Fake News

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, written on clay tablets, Ea (a Mesopotamian god) tells the Babylonian Noah, known as Uta–napishti, to promise his people that food will rain from the sky if they help him build the ark. Once the ark is built, Uta–napishti and his family climb aboard and survive with the animals. Everyone else drowns. Dr Martin Worthington, senior lecturer in Assyriology at Cambridge suggests it may be the earliest example of fake news.

a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh

However, the Mesopotamians were not a literate society and no society achieved anything like our present day rates and it was a gradual progression dating from the invention of the printing press in around 1440 CE and it probably would have taken a lot longer here but for the English Civil Wars (which affected the whole British Isles).

From the moment the fighting started in 1642/3 there were a great many fake and forged publications. Declarations, speeches, letters, and sermons began to be printed with completely spurious claims made on their title-pages regarding their provenance, who had composed them, where they had been published, and why. I’m not saying that most people could read them but paper was easily transported and relatively cheap unlike clay tablets or parchment or vellum. Thus those who could read in the towns and villages would read these papers to the mass of people.

a printing press

The neutrality of the English people presented a challenge to both sides and both rushed to find a way to bolster their popular support. The Royalists took the initiative and published their own newspaper, the Mercurius Aulicus, to help spread their political message. In response, the Parliamentarians set up their own weekly newspaper, the Mercurius Britannicus.

Both these newspapers initially followed the dry and factual style of the few pre-war publications, but the problem was that this style was unpopular with the public. For a start, people didn’t trust newspapers for the simple reason that you could never know who wrote them.

The dry, factual style also failed to hold many people’s attention, especially those who weren’t already politically engaged. Both sides moved quickly to adapt, and the style of newspapers rapidly changed into one that might be recognisable now. To keep their reader base engaged and supportive of the war effort, the two newspapers also slowly began to twist the truth to bolster support for their own sides, leading to a proliferation of fake news.

The Britannicus was notorious for doing this, and in the early months of the war was known to report small Parliamentarian defeats as victories, calling for days of public thanksgiving to celebrate. This led to the Aulicus to report that “never have men been so thankful to be beaten so often or so thoroughly”.

Mercurius Civicus

Fake news during the Civil War took a variety of forms, and one of the most popular forms was character assassinations against members of the opposing side. A popular target for the Britannicus’ was the King’s wife, Queen Henrietta Maria as she was not only French but also Catholic. These two factors meant that the English public was already suspicious of her, and didn’t need much convincing when the Parliamentarians spread fake news about her.

The Royalists lost no time in slandering prominent Parliamentarians. The Aulicus published several stories about the brutality of Parliamentarian officers, mixing fact with fiction to make the fake news harder to discern from the truth. One notable story that contained a grain of truth involved Oliver Cromwell who had ordered the arrest of a Royalist-sympathising priest in London but the Aulicus exaggerated the story. They asserted that the priest’s son had pleaded with him to show mercy, and Cromwell had ordered the boy’s tongue to be burned through with a hot iron poker to silence him.

There were thousands of such fake news in the newspapers and pamphlets being distributed during the Wars and as stated earlier most of the time no one would have a clue who was printing the stuff. Or in these days liking it.

Trumpe Weekly Intelligencer

Some information above was taken from Michael Walters writing in the Yardstick Agency and William White at the University of Oxford.

The following poem was written ages ago and I’ve rewritten parts to fit this week’s theme. A few points I should mention. The first is that the ‘Forlorn Hope’ is a term used to describe the first troops into a battle. The second is that ‘this war without an enemy’ is a quote from Sir William Waller, a Parliamentary officer. The third is ‘self-denying ordinance’ whereby MPs had to resign their military commands.

New Model Poetry

There will be a turning point,
a time when the forlorn hope
of a poem dies
in the glazed eyes
of a people tired of reading
of this war without an enemy.

There will be a time
when all seems lost
truth deserting lines
in times for action
for acts by action passed,
this self-denying ordinance.

There will be a new model poetry
that knows what it writes for
each word advanced on merit
each verse a body
that refuses to be subject
to this state of introspection.

              (First published in Troubadour, 2010)

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.