Just When You Thought It Was Safe ...
To start believing the press again. First a little history.
On December 28, 1917, a newspaper story by noted American journalist and curmudgeon, H.L. Mencken was published in the New York Evening Mail, claiming that the bathtub was invented in 1828 by Lord John Russell of England.
In that article it was also solemnly reported that the first American to bathe in a tub was Adam Thompson of Cincinnati, in 1842, against the advice of doctors who said it was dangerous. Thompson, said the article, gave a big party to show off his new bathtub and also that four of his guests took a dip in it and found it wonderful.
Of course, the story was a deliberate, unvarnished hoax. It hadn’t a grain of truth in it and was contrived by Mencken for his own amusement and to test the gullibility of the public. It wound up, to Mencken’s horror, being consumed as absolute truth everywhere, as magazines, newspapers and even encyclopedias picked it up and kept reprinting it as actual fact.
In 1949, he wrote:
“The success of this idle hoax vastly astonished me. It was taken gravely by a great many other newspapers, and presently made its way into medical literature and into standard reference books. It had, of course, no truth in it whatsoever, and I more than once confessed publicly that it was only a jocosity ... Scarcely a month goes by that I do not find the substance of it reprinted, not as foolishness but as fact, and not only in newspapers but in official documents and other works of the highest pretensions.”
This little story is fascinating because it reveals how easy it is to fool people into believing things which are false as long as they are presented in the public media. Astonishingly, this seems to be true even if the perpetrator of the falsehood admits it to have been fraudulent. Moreover, some can go on believing those things even when overwhelming evidence in presented to the contrary and the truth is made obvious.
The fact that human beings had been bathing in tubs in Egypt for thousands of years never occurred to the publishers of hundreds of American newspapers and encyclopedias (such as Collier’s) who picked up the Mencken hoax of 1917 and kept on publishing it, year after year for decades! One late comer to the error even ran with it in 2008 and, should we go look, we’d probably find it in print somewhere today, put up as gospel truth.
Back in my newspaper days, I published a column in my local (Northern) newspaper in which I claimed firsthand knowledge as a Southerner that grits grew on trees. To me it was such a wildly outlandish spoof that I felt none of the guilt which normally would attend being an outright liar in public. I wrote that these grits trees were harvested by large “shaker” machines which grabbed the grits trees by the trunk and vibrated the ripe grits onto mats laid out on the ground for harvesting.
In the following weeks I received numerous letters thanking me for explaining the true origin of grits. Some of these had long puzzled over where grits came from and were glad that a real Southerner at last had provided the answer.
These people may have known (or at least suspected) better but they nonetheless believed the story not because I made it up but because it was in the newspaper! That fact alone was the assurance they needed that it was true. I received one letter from a reader expressing anger that I hadn’t credited the origin of grits to corn and added that it was absurd of me to think they came from trees, indicating that he thought I was merely factually wrong, not an outright liar.
“As Seen on TV”
The fact that anything becomes significant merely by appearing on television is a testament to the mind’s passive acceptance of supposed authority. The phrase “AS SEEN ON TV” is universally attached to advertisements for products needing credibility, especially the ones that don’t deserve credibility. If it’s on TV it must be true even if it’s not.
H.L. Mencken detested all forms of flim-flam, corruption and deceit in politics, religion, medicine and morals and was a keen observer of those traits in his fellow journalists.
I’ll let him explain:
“How does so much false news get into the American newspapers, even the good ones? Is it because journalists, as a class, are habitual liars, and prefer what is not true to what is true? I don’t think it is. Rather, it is because journalists are, in the main, extremely stupid, sentimental and credulous fellows —- because nothing is easier than to fool them.”
We all know that sensation sells better than fact, that if a fistfight breaks out in a remote section of a stadium filled with happy, peaceful individuals, the cameras will focus on the fight, leading viewers to believe that the event was about “hooliganism” … an impression reinforced by excitable announcers, eager to drive up ratings.
In 1982, National Geographic presented a video which showed an emaciated polar bear dragging itself across a barren landscape and reportedly “dying from climate change”. This became the accepted “truth” of polar bears being wiped out because of climate change. This may not have been an purposeful lie and National Geographic may actually have believed it to represent a true picture of the plight of polar bears. But they had no proof. They were representing an agenda, not facts.
In 1950, the government estimate of the number of polar bears was around 5,000. By the time the National Geographic story aired, there were roughly 15,000 polar bears. Today, that number is 28,000.
Mencken would have difficulty nowadays trying to decide which righteously indignant publication or poltroon to deflate first. The choices are many. In fact they’re almost infinite and I can see him lighting up a cigar and rubbing his hands together in glee in front of his old typewriter, preparing to pounce on the Bushes, the Clintons, Obama, Biden, the pickpockets in Congress, bogus vaccines, Hollywood, the so-called intelligence agencies and all the impotent little tyrants heading bureaucracies, the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum, ad nauseam.
H.L. Mencken died in Baltimore in 1956 and we can lament that no one has risen to take his place. Before him only Mark Twain so effectively demolished the pompous criminals masquerading as noble servants of mankind nor did so as hilariously and with such devastating appeal. Today’s journalists cling to their low-paying jobs by tossing wiffle ball questions at sanctimonious politicians and turning a blind eye to most things the American public really ought to know about.
“No normal human being wants to hear the truth. It is the passion of a small and aberrant minority of men. They are hated for telling it while they live and when they die they are swiftly forgotten. What remains to the world in the way of wisdom is a long-tested and solidly agreeable pack of lies.”
Well, Mencken’s dead.
Not his sentiments.
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