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Abstract
This article describes the work of debunkers, people who call out fake facts and ‘correct’ the record. While we are familiar with many of the journalists today who are carrying out this important work of debunking fake political claims, there is a long history since the eighteenth century in the United States that has involved a long list of colourful and unexpected figures, including the carnival showman P. T. Barnum, the escape artist Harry Houdini, the humorist Mark Twain, the promoter of the weird Robert Ripley, the actor Orson Welles, the astronomer and television showman Carl Sagan, the popular science writer Martin Gardner, and the magicians Penn & Teller. This debunking practice has also been carried out by institutions such as the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, the Committee for Sceptical Inquiry and the Sceptics Society. While this paper focuses on the United States, there are parallel developments in many other parts of the world.
Notes
Notes
1 Not to be confused with the accidental dissemination of false facts, created without sinister purpose, but instead as the result of bad scientific methods or sloppy mathematical calculations.
2 Use of information for practical purposes as tools is a central finding in James W. Cortada, All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
3 An entire issue of Information & Culture was recently devoted to this topic, vol. 54.1 (2019).
4 For example, James W. Cortada and William Aspray, Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misrepresentations in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
5 The notion that dissidents apply a non-violent approach to challenging propaganda or accepted points of view, often political. In the United States, this became an expression possibly beginning in the mid-1950s, but was in wide use by the 1970s, and by the end of the century was a political methodology: Aaron Wildavsky, Speaking Truth to Power: Art and Craft of Policy Analysis (London: Routledge, 2017).
6 Lucas Graves, Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 59–63.
7 Cortada and Aspray, Fake News Nation.
8 There are long histories of scepticism in connection with religion, philosophy, and politics. Philosophers and intellectual historians are the scholars who have paid the most attention to scepticism. See the classic study: Richard Popkin, The History of Skepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 274–302. Also see, for example, P. Ricoeur, History and Truth (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2007); Henrik Lagerlund, Rethinking the History of Skepticism (Leiden: Brill, 2009); B. M. Dooley, The Social History of Skepticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); K. DeRose and T. A. Warfield, Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); R. H. Popkin and M. Neto, Skepticism: An Anthology (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007); and J. Greco, The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
9 Of course, the film critic, folklorist, and computer security specialist all do much more than what we report here. The scholarly study of ‘contemporary legends’ (the term many scholars use for urban legends) has a slightly controversial history because many folklorists did not originally believe that urban legends were an appropriate subject of study as part of folklore. This history is recounted in the chapter on the scholarly study of urban legends in our book From Urban Legends to Political Fact-Checking (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019).
10 William Woodward, Bunk (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923).
11 To use the term ‘media mogul’ here is of course to use a neologism before it was created, but Franklin does meet the characteristics that we assign to that term today.
12 All quotes from Woodward, 641–43.
13 Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 66.
14 We focus on this more sober history of fact-checking in a forthcoming article entitled ‘The Rise of Scrutiny in the United States: Building Capability to Navigate a Complex, Dangerous World in a Time of Lies and Misinformation’.
15 Legacy staff, “P. T. Barnum’s Greatest Hoaxes,” Legacy.com, 2011. http://www.legacy.com/news/culture-and-trends/article/pt-barnums-greatest-hoaxes (accessed December 28, 2018).
16 Candace Fleming, The Great and Only Barnum (New York: Random House, 2009); and Louis Kaplan, The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
17 P. T. Barnum, The Art of Money-Getting or Golden Rules for Making Money (Philadelphia: Bell & Co., 1880), chapter 20.
18 Bluford Adams, E. Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and Arthur H. Saxon, P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
19 P. T. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World: An Account of Humbugs, Delusions, Impositions, Quakeries, Deceits and Deceivers General (London: John Camden Hotten, 1866), 3–4. Although published first in the United States in 1865, his writings also appeared in Great Britain.
20 Barnum, The Humbugs of the World (1866).
21 Ibid., 29.
22 Quoted in Adam Gopnik, “I, Nephi: Mormonism and its Meanings,” The New Yorker, 13 August 2012. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/08/13/i-nephi (accessed March 17, 2019).
23 Twain received a third phrenological reading — many years later, in 1901 — from Lorenzo Fowler’s daughter, Jessie A. Fowler. See Delano Jose Lopez, “Snaring the Fowler: Mark Twain Debunks Phrenology,” Skeptical Inquirer, 26.1 (January–February 2002). https://www.csicop.org/si/show/snaring_the_fowler_mark_twain_debunks_phrenology (accessed December 27, 2018).
24 See “Houdini’s Greatest Trick: Debunking Medium Mina Crandon,” Mental Floss, 31 October 2013. http://mentalfloss.com/article/53424/houdinis-greatest-trick-debunking-medium-mina-crandon (accessed December 27, 2018).
25 Joe Nickell, Adventures in Paranormal Investigation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 213–15.
26 His book has been reprinted several times, for example as Harry Houdini, A Magician among the Spirits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Although Houdini co-authored the book he cited only his own name on the title page.
27 Houdini, 245.
28 Ibid., 245–46.
29 Ibid., 266.
30 Ibid., 266.
31 For general background about Sagan’s debunking efforts, see “Carl Sagan,” Rational Wiki https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan (accessed December 28, 2018).
32 Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980).
33 Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (New York: Doubleday, 1950).
34 Martin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, 2nd rev. ed. (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1957). The original book appeared in 1952 under a different title, but it was this revised edition that was influential.
35 In 2006 CSICOP changed its name to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). Its stated mission is to ‘promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims’. In support of that mission, it prepares bibliographies, convenes conferences, publishes articles, and publishes Skeptical Inquirer magazine (Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, “About CSI,” https://www.csicop.org/about/about_csi (accessed December 28, 2018).
36 David Gorski, “An Open Letter to Penn & Teller about Their Appearance on The Dr. Oz Show,” Science-Based Medicine, 11 February 2013. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/open-letter-to-penn-teller/ (accessed December 28, 2018).
37 The Progressive Movement was a period from the 1890s until the 1920s in the United States in which social reformers sought to mitigate the evils of political corruption and unbridled industrialization through the use of revelatory publications, such as Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), about ruthless practices in the oil industry, and Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, which revealed the horrible working conditions and work processes in the American meat-packing industry. The New Deal legislation of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s may be seen as a revival of these progressivist approaches. On the power of the word in fighting corruption, see Richard L. Kaplan, Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
38 Barnum’s institution was called Barnum’s American Museum; it was created in 1841 in New York City.
39 Jane M. Gaines, ‘Everyday Strangeness: Robert Ripley’s International Oddities as Documentary Attractions’, New Literary History, 33.4 (Autumn 2002), 782.
40 Gaines, 784.
41 Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 11.
42 Bogdan, 789.
43 Ibid., 795.
44 Ibid., 798.
45 Ibid., 795.
46 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 1991), 40.
47 Cortada.
48 Cortada and Aspray, Fake News Nation.
49 Skeptic, “A Brief Introduction,” https://www.skeptic.com/about_us/ (accessed December 28, 2018).
50 Skeptic.
51 For further information on these organizations, see https://www.quackwatch.org and https://www.acsh.org (accessed September 3, 2019).
52 “Outline of Wikipedia” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_Wikipedia (accessed September 3, 2019).
53 We have also focused only on American hoaxes. There are examples of both hoaxes, rumours, and legends throughout recorded history in many different countries. In the introductory chapter of our book From Urban Legends to Political Fact-Checking we briefly summarize this history and discuss in particular a version of the Smiley Gang rumour that has circulated in the Netherlands in the twenty-first century. Readers may also be familiar with the Berners Street Hoax of 1809 in England, the fraudulent Zinoviev Letter that was published by the Daily Mail four days before the general election in Britain in 1924, or the Hitler Diaries, not written by Adolf Hitler but instead forged by the East German scam artist Konrad Kujau and sold to Stern magazine in the early 1980s for millions of Deutschmarks. Hoaxes, rumours, and legends were not only an American phenomenon.
54 The Moon Hoax has been retold and studied many times. See Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxes, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Stephanie Hall, “Belief, Legend, and the Great Moon Hoax,” Folklore Today, August 26, 2014, United States Library of Congress. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2014/08/the-great-moon-hoax/ (accessed September 3, 2019); and Young, 12–19, 21–3.
55 Quoted in Hall.
56 All quotes are drawn from the English edition, Barnum, The Humbugs of the World (1866), 193.
57 Barnum, The Humbugs of the World, 200.
58 Ibid., 201.
59 Ibid., 202. ‘Dr. Dick’ was a fictitious incompetent doctor created by Harold Edwin Batsford and published in serial form in the 1870s and 1880s. For an example of text describing his incompetence, see Truman J. Spencer, A Cyclopedia of the Literature of Amateur Journalism (Hartford, CT: self-published, 1891), 298–304.
60 Barnum, The Humbugs of the World, 203.
61 We have not otherwise had a place to discuss conspiracy theories in this paper. Some people believe that the official word is just a part of a conspiracy, and virtually no amount of factual evidence can persuade them that this is not so. In the United States, for example, there are still many people today who believe that the lunar landing in 1969 was faked by the United States government in cahoots with the main media outlets. In the chapter on rumours and legends surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks in our book From Urban Legends to Political Fact-Checking, we discuss in detail both the extent of conspiracy theories about 9/11 and some of the academic scholarship that explains the nature of argument and evidence used in conspiracy theory claims.
62 Frank Brady, Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989), 172–73.
63 Brady, 174.
64 Joseph Bulgatz, Ponzi Schemes, Invaders from Mars & More: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1992); John Gosling, Waging The War of the Worlds: A History of the 1938 Radio Broadcast and Resulting Panic (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009); and A. Brad Schwartz, Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015), 156–95. Gosling operates a website devoted to the topic, War of the Worlds Invasion: The Complete War of the Worlds Website. https://web.archive.org/web/20061231123037/http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/.
65 Schwartz, 156–95.
66 National Recording Preservation Board, “Recording Registry, 2002,” Library of Congress, 1 January 2003. https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/recording-registry/registry-by-induction-years/2002/ (accessed September 3, 2019). One by-product was self-policing by radio and later television, whereby when broadcasting fiction about space matters, they made it abundantly clear to their audiences that it was not real: Christopher H. Sterling, ““War of the Worlds” (“The Mercury Theatre on the Air”) (October 30, 1938),” [n.d., c. 2003], posted to Library of Congress website https://www.loc.gov/programs/static/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/TheWaroftheWorlds.pdf (accessed September 3, 2019).
67 In a chapter on political fact-checking in our book From Urban Legends to Political Fact-Checking, we discuss in detail the major efforts since the year 2000 in the United States to check fake facts. There are, of course fact-checking operations in other countries, such as the BBC’s Fact Checker in the United Kingdom. On the history and extent of fact-checking in Europe, see Lucas Graves and Federica Cherubini, The Rise of Fact-Checking Sites in Europe (Reuters Institute and University of Oxford, 2016). http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/publications/2016/rise-fact-checking-sites-europe/ (accessed August 7, 2019). In the introductory chapter of our other book, Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misrepresentations in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), we discuss literature of other scholars about how Donald Trump’s lying compares with that of people in everyday American life.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
James W. Cortada
James W. Cortada is Senior Research Fellow, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota Twin Cities and William Aspray, Professor of Information Science and Adjunct Professor of Media Studies, University of Colorado Boulder. Prior to their current positions, Cortada held management and executive positions at IBM, while Aspray held senior positions at the Charles Babbage Institute, the Computing Research Association, and the IEEE History Centre as well as faculty positions at Harvard, Indiana (Bloomington), and Texas (Austin). Together, they have written two books relevant to this paper: Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misrepresentations in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019) and From Urban Legends to Political Fact-Checking: Online Scrutiny in America, 1990–2015 (Cham, Switzerland: Springer).