Benjamin Franklin, taking time out from his duties as American ambassador to France, concocted an entirely fake issue of a real Boston newspaper, the Independent Chronicle. defenseless farmers, women, and children.”Franklin sent copies of his fake newspaper to colleagues insisting, “the substance is truth.” Sure enough, the story appeared in real papers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York and Rhode Island. Franklin wrote a friend about the power of what he had just done. That spring, to illustrate the long roots of this terrible bloodshed, U.S. newspapers introduced a new generation to Franklin’s fake bags of scalps, heating up the iron once again. Our own fake news purveyor, Paul Horner, suggests that Americans today are “definitely dumber” than they used to be.

Source: Washington Post November 25, 2016 23:19 UTC