This is how fake election news spread before social media
A brief history of shady phone calls, rumors, and story placement
Broadcast mediums, new and old, have always been used to spread untruths in election cycles. Before social media, it was email; before email, it was TV; before that, it was phones; and before phones it was the good old printing press. Even Abraham Lincoln was smeared with a pamphlet full of lies, way back in 1864.
I looked at some fake news and the means by which it spread in past elections:
1946Your phone rings, you pick up and hear a voice: “This is a friend of yours, but I can’t tell you who I am. Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist?” Voorhis—was running against Richard Nixon for a California congressional seat—wasn’t a Communist, of course. But Nixon’s campaign team wanted you to think he was. They reportedly paid workers $9 a day to make pick up the phone, recite that line to whomever answered, and hang up.
This was an early example the telephone being used to spread lies in election cycles and a precursor to subsequent telephone “push polling.”
1972In the lead up to the presidential election a 19-year-old Roger Stone, a professional bullshit artist who also worked for Trump’s 2016 campaign, was working his dark magic for Nixon.
Stone manufactured false evidence that Nixon’s Republican primary rival, Paul McCloskey, received funding from the Young Socialist Alliance. When Stone leaked the story, the fake news finished off McCloskey. Nixon took the Republican nomination.
1992 An election was approaching, and the internet had been publicly available for less than a year, but that didn’t stop lies about Bill Clinton having a secret love child spreading.
While more reputable journalistic outlets ignored the story for lack of evidence, The Globe supermarket tabloid paid the supposed mother of the child for an interview.
The following year, notorious right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife began funding the “Arkansas Project,” which turned out investigative stories about Clinton’s supposed involvement with prostitution, drugs, and further extramarital affairs. (Though, to be fair, the last may have had some truth to it.) This initiative was the cornerstone of the “vast, right-wing conspiracy” Hillary Clinton was ridiculed so widely for pointing out.
1996Bill Clinton’s first term was up, his re-election campaign was in full swing, and new Clinton conspiracies began circulating. Clinton aid Vince Foster had tragically killed himself in 1993, but according to some it was the Clintons that killed him and covered it up.
As Republicans investigated the Whitewater scandal, these theories were given wider play. It was even suggested that Hillary was having an affair with Foster and killed him to cover it up. Entire documentaries, distributed via VHS, were made about the Foster conspiracy and others. The Clinton Chronicles was among the better-known of these series.
The Clinton Chronicles also covered accusations that the Clintons had something to do with a plane crash that killed Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown.
2000 Rumors that John McCain had an illegitimate child, and was pretending she was an adopted daughter from Bangladesh, helped George W. Bush secure the Republican nomination in 2000.
The racially charged misinformation campaign was run using emails and fliers that featured a photo of the family with their daughter.
Other false rumors claimed McCain slept with prostitutes and gave his wife a venereal disease. It got crazier: some claimed he turned traitor while a P.O.W. in Vietnam and was mentally unstable due to his detention. Others said he was brainwashed by the Vietnamese to sabotage the Republican Party.
One of the other choice methods of spreading such rumors was “push polling,” in which respondents are asked questions full of false accusations.
2008While Obama was the first African American presidential nominee from a major party, that progressive milestone came with some regressive, racist lies. Social media only played a small role in spreading fake news in 2008: Twitter had about a million weekly visitors, and Facebook had a now-meager sounding 90 million users.
A picture of Obama in a head wrap was leaked and circulated and played into the notion he was secretly a Muslim. These photos, from Obama’s Muslim half-brother’s wedding were brought up again in 2012. Rumors about his place of birth also began spreading.
It wasn’t just Democrats who were subjected to fabricated rumors, Sarah Palin was accused of lying about her son’s parentage, with people saying Trig was actually Bristol Palin’s baby, and the family were covering up that fact.
2012When it came time for Obama to seek re-election, social media was now mainstream. Future president-elect Donald Trump notably used it to call for Obama to release his long-form birth certificate.
This was just a taste of how Trump would wield social media as a tool for spreading fake news— a strategy that would propel him all the way to the White House.
This year, the fake news comes straight from Trump to his more than 16 million followers: no anonymous phone calls or manufactured evidence. In many ways this latest election was a collection of greatest hits from fake news past. It featured Roger Stone from 1972 peddling many old lies, stories of Bill Clinton’s love child from 1992, Clinton murder conspiracies from 1996, and Alex Jones’ deranged ramblings from 2008 and 2012. Let’s hope truth survives the next 4 years.
