Justin Fox, Columnist

Real Talk on the Power of Fake News

There's a long history of markets and elections being manipulated through the press.

November 29, 2016 at 5:15 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

* Not really Donald Trump.
Photographer: Dominick Reuter/AFP/Getty Images

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Fake news is in the news. During the election, political partisans and cagey entrepreneurs from Arizona to Macedonia flooded social networks with entirely made-up stories that mostly favored Donald Trump and often got far more readers than the perhaps flawed but generally not faked products of conventional news outlets. That’s definitely disturbing (for a journalist, at least). But is it new?

In an op-ed article published Friday in the Washington Post, Binghamton University historian Robert G. Parkinson answered with a clear “no,” offering examples of partisan news-faking by Founding Fathers John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. “No” was also the gist of the answer that Richard R. John, a professor of history and communications at the Columbia Journalism School, gave when I talked to him last week. But there were caveats, and lots of fun facts. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.1480430053138