FAKE NEWS/INTOX

7 spectacular fake news spread by the media!

March 14, 2023
professormaurice
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HAKIZIMANA Maurice

According to an IPSOS survey, one in three French people no longer trusts traditional media for information. The term “fake news” was popularized around the time of Donald Trump’s presidential election in 2016, about a suspicion of Russian interference in the presidential election. In reality, fake news has been used for centuries to justify, most of the time, political decisions.

To take only the contemporary era, in the last century: the former USSR and Nazi Germany were masters at spreading fake news. At the time, it was called propaganda. Fake news abounds in human history to such an extent that I will settle for only seven of them for a hundred years. These have changed the face of the world and/or have had very important consequences on the course of history or on the lives of the peoples who have been victims or influenced by this fake news!

1.Fake News: Martians are landing on earth!

7 fake news spectaculaires propagées par les médias !
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Even if it is not in the political realm, this fake news is undoubtedly one of the most striking and spectacular. It shows the power of the media and the influence it can have on peoples or societies. On October 30, 1938, the famous director, author, producer Orson Welles (1915 – 1985) was working on the American radio station CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System).In the 30s, radio was the most powerful and listened to medium in the USA because television was still in its infancy. Thus, the first television broadcast did not take place until April 7, 1927!

Everything the media said was, at that time, (still) the word of the Gospel. Imagine, then, the effect that could have made on the air of one of the most powerful radios in the United States, the announcement by Orson Welles that the Martians had landed in New Jersey! A panic ensued, and a large number of listeners fled New York by road, convinced that the Martian army had invaded Earth! In fact, it was a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel War of the Worlds by Orson Welles’ theater troupe, with the Mercury Theatre effectively chronicling an alien invasion of our planet.

2.Fake News : The mass grave of 4000 dead in Timisoara!

7 fake news spectaculaires propagées par les médias !
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

In December 1989, images played over and over again before the horrified eyes of viewers around the world would arouse widespread indignation and precipitate the fall of the regime of Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, then his summary execution, as well as that of his wife. These horrific scenes showed hundreds of corpses in “mass graves” found in the city of Timisoara.  These bodies were presented by the media as political victims of the Ceausescu regime, which allegedly ordered them to be tortured and then summarily executed before being thrown into fake communes.

The media spoke of nearly 4000 dead In fact, it was proved that these corpses were only a hundred and that they had been dug up from a cemetery in this city to organize this macabre scene. In fact, it was a horrible manipulation that did not honor its instigators… and put them on the same level as the dictator they wanted to overthrow. The culprits were never identified. This “information” came from a dispatch from the Yugoslav news agency taken up, without verification, by the largest news agencies including Agence France Presse, and by all the French media!  So: incompetence or the result of ideological bias on the part of the journalists who spread this “information”?

3.Fake News : Babies slaughtered by Saddam Hussein’s army!

7 fake news spectaculaires propagées par les médias !
WIKIPEDIA

In 1990, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s troops seized Kuwait. On October 10 of that year, a Kuwaiti teenager appeared at the podium of the US Congress in Washington, D.C., with tremolos in her voice and tears in her eyes, to tell a story that horrified the members present. These images, relayed by the media, scandalized people around the world. This horrific news precipitated the US intervention in Iraq already planned by US President George W. Bush (probably a “coincidence”!).

This young girl, named Nayirah, swore that she had seen, with her own eyes, Iraqi soldiers enter the maternity hospital in Kuwait City, the capital of this emirate. Then, they had snatched the babies from their incubators to let them die on the floor! In fact, this “frightened” Kuwaiti was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and her story was a lie! As Le Point recalls, this manipulation, organized by the American and Kuwaiti governments, tipped American opinion in favor of an intervention by American soldiers in Iraq! The Gulf War followed in January 1991 to bring “democracy” to Iraq, which has since experienced permanent chaos! Once again, the media around the world spread this fake news without bothering to verify it!

4.Fake News : Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction!

7 fake news spectaculaires propagées par les médias !
WIKIPEDIA

Once again, it is gross fake news about Iraq that allows the Oscar for fake news of the year to be awarded again to the US administration in 2003. On February 5, 2003, the then Secretary of State for Defence appeared at the United Nations in New York. By theatrically waving a vial of an indeterminate liquid, he claims to demonstrate proof that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and that urgent intervention is needed to destroy them before this madman of Saddam Hussein triggers a nuclear or chemical apocalypse the morning he gets up on the wrong foot!

I hardly caricature. On this pretext of finding these chemical weapons of mass destruction and stopping the Iraqi nuclear development program (for civilian purposes but you never know!), the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003. Ten years later, Colin Powell will confess to bitterly “regretting” his mistake, blaming the American secret services. In the meantime, the US intervention would have caused at least thousands, if not millions, of deaths according to estimates, will have plunged an already bloodless country into an even more catastrophic situation. Oil companies will seize the country’s immense hydrocarbon reserves. Saddam Hussein was deposed, tried quickly and summarily hanged. We still do not know what was in the bottle that Colin Powell waved in front of the United Nations assistance and the search for these famous chemical weapons has still yielded nothing! Moreover, as Le Monde wrote, the Chilcot Commission report, published in the United Kingdom in 2016, overwhelmed the British Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, for his blind followism of the United States without any real justification for the British intervention in Iraq.

5.Fake News : German coal-fired power plants responsible for pollution in France

7 fake news spectaculaires propagées par les médias !
PIXABAY

Fake news can concern sectors other than geopolitics such as ecology and strongly influence public opinion! For example, in December 2016: many French media blamed polluting emissions from German coal-fired power plants for pollution peaks in France. Germany then chose to abandon its nuclear program and reopen its coal-fired power plants… yet extremely polluting.

This serious pollution comes from the massive emission of very toxic particles, especially for our respiratory system. These major disadvantages of the use of coal made the media accusations against pollution from Germany all the more coherent! But as Le Monde reveals, this information was false! Indeed, in December 2016, the increase in the pollution peak in Ile-de-France, although accredited by many experts, had a local origin. This rumor came from the site Les Econoclastes and was taken up without verification by many media and “experts”.

6.Fake News : The alarming increase in Covid-19 cases!

7 fake news spectaculaires propagées par les médias !
PIXABAY

The figures concerning the spread of the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus causing the Covid-19 pandemic give rise to a strategic battle of figures that has a strong influence on the measures taken by the government and on the behavior of the population! The slightest increase, for example, in the number of deaths, hospitalizations or resuscitations has a considerable psychological impact on the whole country. Awhile, in the opinion of doctors and epidemiologists, it is absurd to give the daily figures, because of their variability from one day to the next, the Minister of Health continues to list the figures every day, blowing hot and cold alternately and increasing the fear, even panic, of the French already immersed in an anxiety-provoking atmosphere for months!

It happens that the general rate of panic rises sharply, following false news spread by the authorities, themselves and relayed blindly, without verification, by the media. Thus, in an article of September 19, Le Figaro revealed that, according to data from Public Health France, the balance sheet of the previous Friday, September 18, was 123 additional deaths in 24 hours while it was only 50 the day before!

Voices were raised speaking of the deadliest period since March, of a hecatomb announced, of a second wave, even of a new confinement! In reality, these figures were false because they took into account the late addition of data from a hospital in Essonne that had not been taken into account previously! In fact, there were “only” 47 more deaths compared to the day before and not 73 as the data from Public Health France suggested! According to the same article in Le Figaro, the Public Health site France was accustomed to display bugs and suffered from a lack of accurate information on the evolution of the epidemic!

7.Fake News : Game Winter, the game that blew the heat… then the cold!

7 fake news spectaculaires propagées par les médias !

To finish on a lighter note but nevertheless on a fake news that made some noise in the world of reality TV in 2017, we can talk about Game2: Winter. This program was to radically revolutionize the world of reality TV and survival shows. Its creator, Russian billionaire Yevgeny Pyatkovsky, said he wanted to broadcast on the internet, from June 30, 2017, a survival game in which thirty candidates had to compete in Siberia, in the middle of the forest, and survive among bears and wolves!

Participants were only allowed a knife. Their mission was to survive in one of the most hostile environments in the world! This game was inspired by the famous movie Hunger Games which was so successful worldwide in 2012 that a sequel was shot in 2015: The Hunger Games, the Revolt.

This Game2: Winter project spread virally, especially on the Web. Hundreds of applications poured in for the game, which was to be broadcast 24 hours a day online. Two small “details”: first, applicants had to pay 158,000 euros to register… but to win 1.6 million euros for the winner.

Second, contestants could use all kinds of violence (such as raping other contestants or killing each other) under the eye of 2000 cameras installed to follow the game! The police had to take charge, nevertheless, of arresting those guilty of abuses and crimes!

The immense buzz caused at the global level was going to fall like a soufflé when the organizer of the game, Yevgeny Pyatkovskï, finally confessed, on June 1, 2017, to have set up this whole affair to demonstrate the rapid transmission of fake news but without ever intending to launch Games2: Winter! Nevertheless, this scam had been relayed, for nearly six months, a little hastily and without verification, by many print, radio, television and digital media (eg Konbini) in the world.

Professor Hakizimana Maurice is a professional teacher graduated from the Catholic University of Paris and Human Sciences from the Sorbonne University and teaches at the second degree in France. Follow him on  Facebook,Twitter and Instagram

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