MOON HOAX: That Fooled The World | THE BIRTH OF FAKE NEWS | 👽 It Must Be Real If You See It?

🌘 THE GREAT MOON HOAX THAT FOOLED THE WORLD
The moon and space exploration are magnets for fake news. August 2022: A prominent French physicist discovers a star that he later admits is a piece of chorizo. July 1969. Man lands on the moon. Or didn't? But before all that, it was August 1835 that spawned the most imaginative lunar hoax of all. And it was then that the world looked up at the moon and saw a whole new lunar landscape that would change humanity as we know it.

Few people today remember that the first man walked on the moon in 1835. That year, however, it was all anyone could talk about. Reports in the Sun, the New York newspaper founded just a few years earlier, described sightings of men with bat wings, unicorns, and bipedal beavers on the lunar surface, leading to much speculation and huge newspaper sales in New York and the rest of the relatively new nation. Every paper in the city printed excerpts or rebuttals; every outlet had to weigh in. News of life on the moon spread like riots had the previous year, when mobs of white New Yorkers took to the streets to intimidate, beat, or worse blacks, abolitionists, and "amalgamators"-the name given to those they feared favored race mixing.

Needless to say, none of these lunar discoveries turned out to be true. The Moon Hoax was concocted by Richard Adams Locke, the editor of The Sun, and today it reads not only as a parody of science and faith, or as a prank on a gullible public, but also somehow as a transference of some of the energy that had led to those riots. Many white readers would rather embrace lunar man-bats than their fellow human beings.

The changes wrought by the advent of the penny press are in some ways similar to the more recent changes wrought by the Internet. The Web, too, promised a democratic upheaval based on the notion that freedom could be almost free; it, too, soon became filled with sensationalism as news, supported not by sponsorship (as earlier newspapers had been) but by advertising (at least at first); it, too, intensified the tendency to make court life a kind of politics, and politics a kind of kangaroo court, with "-gate" added as a suffix to every incident; it, too, implements chaos as a way of life. And like the Internet, the penny press inaugurated by the Sun was fueled not by disputes over facts, but by hoaxes, impostors, vast fictions, artists, and frauds.

While the age of social media may allow misinformation to spread like a highly contagious virus, "fake news" is, of course, as old as the news itself. The video explains why the articles ended up being taken seriously, and details how profit, entertainment value, and the nature of belief intertwined to perpetuate this fantastical hoax, mirroring trends that continue, amplified, today.

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