Fakes in American Journalism

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ... INTRODUCTION. American journalism holds the record for faking. In its masterful manner of misleading the public it has yet to be surpassed. Its ingenuity in this direction asserts itself in every phase of the news. Whether it be an imaginary voyage to a heretofore unexplored or unheard of region, or a pipe dream of an interview with a dead man, or a detailed account of a battle that was never fought, or a riot by strikers that never took place; the author of the fake is invariably surprised at the unusual credence given to his fake by a credulous public. Which goes to prove that the vast majority of us are not Missourians. We bejieve whatever we are told. When we learn that we were stung we have nothing but admiration for the stinger. And then we like the sensation of being told that we were stung. This, perhaps, accounts for the exhiliration we get out of the many exposures that are being staged for us every time we get stung. Even the art of faking is not exempt from class division. Fakes may be divided into several groups. There are those which are called harmless--if indeed misinforming, in any shape, can be said to be harmless; then there are those that are deliberately harmful; those that are engineered with the purpose of profiting the faker; those that creep into the paper through carelessness; the fakes that will provoke a sob in the woman reader--this class of fakes is known as sob stuff and is being manufactured by the sob squad; those that are promoted by the advertisers; those that are influenced by the interests of the owners of the paper; those whose purpose it is to create a certain kind of public opinion and finally those 'which affect one way or the other the--, existing conflicts between capital and labor. Of all these...