{"id":22373,"date":"2016-12-27T21:54:53","date_gmt":"2016-12-28T02:54:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22373"},"modified":"2016-12-27T21:54:53","modified_gmt":"2016-12-28T02:54:53","slug":"the-great-fake-news-scare-of-1530","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22373","title":{"rendered":"The Great \u201cFake News\u201d Scare of 1530"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Great \u201cFake News\u201d Scare of 1530<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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Fake news has always been around for humor purposes, but the real \u201cfake news\u201d scares happen when the establishment is so used to getting away with lying, that any alternate narrative is demonized as factually false, irresponsible, and dangerous.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Onion\u201d was next to \u201cThe Economist\u201d in the newspaper stands for almost two decades. \u201cWeekly World News\u201d, which one-ups most British tabloids with regular Elvis sightings and vivid descriptions of two-mile fish orbiting in the rings of Jupiter, is still next to \u201cForeign Policy\u201d in the same newspaper stands. This was never considered problematic in the slightest. Why, then, is a unified establishment screaming bloody murder about \u201cfake news\u201d all of a sudden?<\/p>\n

To see the pattern here, it helps to know a little history \u2013 let\u2019s look at the great \u201cFake News\u201d scare of 1530. It has a lot of elements similar to ours today.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe statements that make [established] people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. [\u2026] If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking.\u201d \u2014 Paul Graham<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After the\u00a0Black Death<\/a>\u00a0hit Europe hard around 1350, the monasteries were chronically short on manpower. The families that had used to send a child or two to become monks or nuns simply needed all their kids to work in the fields, to ensure food production, before such luxuries as manning the monasteries could even be considered. Therefore, any work that required involving monasteries became increasingly steep or scarce for the coming century.<\/p>\n

This is relevant as those monasteries were the only places that produced books, all of which were in Latin, and all of which were in complete synchronization with the messages of the Catholic Church, the owner of the monasteries and therefore the owner of all mass media at the time.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Great \u201cFake News\u201d Scare of 1530 Fake news has always been around for humor purposes, but the real \u201cfake news\u201d scares happen when the establishment is so used to getting away with lying, that any alternate narrative is demonized as factually false, irresponsible, and dangerous. \u201cThe Onion\u201d was next to \u201cThe Economist\u201d in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[14637,14639,9296,281,2779,14638,3847],"class_list":["post-22373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-14637","tag-black-death","tag-catholic-church","tag-europe","tag-fake-news","tag-galileo","tag-mass-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22373"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22374,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22373\/revisions\/22374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}