Annotated Selections I
Kevin Young, ‘Moon Shot: Race, a Hoax, and the Birth of Fake News’
This article in the October New Yorker “Moon Shot: Race, a Hoax, and the Birth of Fake News” addressed the events of 1835, the year in American history of a report of plants and other creatures living on the moon. This announcement of humanoid lunar life caused a big sale of newspapers, and as a result people started to believe in mythological figures. The hoax claimed that hairy men about four feet in stature with wings lived on the moon, and attributed to them features stereotypically assigned to African Americans – for example, wooly hair.
This incident shows how people make fake news and gradually build on the farce and force themselves to believe it, so more and more the fake news becomes seemingly a truth. People disregard or intend to block themselves from the real facts. The article brings up an interesting subject, and targets the weakness of human minds for fragile, insecure data. While the fake is fake, eventually the facts are still available, and ultimately the wise will never be easily able to believe fabulous tales.
People do not know that this fake news can be well spread or scattered because human beings long for a paradise, such as Shangri-La, a lost horizon to be found. This hoax may have succeeded because it mirrored people’s expectations in discussing racial hierarchies on the Moon. Also, angels or evangelists that bear wing to take people to a time-space that can confer a physical and spiritual freedom may share some characteristics of hoaxes like this.
Therefore, I thought this an interesting article that recalled a little-known incident from the 1830’s. This hoax underlines the fact that Trump did not invent the notion of fake news. Do we believe it’s fake news that the largest population ever to see the inauguration of an American president stood in front of the White House on the day of Trump’s inauguration?
Kevin Young, ‘Moon Shot: Race, a Hoax, and the Birth of Fake News’
The New Yorker, October 21, (2017)
Also published in Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News,” Graywolf Press, 2017.
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| A French print, published in the New York Sun newspaper, in 1835,
purported to show all manner of plants and life on the moon’s surface. Photograph by SSPL / Getty |
This article in the October New Yorker “Moon Shot: Race, a Hoax, and the Birth of Fake News” addressed the events of 1835, the year in American history of a report of plants and other creatures living on the moon. This announcement of humanoid lunar life caused a big sale of newspapers, and as a result people started to believe in mythological figures. The hoax claimed that hairy men about four feet in stature with wings lived on the moon, and attributed to them features stereotypically assigned to African Americans – for example, wooly hair.
This incident shows how people make fake news and gradually build on the farce and force themselves to believe it, so more and more the fake news becomes seemingly a truth. People disregard or intend to block themselves from the real facts. The article brings up an interesting subject, and targets the weakness of human minds for fragile, insecure data. While the fake is fake, eventually the facts are still available, and ultimately the wise will never be easily able to believe fabulous tales.
People do not know that this fake news can be well spread or scattered because human beings long for a paradise, such as Shangri-La, a lost horizon to be found. This hoax may have succeeded because it mirrored people’s expectations in discussing racial hierarchies on the Moon. Also, angels or evangelists that bear wing to take people to a time-space that can confer a physical and spiritual freedom may share some characteristics of hoaxes like this.
Therefore, I thought this an interesting article that recalled a little-known incident from the 1830’s. This hoax underlines the fact that Trump did not invent the notion of fake news. Do we believe it’s fake news that the largest population ever to see the inauguration of an American president stood in front of the White House on the day of Trump’s inauguration?
(by Luchia Lee-Howell)
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