Inside The Time When Actual Fake News Helped Fuel A War Shutterstock
By Cody Copeland/Jan. 1, 2021 1:25 pm EDT
Fake news may seems like a 21st century phenomenon, considering how often Donald Trump uses the term to delegitimize any and all criticism of the way he has served as president. According to Washingtonian, he even erroneously claimed to have invented the term himself and is very proud of it, but the popularization of the term has actually been attributed to Craig Silverman, a media editor for BuzzFeed News, who used the term to describe the spread of online misinformation for a 2014 research project. Consult the U.S. Office of the Historian, however, and you ll find that the practice of publishing false information to sway public opinion in the United States has a much longer history than you may have previously thought. Fake news actually dates back to the late 19th century, but back then it went by a different name: yellow journalism.