On October 30, 1938, a radio broadcast spread sheer panic through the east coast of America. On-the-scene reports depicted a terrifying alien invasion, as heat-ray wielding Martians descended on the town of Grover’s Mill, near Princeton in New Jersey.

With the US infantry and air force alerted, New Jersey police were flooded with calls from fearful citizens. Neighbouring New Yorkers fled their homes in panic. Several people were taken to St Michael’s Hospital in Newark suffering from shock, and a newspaper reported that upon hearing the broadcast a man had crumpled and died with a heart attack. Then came the dawning realisation that it was all a hoax. The voice they heard was, in fact, Orson Welles reading HG Well’s classic ‘War of the Worlds’ as a 62-minute radio play from the Mercury Theatre in New York.

However, the real hoax was that all of the supposed panic that this broadcast stirred up was, in itself, just a myth. As covered recently by the Daily Telegraph, there was never mass hysteria, and there was never mass panic. Police and emergency services had experienced hardly any increase in calls, and the heart attack claim was never verified. In fact, not many people actually heard the programme. According to ratings estimates at the time, just 2% of radio listeners tuned in, as most people were enjoying the popular Chase and Sanborn Hour variety show.

Someone may have recounted the ‘panic’ caused by Welles’ broadcast to you as though it were fact. Maybe you believed it; hell, we’ve all fallen for this sort of thing, whether we like to admit or not. As this myth gathered moss over the years, the lesson it could tell us now feels so prescient for our times. In the age of digital aggregators and fake news, true facts don’t stand a chance against the legend, the conspiracy and the tall tale that echoes what we want to believe.

Punch drunk on fake news

11 September, 2016, Gennedy ‘Triple G’ Golovkin has just steamrolled Kell Brook to the canvas. Despite plenty of heart, the British boxer simply could not cope with a flurry of blows from the Kazakh, prompting his trainer Dominic Ingle to throw in the towel. “I was starting to settle into it,” Brook told reporters after the fight, “but when you see three, four, five of them, it’s difficult.” The sensation that Brook felt that night somewhat symptomises what we are feeling right now. It’s of being punch drunk, battered, bruised and bewildered by information overload. The age of everything and nothing.

Adam Curtis’s latest documentary, Hypernormaliation, tells of how we have “retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world”. All-consuming and onmipresent, we have accepted this climate as “normal”. Curtis describes a continuing state of shell-shock, in which “nothing ever changes”, because there is neither the will nor the ability to change. It’s a fascinating documentary, but I feel that things are changing. Fake news has played a key role as an agent of change, helpng to drive the twin seismic shocks of Brexit and the Trump US election win. 

There’s money in fake news. It was widely reported that some teenagers in Macedonia were mass producing fake news stories for profit. However, that’s merely a reality of the internet; whether its fake reviews on Amazon or buying bulk ‘likes’ on Facebook. What’s more worrying, however, is when fake news is used for political, or, rather socio-political gains.

Bored of disrupting traditional industries and corporate cabals, a new wave of bedroom activitists are targeting the real bases of power. While The Sun could previously claim that it ‘won it’ when it came to elections and votes, it is now the fake news engines that are shifting the undecided voters, and winning over the left-behinders.

In this new normal, the fake news engines have bombarded social networks, forums and website with a blinding array of blows. This onslaught has been so bewildering that is has mounted a coup over the popular consciousness. And all the pervious engines of truth – newspapers, polls, traditional political parties – have been left outmanouvered and outmoded. 

Self-interested cultures and subcultures have homogenized into one overarching movement. They have taken figureheads – a gawping idiot who couldn’t get a seat in Thanet, and a guy who thinks grabbing women by the pussy is OK for anyone over the age of five – and enemies, too (most notably, Hilary Clinton). They have used the freedoms and powers enabled by the internet age to subvert the traditional order. You would describe it as an avant garde, postmodern lark, if it wasn’t a million miles from being post-modern or avant garde, and infinitely more sinister.

Finger of blame points to Facebook

This new source of ‘news’ that has so seized our reality has more in common with marketing, sales, promotion and soap box campaigning, than is does with actual news. What is posted and then shared, re-tweeted or liked has no need or requirement to be actually true. The author just has to have a big enough audience to receive it, and with little enough desire or time to get a second opinion. The truth-hungry nerds will come with their pesky fact-checking, but they are a whisper against the storm. Well researched, thorough articles and posts will be summarily ignored when we have a peadophile ring in a pizza restaurant to post and comment about.

Meanwhile, the finger of blame for fake news has been pointed at Facebook. With millions of people spending a large percentage of their online lives using the social network, it was unsurprising that it would be become their de facto news source eventually. Facebook was at first accused of being a leftist aggressor to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and then later of being a passive conduit to the fake news trolls. Damned if it did, and damned if it didn’t. In truth, Facebook seems to be a tech goliath suddenly realising that it is becoming much more than that, and comprehending that for such a shift it is so woefully unprepared.

Facebook has since announced a serious of measures to combat fake news. These include; greater fact checking to verify suspicious content, closer investigation of the articles not being shared, and even stopping fake news providers from being able to get advertising on Facebook. All admirable endeavours, no doubt, but none will deal with the real elephant in the room; Facebook does not, for right or wrong reasons, want to be dragged into the business of editing the news. This means that for all efforts to tweak its algoritihim and fact checking, it will remain as it currently is – a loosely regulated forum in which cute angles and cunning braggadocio will usually, ahem, trump true reporting.

Who fact-checks the watchmen? 

I have been a journalist for over a decade and am old enough to remember times before social media and news algorithms. I currently work at Which?, the consumer group known mostly for testing washing machines, TVs and printers (I used to do TVs, now I do printers). At Which?, we are never first to breaking news (unless we are breaking it) but we pride ourselves on being accurate, trustworthy and truthful. Every single fact that goes into our magazine or on our website is debated, checked, debated and checked again, before it is published.

In the face of a digital onslaught, traditional media, like Which?, faces the strongest of challenges. Why would you bother buying a newspaper when you can dip into your Facebook news feed and get it all for ‘free’? However, fake news, for me, shows how important traditional media (and that includes well-managed, ad-supported, digital-only publications) really is. After all, in the new normal of fake news; who fact-checks the watchmen? 

In his book, the late AA Gill gave a stirring defence of his employer, newspapers. He wrote: “Consider starting each morning with three or so dozen blank sheets of broadsheet paper. And then having to fill them with facts, opinions based on facts and predictions based on facts. I don’t know how many facts a newspaper has in it. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Millions. From the stock market to TV listings by way of courtrooms, parliaments, disasters, wars, celebrity denials, births, deaths, horoscopes and the pictures to go with them…. What’s amazing, what’s utterly staggering, is not the things paper get wrong, it’s just how much they get right. No other business could guarantee the percentage of accuracy that a newspaper does.”

Some would read this as a career hack defeding his livelihood. But I think that is wrong. In debates about the media, we get far too focused on format. For me, what’s really important is the discipline and rigour that comes with a professional media outfit. This is where facts are checked, stories are followed up and advice is considered carefully before it is given. Sure, there is bias and irresponsibility (we are still reeling from the phone hacking scandal) but there is also a responsibility to the truth. In the new digital mediaverse where fake news thrives, this is so often not the case.

Take health blogging – one of the biggest growth areas in the media. While many blogs are well produced, some have all manner of advice from people with seemingly zero qualifications to dispense such guidance. With usually limited editorial oversight, as long as they are charismatic enough, bloggers can build a committed audience. I heard a story once of a health blog advising people to drink as much water as they can as you ‘cannot drink too much’. Not only is that wrong, it’s downright dangerous.

Truth is our life-raft

The press is supposed to be the fourth estate in society, yet engulfed by information overload in the digital age, it feels more like a stuffy old shirt trying to hold back Spring Break. And some of the odious and damaging dross that has been circulated as ‘news’ makes the worst ills the tabloids look relatively benign. Maybe this is it for the media – the death knell. But it is also possible that people will seek out good old fashioned fact-checking and journalistic discipline as a life raft on this endless sea of misinformation.

We still need someone to consider a story, a fact, a source, a quote or a statement, and say ‘what does this really mean? How should this really be reported?’ Not for click bait, and not for shares. Newspapers have been taking shameful political standpoints for years, but at least you knew what you getting with their brand. When JoeBloggsXXX posts about the ‘real reason Hilary Clinton won’t release her emails’, we have literally no understanding of who, what, why, how or where. Only ‘share’. We now know the impact this material can have. Fake news stories can move people. Change governments. Win elections. And there is nothing fake about the consequences.