The Impossible Battle against Fake News: The Horse Manure Crisis in London
Sometimes, I have this horrible feeling that the battle against fake news and propaganda is just impossible to win. The latest example is an article appeared on the unnamable WUWT blog, which repeats the story that someone in 1894 “predicted” that 9 feet of horse manure would soon accumulate in the street of London. And, of course, since that didn’t happen, we are free forever and ever from any and every possible kind of catastrophe.
Let me repeat it, this is a legend. I wrote that two years ago on the Cassandra blog: nobody ever wrote such a thing on “The Times” nor anywhere else. People keep repeating what they hear from other people and keep thinking that sheer volume means truth. It is pure invention, fake news.
What I found most bewildering is how slick it is the report on WUWT – note how subtly they link an article with the words “but fake“. It is a recent article by Rose Wild where she says exactly what I said in my 2016 article: There never was such a headline on The Times.
But the WUWT author, Larry Kummer, never states that explicitly. The hurried reader will surely think that the term “but fake” refers not to the existence of the 1894 article, but to its wrong predictions. This is reinforced by the sentence “accurately describing the views of the time.” It is hard to think that a non-existing article could be accurate about anything. Slick, indeed.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
