While in college, Petra McGillen took a summer internship at a call-in radio show in Germany. A young, idealistic journalist-in-training, McGillen was shocked when, within her first week on the job, her manager asked her to call in and pretend to be a listener. She soon discovered that this type of fakery was common at the station.
“I also had to write the weather,” she recalls. “The station was too cheap for its own meteorological service, so they had me listen to the weather report on some other news stations and then cobble my own thing together. For that whole summer, it was always a sunny-cloudy mix, temperatures in the mid-70s and the occasional shower—can’t go wrong, because some piece of that will be true no matter what!”
McGillen, an associate professor of German studies who researches the history of creativity and knowledge production in 18th- and 19th-century German literature and culture, had come face to face with the economic and societal pressures that have shaped journalism since its inception. In her current book project, Formative Fakes: Manipulation and the Origins of Modern Journalism in the Long Nineteenth Century, she scours 19th-century German, British, and American print archives to show how fabrication, staging, and manipulation were foundational to journalism long before the fake news era.
McGillen’s related paper, Inglorious Resistance: The Opposition Press’s Exploitation of Sitting Editors in Imperial Germany, recently won the top research award from the Society of Nineteenth Century Historians.
“It is really important to understand that the whole journalistic enterprise rests on really fragile foundations,” says McGillen. “We cannot assume that previously things were working fine and that we had a functioning media scene. No, things have always been problematic and difficult. For a good understanding of our troubled media landscape now, it is helpful to look at historical sample cases and take the long view.”
The birth of “breaking news”
Journalism as an institution crystallized in the second half of the 19th century with the advent of the telegraph. While the new technology vastly sped up and globalized the dissemination of information, it also posed key challenges for journalists. Information that used to travel at the speed of ships, trains, or letters was suddenly arriving instantly—and in fragments. Journalists now lacked the time to verify details before succumbing to the pressure to publish breaking news, while many newspapers began relying on transmitted accounts to cover foreign events rather than having their own boots on the ground. At the same time, newspapers proliferated and reporting became more standardized, resulting in intense competition for readership and attempts to stand out from the crowd with unique articles and details.
The result, McGillen shows, was the rise of “formative fakes”—fabrications that fundamentally shaped the practice of journalism. There were made-up eyewitness accounts, news illustrations produced in advance based on speculation, and articles composed by merging multiple existing reports and filling in gaps with plausible but unconfirmed details.
As editors relied heavily on engravings for images during this time, the visual media included in newspapers represented their own form of fakery—presented as truth, but based on written reports, sketches, and artists’ own imaginations.
“Historians who look at 19th-century newspapers may not necessarily be aware that the eyewitness report they’re quoting might be a fabrication,” McGillen says. “We need very critical eyes when we look at 19th-century newspapers.”
McGillen recalls one striking example of this from a regional newspaper in Pennsylvania. In 1895, the Wilkes-Barre Times published a “telegraphic special,” very likely written by a fake correspondent, that described violent crimes on immigrant miners in a mining town near Hazleton. According to this “special,” one Hungarian miner had been brutally slain and another one severely wounded by members of the Italian mafia. Another newspaper dubbed it a hoax and accused the outlet of fakery and sensationalism, but as more newspapers joined the conversation, the discussion quickly shifted away from discussions of journalistic malpractice and towards political concerns—specifically about “‘gangs’ of ‘Italian assassins’ controlling mining towns and taking the jobs of American miners,” McGillen says.
“Within days, nobody was talking about the fake dimension of the story anymore but about fears associated with ‘foreigners’ and their alleged disposition toward violence,” she says. “What this shows is how easily the late 19th-century version of clickbait could already be exploited for xenophobia and political manipulation.”
McGillen notes that the fakery she focuses on is not always fueled by ulterior motives or malicious intent, however. These 19th-century journalistic practices saved money and time—two crucial advantages in an underfunded and increasingly fast-paced news environment.
Then and now
McGillen notes that today’s media environment is being shaped by strikingly similar forces as those that coalesced in the second half of the 19th century. Like the telegraph, the arrival of the internet turbocharged the speed at which information can be circulated, while also vastly minimizing both accuracy and barriers to entry; anyone with a broadband connection can share and access information. While wire transmissions in the latter 1800s arrived fragmented and often incomplete, today’s information arrives via tweets, screenshots, TikToks, and anonymous tips—resulting in 19th-century-style composite reporting, but on a massive scale.
In fact, there are clear echoes of 19th-century journalistic practices in our media landscape today. Consider Germany’s so-called “sitting editors” from the late 1800s. German press laws at the time required that every newspaper issue include the name and address of one individual who was legally responsible for the entire issue’s content and who could be taken to court in the event a paper was prosecuted. To deal with this requirement, quite a few papers of the opposition press hired janitors, office boys, injured war veterans, or other people in precarious jobs to serve in this role for a modest salary. These individuals were legally responsible for content they had nothing to do with producing, and in some cases couldn’t even read. They were tried and sometimes went to jail on behalf of the papers, allowing the opposition press to continue publishing.
“Now, in AI-driven journalism, there are spurious online ‘news’ outlets that publish AI-generated bogus stories but pay human freelance journalists to lend their faces and bylines to the machine-generated content to make it seem like real, fact-checked journalism,” McGillen says. “To me, there is a direct connection there: In both cases, people in precarious positions are exploited in order to pin anonymous texts to human bodies.”
The systemic defunding of journalism since the 1980s has compounded the problem, McGillen adds, as journalists are forced to work with less and less.
“It’s not that media outlets are not generating revenue. It’s just that the revenue is not getting reinvested,” she says. “The conditions under which journalists are working in the U.S. and in Europe are really different and much worse than what they used to be. Journalists have a lot less time to verify stories, to do basic fact-checking, because in many newsrooms they’re in assembly-line setups—something that I experienced myself. And as prominent British journalist Nick Davies says, if you take away time, you take away truth.”
The challenges facing journalists today go beyond economics. McGillen says journalists are contending with an increasing lack of access to the White House, which “creates tremendous problems and adverse circumstances,” as well as “a president who produces falsehoods on an enormous scale, and a government that produces falsehoods.” Media censorship, she adds, is another growing obstacle. “Being a journalist right now is incredibly difficult.”
Also, much like in the 19th century, competition for readers and viewers today is fierce. Unlike in the past, though, revenue is now tied to clicks, shares, watch time, and other engagement metrics rather than outright purchase of content, meaning media outlets are further incentivized to prioritize sensationalism over accuracy.
McGillen draws an urgent lesson from this history.
“We could say, ‘Well, it's never worked, so why bother?’” she says. “On the contrary. If you want journalism to work, then subscribe to a newspaper—give them the monthly fee that they need to pay their employees a decent salary and send actual people out there to do investigative reporting. My book is a plea for better societal support for journalism.”