BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Sunday is April First, a popular day for hoaxes in American journalism, a tradition that dates back to the mid-nineteenth century – popular then, not so much nowadays. In the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, author Robert Love chronicles some of the more memorable ink-stained hoaxes in newspaperdom.

He says that one of the oldest was perpetrated in a series of articles in the original New York Sun.
ROBERT LOVE:
The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 was a series of articles in The New York Sun. It was about the exploits of an astronomer named Sir John Herschel, a real man, who found fantastic things when looking through this 24-foot telescope at the Cape of Good Hope. And what he found was men on the moon.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What he says about those lunar humanoids was that they, quote, “averaged four feet in height, were covered with short and glossy copper-colored hair and had wings composed of a thin membrane lying snugly upon their backs.”

Now, Bob, someone put a lot of thought into this hoax. There were six very long and detailed articles. At what point did The Sun say, just kidding?
ROBERT LOVE:
You know, The Sun really never did fully admit that this was a hoax, and the prevailing attitude among journalists who were hoaxers at the time was that if people were credulous enough to believe it, so there!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Did The New York Sun’s readership ever express skepticism?
ROBERT LOVE:
First of all, the hoax worked, and in general, hoaxes worked very well, in the 19th century, doing what publishers always want to do, which is bring in more eyeballs.

Did people ever sort of rise up and revolt against what they thought was fake news? The answer is no. Hoaxes became part of newspaperdom’s menu of entertainments. Nobody really thought the worse of the papers for doing it. In some cases, they would reveal at the last line that this was all made up. Sometimes it took place on, you know, April First, but many times, it never did.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What about the much vaunted relationship of trust between reporters and readers? Did that not matter back then?
ROBERT LOVE:
Well, I mean, that’s a hard question to answer, but the truth is that sometime after the first couple of decades of the 20th century, newspapers began to acquire the mantle of authority, almost a quasi-governmental source of truth about what was going on.

To a large part, that didn’t exist for many papers in the mid-19th century. There was news. It was often biased, it was often kind of like some of the news you get today in certain outlets that have a kind of slant to them, one way or the other. And people understood that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Tell me about the Central Park Zoo hoax in The New York Herald in the 1870s.
ROBERT LOVE:
The Central Park Zoo hoax is one of the most famous hoaxes in the great landscape of media hoaxes, and there’s a rumor that the publisher said he could keep every New Yorker indoors just by publishing a story like this one day, and somebody said, I’ll take you up on that bet.

But what happened was, on November 9th, 1874, The Herald talked about a Central Park Zoo escape. There was a lion seen inside a church, a rhinoceros had fallen into the river. The National Guard was called out and I believe it was 27 people were already dead and hundreds injured. The paper called it a, quote, “bloody and fearful carnival,” and that the animals were still on the loose.

People started reading this article and they just set out to defend themselves, their homes and their families. But at the very end of it, it said, “The entire story given above is pure fabrication.” [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Sounds like a million laughs.
ROBERT LOVE:
[LAUGHS] And the point of it was, if a hoax needs a higher moral point, it was that the conditions of the animals at the zoo and their cages was thought to be not up to snuff by these crusading reporters.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What’s the deal with all the hoaxes in New York City? Is it just that that’s where some of the biggest papers were or is there something about the nature of this city that lends itself to it?

ROBERT LOVE:
Well, more papers, I think, Brooke. Also we have better records of the old newspapers in New York than we do elsewhere.

There were thousands of hoaxes that are unrecorded in small newspapers, throughout the west especially, in the 19th century. Many of them were about finding the remains of a petrified man. This was a hoax that became such a cliché that Mark Twain himself set out to shatter it by writing the best petrified man story he could.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
[LAUGHS]A hardy perennial. Now, one of history’s most peculiar and most persistent hoaxes, you note in your story, was by H.L.Mencken, but not in Baltimore, where he was most famous for working. It was in The New York Evening Mail in 1917, and it was headlined “A Neglected Anniversary.”

ROBERT LOVE:
Mencken’s neglected anniversary was the natural history of the plumbed bath tub in America. It was so well-constructed, so well-written, that it was quoted in sources high and low from then on.
It stated that a man named Adam Thompson had become acquainted with the tub in Europe, and had brought one here and it had been basically roundly pooh-poohed by Americans.

But finally, President Millard Fillmore, going against the political grain, bravely ordered one put into the White House, and from then on the bath tub was an American institution. [BROOKE LAUGHS] Of course, all of this is completely made up.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
He claimed that the city of Boston made it illegal to bathe except, quote, “under medical advice.” [LOVE LAUGHS]He said that here, the bath tub was denounced as “an epicurean and obnoxious toy from England, designed to corrupt the democratic simplicity of the Republic?”
ROBERT LOVE:
Well, it’s interesting that recent surveys have found out that too much use of the bath tub can do all those things and more.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Weaken the simplicity of the Republic?
ROBERT LOVE:
Kidding. [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
You know, we did some digging and found that President Truman, in a 1952 speech in Philadelphia at the American Hospital Association Convention, repeated parts of Mencken’s story as fact.
PRESIDENT TRUMAN:
The local medical association in Cincinnati, Ohio, passed a resolution calling Mrs. Fillmore an indecent person, because she had put a bath tub in the White House. This medical association in Cincinnati said that it was unsanitary, that it was unhealthy, that no person should take all his clothes off at one time.
ROBERT LOVE:
[LAUGHS] That sounds right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
[LAUGHS] Thank you very much.
ROBERT LOVE:
Thank you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Robert Love is an adjunct professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. His article in the current issue of CJR will be linked to at onthemedia.org.
ORSON WELLES:
Ladies and Gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.

The battle which took place tonight at Grover’s Mill has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by an army in modern times. Seven thousand men, armed with rifles and machine guns, pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders from Mars. One hundred and twenty known survivors, the rest strewn over the battle area from Grover’s Mill to Plainsboro, crushed and trampled to death under the metal feet of the monster or burned to cinders by its heat ray.