In the spring of 1892, Ida B. Wells had had enough. The 29-year-old Memphis editor was sick of reading about the lynchings of Black Americans and angry about the bogus excuse often used to justify them: fraudulent claims of sexual assault — “the same old racket,” as she called it. “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women.”
And so she set out to convince other Americans. Wells collected data for hundreds of cases, investigated dozens herself and even hired private investigators, and carefully tracked and catalogued how those cases were reported. What she found was a concerted newspaper campaign of false propaganda that encouraged lynching and then excused or covered it up.
Wells muckraked the failings of the press, in other words. And her exposés of racist lies form a crucial part of the history of disinformation in America.
That’s not the way I originally conceived such a history, though. In trying to chronicle media malpractice in America for a book, I expected to cover infamous hoaxes, such as the New York Sun’s batmen-on-the-moon series in 1835 or the New York Herald’s fictitious zoo escape of 1874, which featured rampaging grizzlies and bloodthirsty panthers. I also anticipated writing about conspiracy theories, like the various “Satanic panics” and QAnon, along with notorious examples of partisan deception, whether in the 1790s or today. But in doing the research, I kept seeing cases like Wells’ critique, and that changed my entire frame of reference.
The most consequential part of the history of disinformation in America, it soon became obvious, isn’t the episodic lying driven by pranking or profit. Instead, it’s the longstanding “bipartisan” myths that have targeted marginalized groups: women, people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ communities, labor unions, the poor and others. These lies have proved far more enduring and much more lethal.
Disinformation about Black people is one of the oldest traditions in America. It turns out that, for centuries, what white people have said and written about communities of color was false, fantastical, unfair and often self-contradictory.
This is evident in the many oxymoronic myths spread about African Americans. One of the first of those was that slavery was benign and enslaved persons were generally well-treated. Why, then, did so many try to escape, protest or revolt? Other lies asserted that Black people weren’t as smart or chaste or hardworking as white people, even though many examples to the contrary abounded, and even though the entire Southern plantation economy was sustained by forced labor under the most brutal conditions.
For generations after slavery, white writers routinely disparaged the Black family, claiming it wasn’t as strong or as wholesome as their own. They called African-American men “beasts,” portraying them as dangerous predators barely able to contain their impulses to rape, pillage and kill. This was the infuriating hypocrisy that drove Wells to set the record straight. She was perhaps America’s first great investigative journalist.
But the lies didn’t end in the Jim Crow era. They persisted through the 20th century, rearing their heads anytime racists needed to push back against the progress of civil rights. And they had many skillful practitioners.
Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett was one of the most convincing liars of his day. In the wake of the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, he gave a televised speech announcing his intention to fight the ruling. Barnett insisted that no school in the state would integrate — and couldn’t be forced to, he claimed, because Mississippi’s sovereign power superseded the federal government’s.
That’s not what he told the public, however. “Of course I know interposition is invalid,” he admitted. “I’m bluffing. But you wait and see. I’ll bluff the Justice Department into backing down.”
Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus also practiced doublespeak. After reversing his public position on segregation several times, he snapped to reporters: “Just because I said it doesn’t make it so.”
That same lack of truthfulness becomes clear in the media's sensationalistic coverage of drug use. Long before the manufactured myth of the “crack baby” epidemic of the 1980s, which was altogether unsupported by evidence, many newspapers in the early 20th century peddled the narrative that cocaine was the African-American drug of choice. “Negro cocaine fiends” was a fearsome trope the press loved to brandish, even though the vast majority of cocaine users then were white. For too many editors, the combination of Black criminality and exotic substances was a potent elixir, something that Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger exploited in his openly racist public relations strategy and selective enforcement. Anslinger was one of the greatest con men of that century, and racist canards were his stock in trade.
Disinformation about people of color never disappeared. It has flourished on talk radio, on Fox News and on websites like Newsmax and Breitbart, which for a time featured a “Black Crime” menu option and regularly traffics in stories about “illegals,” the “border crisis” and “migrant crime.” Outlets with no journalistic ethics don’t just happen to dabble in these fictions; they bank on them. Disinformation is part of their business model.
Into this fraught media ecosphere strolled Donald Trump. From his “birther” conspiracy theory, alleging that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, to his insults targeting Muslims, Mexicans, Black Lives Matter activists and others, Trump milks racial animosity regularly, hawking lies about people of color at nearly every rally. He, too, is a kind of racketeer.
His attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris often descend to insults about her identity — that she’s not Black or too Black or in some way not sufficiently American — but mostly they lump her in with the myths so often told about African Americans, essentially that they’re deficient in some way and thus not equal to white citizens.
Only in America can a white man convicted of multiple felonies try to paint a Black former prosecutor as a criminal. Only in America can a trust-fund heir with numerous bankruptcies and an endless list of lawsuits accuse a former McDonald’s employee of privilege. Only in America can a “businessman” with financial ties to the Russian mob suggest others are corrupt.
When Alexander Hamilton contemplated recruiting African-American soldiers to fight in the Revolutionary War, he recognized the resistance that would ensue from many white people. As he lamented, “The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor in experience.”
Those delusions die hard. Too many white Americans today still fail to see clearly, and continue to chase phantoms instead of reality. If Ida B. Wells were alive today, she’d be fighting for facts and challenging the dishonest schemers. So should we all.
