John Adams didn't literally call the Philadelphia Aurora (also known as the Aurora General Adviser) "fake news," but he was not pleased by the way he was often depicted in it. (Photo illustration by Smithsonian.com; Photos by Smithsonian American Art Museum, Adams-Clement Collection, gift of Mary Louisa Adams Clement in memory of her mother, Louisa Catherine Adams Clement / National Museum of American History)
In the margins of his copy of Condorcet’s treatise Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind, President John Adams scribbled a cutting note.
Writing in the section where the French philosopher predicted that a free press would advance knowledge and create a more informed public, Adams scoffed. “There has been more new error propagated by the press in the last ten years than in an hundred years before 1798,” he wrote at the time.
The charge feels shockingly modern. Were he to have written the sentiment in 2018, and not at the turn of the 19th century, it’s easy to imagine that at just 112 characters, he might have tweeted it, instead.
While Chinese monks were block printing the Diamond Sutra as early as 868 A.D. and German printer Johannes Gutenberg developed a method of movable metal type in the mid-1400s, it took until the Enlightenment for the free press as we know it today to be born.
Condorcet’s 1795 text expanded upon the belief that a press free from censorship would circulate an open debate of ideas, with rationality and truth winning out. Adams’ marginal response reminds us that when something like truth is up for debate, the door is open for bad-faith actors (the partisan press in his view) to promulgate falsehoods—something that a reader today might call “fake news.”
Historian Katlyn Carter drew attention to Adams’ private note at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting during a panel concerning Early America and fake news.
“A lot of things we talk about today we talk about as unprecedented,” says Carter. “It’s important to look back and see how these same concerns and issues have been raised at many points throughout history.”
Going back as early as the 1640s, partisan tones in broadsides and pamphlets published in England and colonial America were “setting precedents for what would become common practice in [the] 18th-century,” writes historian David A. Copeland in The Idea of a Free Press: The Enlightenment and Its Unruly Legacy.
Fake news, as it turns out, is no recent phenomenon. But what we’re talking about when we talk about fake news requires some clarification. In a 2017 paper published in the journal Digital Journalism, researchers at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University came up with six distinct definitions of fake news after examining 34 academic articles that studied the term between 2003 and 2017 in the context of the United States, as well as Australia, China and Italy.
Most of them you’ve probably seen examples of on your social media feeds. There’s news satire, which applies to how programs like The Daily Show use humor to contextualize and mock real-world events. There’s news parody, like The Onion, which differs from satire in that platforms create made-up stories for comedic purposes. Propaganda created by the state to influence public perceptions is another form of fake news. So are manipulations of real photos or videos to create a false narrative (such as the animated gif of Parkland shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez tearing up the Constitution, when in reality she was tearing up a gun-target poster).
Content generated by advertising or public relations teams that appear as though it has been generated by news outlets also falls under the umbrella. Lastly, there’s news fabrication, the definition of fake news which swirled prominently around the 2016 U.S. presidential election in reference to pieces with no factual grounding that attempted to pass as legitimate news items. (The Pope endorsing Donald Trump was one of the more prominent examples.)
“The difficulty in distinguishing fabricated fake news occurs when partisan organizations publish these stories, providing some semblance of objectivity and balanced reporting,” the researchers note.
But “fake news” has arguably evolved faster than academia can keep pace. As the Washington Post’s Callum Borchers lamented last February, the most recent definition of “fake news” is one that’s been hijacked and repurposed by politicians, most notably President Donald Trump, to dismiss good-faith reporting that they disagree with. As Borchers points out, the framing, not the facts, are often the bone of contention for these stories. “[These politicians have] sought to redefine [fake news] as, basically, any reporting they don't like,” wrote Borchers in the piece.
Though social media has dramatically changed the reach and impact of fake news as a whole, historians such as Carter want to remind Americans that concerns about truth and the role of the press have been playing out since its earliest broadside days.
Earlier echoes of John Adams’ frustrations can be found in laments by figures like Thomas Hutchinson, a British loyalist politician in a sea of American revolutionaries, who cried that the freedom of the press had been interpreted as the freedom to “print every Thing that is Libelous and Slanderous.”