Fake news has a deep history in the US. Here is a tragic example from history.

With all the talk about President Trump not letting organizations he deems as "fake news" into press conferences both sides are quick to throw out the n-word, NAZI. Both sides say that the other wants to stifle the "truth" to promote some agenda and for some reason, people think that this only happened in Germany during the rise of power of Hitler. But sadly enough America has been full of fake news since colonial times and its never really made much headway towards any real object news reporting.

In the 1890s, African-Americans were attempting to become political agents active in American politics and the Populist and Republican leaders of the reconstruction era and gilded age saw to this gradually. In Wilmington NC during the early 1890s, many African-Americans won or were a pointed to civil offices.

Democrat leaders with strong ties to the defunct confederacy decided that something must be done, and they launched a fake news campaign designed to promote the idea that African-American males were 'vampires and incubus' whose only drive was violence and the rape of white women.

Many of these relied on editorials written by people like Mrs. Felton of Georgia who said:

When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue — if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts — then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.”

Link to source

There was a response to her horrific claims from both communities, the journalist Alexander Manly had this to say:

Mrs. Felton must begin at the fountain head if she wishes to purify the stream. Teach your men purity. Let virtue be something more than an excuse for them to intimidate and torture a helpless people. Tell your men that it is no worse for a black man to be intimate with a white woman than for the white man to be intimate with a colored woman.

Link to source

but his response fell on deaf ears, and then after the 1898 elections in Wilmington, which saw Republican and Populist win, there was an attack.

On November 10th, Alfred Moore Waddell, a former Confederate officer and a white supremacist, led a group of townsmen to force the ouster of Wilmington’s city officials. Waddell relied on an editorial printed in the African American-owned Wilmington Daily Record as the catalyst for the riot. Alex Manly, the editor of the Daily Record, had published an editorial in early November arguing that “poor white men are careless in the matter of protecting their women.” Paraphrasing articles by Ida B. Wells on the subject of lynching, Manly opined that “our experiences among poor white people in the country teaches us that women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than the white men with the colored women.” Manly’s public discussion of the taboo subject of interracial sex exposed the reality of sexual exploitation of black women by white men and challenged the myth of pure-white womanhood.

Link to source

African-American journalist like Manly and Wells proved that the charges of rape in most of those cases false, and that did not stop the white supremacy movement because of the fear the Democrats caused with their lies. After many of the African-American had been killed or left the city, the local white leaders quickly put democrats in charge and established laws that would prevent African-Americans from gaining political power again. Jim Crow laws would be established and the federal courts would uphold them until the 1960's. So many African-Americans were killed during the Wilmington riots that the total is still unknown, and many of the Jim Crow laws themselves would not be taken down until the 1990's.

Many of the displaced African-Americans wrote to then president McKinely, which you can read HERE, his response, of course, was silence.

So before we call everyone a Nazi, let's remember that fake news is when truth is obfusticated by anyone to promote any political agenda. An agenda that does not have to be fascist or racist.

Here we have fake news starting a war to topple a democratic country.

a reply to: Templeton

It is not to say that Bernays was a bad man, he was just very good at what he did.

Thanks for the video example of how America itself has been using propaganda to shape ideas and control people. The truth is hard to deal with, and for most people, I assume they would rather just have their beliefs reaffirmed...

not to reaffirm anything.

originally posted by: hubrisinxs
a reply to: Templeton

It is not to say that Bernays was a bad man, he was just very good at what he did.

Not to say Bernays was a bad man? He was a cretin. Edward Bernays

How about the campaign by big pharmacy Reefer madness anti medical and recreational Marijuana.

a reply to: SpeakerofTruth

I assume you did not watch the video, cause that is what I was quoting. If you did, you would see that much like my OP, it denounces the idea that propaganda being used to manipulate people is bad. And yes, that is the only use of propaganda, so it is always bad regardless of whose propaganda it is.

So yeah, Cretin... I guess, but I guess he was smart enough to get people to believe him.

a reply to: Cloudbuster

That's one of the many examples of how American media is used to control ideas, but I think if I get too deep into that one I might violate T and C of this site.

But yeah good example.

When the Cuban people fought a war of independence in the 1890s and Spanish colonial troops dealt brutally with the Cuban independence fighters, like sending peasants to concentration camps called reconcentrados, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer resorted to yellow journalism whereby by published fake news stories about the carnage in Cuba as a result of the Spaniards' brutality against Cuban independence fighters, and such reports led Americans to support the cause of Cuban independence from Spain.

Link:
www.pbs.org...