As old as politics . . .

There is a current furore over what is called ‘false news’, as though this was something that hadn’t existed from time both memorial and immemorial.

The historian Adrian Goldsworthy writes in In the Name of Rome (2003) of Julius Caesar: ‘Rumour persisted that during his service in the east he had had a homosexual affair with the aging King Nicomedes of Bythinia, so that he was dubbed “a husband to women and a wife to men”.  Such crude invective was the common coin of Roman politics, making it very difficult to know whether the story had a basis in truth, but Caesar’s womanising was certainly both frequent and blatant’.

In the 12^th century, as John Julius Norwich reports in The Popes, the foremost candidate to replace the dying Honorius II as pope was ‘Cardinal Pietro Pierleoni who, after studying in Paris with the great Peter Abelard, had spent several years as a monk at Cluny before being appointed Papal Legate, first in France and then in England.  His genuine piety and irreproachable Cluniac background had made him a staunch upholder of [Church] reform . . .’  All of which, however, was insufficient to save him from attack.

As Norwich goes on to relate in a footnote: ‘Accusations were from time to time made against him by such robust prelates as Manfred of Mantua and Arnulf of Lisieux (who actually wrote a book [against Pierleoni] called Invectives) to the effect that he seduced nuns, slept with his sister, and so on; but these can be discounted as being the normal, healthy Church polemic to be expected at times of schism’.

Leonie Frieda, in her biography of Catherine de Medici, wife of Henry II of France, speaks of the avalanche of slander and abuse that beset her from her religious and political enemies, in the course of the Reformation: ‘Published in 1576, the most notable and virulent attack upon Catherine [appeared] . . . . Written by someone with an intimate knowledge of Court life cleverly blending fact with fiction, this slim volume was a huge success throughout the country and underwent several reprints.  It accused the Queen Mother of every lurid and horrible crime imaginable.  She had not only killed every person whose death had been convenient to her, orchestrated the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, seduced her sons into lives of fecklessness and debauchery so that she might usurp their rights, but her whole life was also so motivated by greed, hatred and a lust for power that no crime was too vicious for her provided that she kept her position as the de facto ruler of France.  Catherine reacted with amused interest; the charges were so exaggerated that she laughed and encouraged her ladies to read it to her aloud.  The only pity, she commented, was “that the author had not previously applied to me for information . . . he evidently knew nothing of the events he pretended to discuss”.  Besides, she laughed, he had left so much out!’

Marie Antoinette, too, suffered all during her marriage from a bad press to do with frivolity and extravagance, culminating after the imprisonment of the monarchy in ‘a lively commerce in libellous books.  A two-volume Private Life of the Queen, complete with obscene drawings, was selling well’ (Caroline Moorhead: Dancing to the Precipice).

There is nothing new about ‘fake news’, it is as old as humanity, or certainly as old as politics.  The illustrations given above could be multiplied a thousandfold, if one had the time.

The difference in reaction now to ‘fake news’, it seems to me, lies partially in the ‘democratisation’ of the means of communication, whereby anyone with a connection to the internet can empty their pisspot of angst and bile on whoever’s head they choose.

Back around 1990—pre-internet days—I wrote a futuristic short story that involved people socialising over distance by means of holograph, and it seemed to me even then that a consequence of any such development would be to embolden those who in ordinary circumstances wouldn’t say boo to a goose.  ‘Little dogs with suddenly big tails’ was, I think, how I described it at the time.

Now there are two implications for the art of political character assassination in the current situation.  On the one hand, the proliferation of abuse on-line allows the clever operators to hide within the herd and ramp up their campaigns in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.  On the other hand, it handicaps them, too, in that the effect of their message runs the risk of being drowned out in the sheer tsunami of omni-directed spleen that exists on the internet.

And I suspect it is this second that is the main driving force behind the whole ‘fake news’ hysteria—the fear that, in the shootout that is social media, the targeted message of the professional assassin is likely become less effective; indeed, that it might even become counterproductive through blowback.

            It is interesting that the whole nonsense over ‘fake news’ has only manifested itself in the wake of Trump’s win and the Brexit vote in Britain.