HIST231 - Fake News and American Democracy

At separate moments, Thomas Jefferson famously declared both that newspapers were crucial to sustain a nation and that a person who never looked at a newspaper was better informed than a regular reader of the press. The ideal of an informed citizenry occupies a central spot in our understanding of the democratic project in the United States, and, consequently, the news and the news media play a vital role. But the news may also be a means to manipulate and distort, not simply inform. As Americans on both the Left and Right wonder today, what happens to our democratic prospects when public information and the media are unreliable? In this class we will consider the history of fake news in the United States and its implications for democracy and citizenship. We will dig into an array of episodes – from the Jefferson-Hamilton debates in the press to battles over what could be printed about slavery; from McCarthyism to the ways in which different racial and ethnic groups often engaged with different accounts of the news. We will examine in depth the moment of a global rise in fascism and America’s best-known news hoax, the “War of the Worlds” radio program. Throughout, we will explore the importance of the different media that conveyed news in the past – and think about what that means for us in the present moment as news travels through new channels.