The Long History of ‘Fake News’ in the Hebrew Press

For the post-lunch session on Day 3 of IAMCR 2019, I’ve made my way to a communication history session on ‘fake news’ (!). We start with Gideon Kouts, who points out that such content has a very long history. It spreads under the condition that it finds in its host society a culture that is susceptible to such content, and is able to translate false information into widely believed legend.

This was the case for 19th-century Jewish community: ‘fake news’ in Hebrew journalism is as old as journalism itself. This is in spite of religious commandments prohibiting lies, in protection of society and religion as well as in pursuit of professional and business rivalries, sometimes also in the form of satire.

Two early Hebrew-language newspapers in Europe exemplify this, and indeed publishing in such newspapers conferred such important social status on authors that they were led to publish the same articles over and over or just made up ‘miracle stories’. This phenomenon of ‘miracle stories’ is not unique to Jewish and Hebrew newspapers, however, but it was also used to make religious and political points about Jews and their place in European societies, as well as for attacks between secular and orthodox Jews.

Orthodox circles in Vilna even set up a propaganda bureau called the Black Office, distributing ‘fake news’ about their opponents in the city’s Jewish community (attacking them as pork-eaters and womanisers, for instance). Elsewhere, such scandal stories were also used to attract audiences to the newspapers, of course.

At the same time, newspapers were also fearful of official censorship, and engaged in a certain amount of ostensible self-censorship – reporting at the top of the article that ‘nothing happened’, but then going on to outline some of the current problems. Some also perceived significant differences in the quality of information between Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers, with Hebrew seen as the language for ‘proper’ news coverage.

This long pre-history has left its imprint on the present-day Israeli press, Gideon suggests.