Nov 21, 2016 4 min read

The Sun, one of many daily newspapers being hawked on the streets of New York in the late summer of 1835, managed to best the competition with stories that were not merely electrifying, but changed how man viewed his role in the universe.

See, The Sun reported eye-opening findings from British astronomer John Herschel that, rather than being a dusty rock almost 240,000 miles from Earth, the moon was teeming with life. A series of stories suggested that, thanks to a newfangled telescope, Herschel could see goats and bison, unicorns and, astonishingly, human-like creatures with wings who stood about 4 feet tall.

A dispatch in The Sun stated, “We scientifically denominated them as Vespertilio-homo, or man-bat; and they are doubtless innocent and happy creatures.”

There was just one problem with these news reports – none of them was true.

Herschel had not built a telescope that could look at the moon in such detail, had made no pronouncements about life being on the moon, and, as our trips to the moon from 1969 to 1972 made abundantly clear, there’s no evidence that any kind of sophisticated life has ever resided on the moon. The writer of the Sun articles later claimed they were meant to be satirical, poking fun at the influence religion then had on science. Nevertheless, large numbers of The Sun’s readers fully believed that, yes, those 4-foot-tall manbats were zooming around up on the moon, and we were not alone in this corner of our solar system.

We look back now on the “Great Moon Hoax” and chuckle. We’re now so much more savvy, worldly wise and learned in the 21st century that only the most terminally credulous would swallow such nonsense.

Right?

Well, maybe we shouldn’t be patting ourselves on the back so vigorously. The last election season demonstrated with all too much clarity that there is an audience out there ready to be gulled by fake news, and spread it like kudzu on social media.

Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump! So did Denzel Washington! Three million undocumented immigrants voted in the 2016 presidential election, making Hillary Clinton the actual loser of the popular vote! Clinton sold weapons to ISIS! Germany now allows child marriages!

Not one of these stories is true in the least, but they all ended up making the rounds on Facebook and Twitter, and deceived readers who thought they were the product of reporting from legitimate news sources.

Last week, The Washington Post interviewed Paul Horner, a fake-news scribe who also claims his pieces are satire, and he said social media users “just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore – I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

President Obama, who has been the victim of a fake news story or two in his time, stated last week that “If we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.”

“The media” has become one of the American public’s favorite whipping boys, both from the left and the right. “The media” is not a singular monolith, but hundreds of different organizations staffed by human beings who have to make hundreds of different judgment calls every day. Are all of them correct? No. Journalists are human, therefore not perfect, and subject to the same foibles as people who work in every other profession.

But whether it is leviathans like CNN or The New York Times, or a local newspaper that prints courthouse news and high school football scores, they are all committed to truth-telling.

Oxford Dictionaries just named “post-truth” its international word of the year, defining it as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion or personal belief.”

If this is what we have to look forward to in a “post-truth” world, then we all should be worried about the health of our democracy.