The original FAKE NEWS

Jill Lepore, The Hacking of America, NYTimes:

Radio, though, was also a tool of tyrants. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, had a device installed in his office that allowed him to pre-empt national programming. He also hoped to sow division in the United States, partly through a shortwave radio system, the ministry’s “long-range propaganda artillery.” It spread lies about a “Communist Jewish conspiracy” that sounded like news reports, which the newspapers at the time referred to as “fake news.”

In 1938, Orson Welles tried to raise the alarm about fake news with his notorious radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds.” Fifteen minutes into the program, listeners began to call the station in terror, believing that the earth was really being invaded by Martians. A station supervisor asked Welles to halt the broadcast; Welles refused. Dorothy Thompson was grateful to him, writing in her column in The New York Herald-Tribune that Welles had “made a greater contribution to an understanding of Hitlerism, Mussolinism, Stalinism, anti-Semitism, and all the other terrorism of our times, more than will all the words about them that have been written.”