my fictional characters filed tax returns, I probably would have been personally responsible for creating more new jobs in central New York than any non-fictional company.

I littered my fictions with bogus references and bastardized quotations from literature, less to show off my fine education than to underline how utterly irrelevant it now seemed. I quoted Donald Barthelme but made the words pass through the dead lips of Adam Smith. In another counterfeit, I drew names of characters from a New York Review of Books essay about Vincent Van Gogh forgers and the businessmen who knowingly peddled the knock-offs.

Maliszewski even translated a School of the Americas torturer's instruction manual into business-speak to report on management skills. Kudos!

Edgar Allan Poe, figured that he was a better fiction writer than a newspaper reporter, but that news paid better. He wrote a fictional news story about two people who crossed the Atlantic on a hot air balloon that was printed in the New York Sun. (Poe also took on a hoaxbusting rôle, investigating and exposing the ruse of Wolfgang von Kempelen's chess-playing robot, and writing about "Diddling" [con games] "Considered as One of the Exact Sciences.")

Another fine hoax on (or perhaps by) 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.

The New York Times breathlessly rushed to print in 1992 with an article about "grunge" that followed the standard template for reporting on the latest youth music and fashion trends. A sidebar described the "lexicon of grunge" - interpreting the hip lingo of the whippersnappers. Of course, it was more blatantly fictional than the rest of the stories on the page...

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.

Letters-to-the-editor are a good place for the news troller 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.).

A yippie provocateur wrote a letter-to-the-editor of the Berkeley Barb in 1967 claiming to have gotten high from smoking banana peels, and pretty soon the "news" was making headlines from the San Francisco Chronicle to Time magazine.

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."

Harry Reichenbach fed the media spurious scoops in order to get free publicity for his patrons. Among his best hacks was getting smutbuster Anthony Comstock to become outraged about the painting "September Morn" whereupon the prints that had been taking up valuable shelf space gathering dust at a dime a pop suddenly sold seven million copies at a buck each.

A marketing firm got some well-deserved exposure through its campaign to raise public awareness about the emerging sport of professional indoor ice fishing. "Catch the Fever" is the advertising slogan of the Minnesota Woodticks.

Remember the mysterious "companion object" following the Hale-Bopp comet? It set off a lot of alarms among the usual suspects of abductees, ufologists, end-timers and Heaven's Gate cultists. Turns out it was the brainchild of one Chuck Shramek, who (according to a friend) has been playing these sort of pranks for some time now.

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.

Photo-doctoring tools have long been stock-in-trade to the revisionist historian trying to remove old Trotsky from all the old class photos or what have you. Now that the ordinary schmoe can do a professional fake job, the Pulitzer Prize-winning news photo is more art and less luck than ever before.

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? How about prisoners starving in Serbian death camps? (And that's just a few examples from my country, which has also been on the receiving end once or twice.)

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 the fabulously dead, 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 where falsehood dares not show its face! And Seymour Hersh almost got taken in by phony 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 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.

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.

Radio personality Howard Stern's fans have taken the media hack on as a crusade - zapping TV news coverage of the O.J. Simpson car chase, the U.S. Capitol shootings of '98, and any other news event, no matter how trivial, that they can use as an opportunity to sling baloney.

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. Other quasi-hacks fall under the category of April Fools or lazy, stupid reporters.

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..

Commentator, satirist and all-around fun guy H.L. Mencken published a made-up history of the bathtub for shits and grins, never guessing that it would be accepted as gospel truth from that moment on. Luther Blissett is trying the same sort of game with his fictional venereal disease, "The Clam."

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 homelessness activism and right-wing firearm advocacy.

Sometimes, if culture jammers are getting lazy, the press will engage in its own pranks. The San Francisco Weekly responded to angry anti-gentrification sentiment by running an ad promoting a yuppie anti-defamation demonstration, in hopes of catching other papers (and activists) with this tasty lure.

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.

These TV newsmagazines are ripe pickings for freelancers who know that fiction and fact don't amount to much when it comes to paycheck time.

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.

The Maine
The wreckage of The Maine

Rorvik's book
Rorvik's clone hoax

Joey Skaggs
Joey Skaggs

Alan Abel
Alan Abel (not dead yet)

Arm the Homeless
Arm the Homeless on KSBY

See also:

  • Forgeries
  • Impostors
  • Invented Persona
  • Guerrilla Hacks
  • Pages referenced here:

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