Let's make fake news fun again

The phrase “fake news” wasn’t invented yet. My friend Charlie and I would have preferred “pranks,” anyway. It was half a century ago, print was king, there were only three networks on TV, and people trusted one another enough that nobody at our neighborhood newspaper in the Bronx bothered to check the identity of readers who sent in letters to the editor.

We counted on that, Charlie and I. We were kids in high school, fascinated by the media and evidently burdened with too much time on our hands. We regularly read each other the most angry and appalled reader letters appearing in the Riverdale Press each Thursday — complaints about traffic and development, pleas for gentler neighbors and better rat controls, tirades about do-nothing politicians, love songs to local merchants and favorite teachers. There were even poems.

Like juvenile Juvenals, we wanted to satirize the form while hoodwinking the editors. We began a campaign to get our parodies of Press letters published. Every couple of weeks, we sent off a new missive, most of them signed with a fictional name based on characters we’d plucked out of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” The names were fabulous, and we figured no one would catch on to the pattern (though we’d have been thrilled if anyone did).

Almost every letter we sent was published. One week, “Arnold Lubetsch” advocated combating homicides by wearing dazzlingly colorful clothing. “Garb yourself brightly!” he suggested. “Mrs. Edna Purefoy” railed against a new public hazard, a metal banister installed in the center of the aisle on city buses: “Both the groceries and I spilled to the floor as the bus screeched to a halt,” she wrote. “Garry Owen” slammed as “hoodlums” neighbors who left their windows open while burning incense.

Desperate to be caught, we stepped up the tempo: Some weeks, we had two, even three, missives on the letters page. One week, a triumph: The Press published a letter of ours from “C. Kelleher” that responded to a letter we wrote the previous week by “Barney Kiernan.” They traded arguments about the merits of leaving streets unpaved in a rich section of town.

After more than a year of this, we chanced using the best-known name from “Ulysses” on a letter of thanks in the voice of an elderly woman helped by two boys after she tripped on a display of goods outside a shop. “Won’t you print this as a token of my appreciation and as an example of true downright goodness in our lovely neighborhood?” wrote “Mrs. Molly Bloom.” The editors slapped this headline on the letter: “Such Lovely Youngsters.”

No one suspected a thing, it seemed. We upped our game. From that point on, every letter we submitted would contain the word “spill.” The letters page was soon a drumbeat of people “spilling” their guts, taking a “spill,” or “spilling” paint, soda or “essential truths.” We told ourselves we were providing readers with a clue. No one ever noticed.

We carried this on for three years. At one point, writing as “Patrick Dignam,” we got into a lengthy exchange with a (real! We checked!) letter writer, debating U.S.-Soviet relations and Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” of American history. Week after week, “Dignam” and Theodore Spokony went after each other, with our letters becoming ever more obscure and, well, nonsensical.

Our early adventure in concocting fake news was not meant to sabotage a good and credible newspaper. We had a classic adolescent urge to challenge the rules and authority figures — the same motive that drives many pranksters and purveyors of disinformation alike all these years later.

I can defend our prank as good-natured and victimless (though the letters editor would no doubt disagree), or I can view it as an immature precursor of the millions of phony news reports and deceitful, even destructive, bits of mis- and disinformation that cascade through social media nowadays. Some of today’s untruths are as harmless as ours were: In the days before star outfielder Juan Soto signed with the Mets, I read a slew of tweets declaring the “news” that he had agreed to a contract with any of several other teams. Annoying, but no damage done.

Too many of today’s phony news bits, however, undermine trust and spread cynicism. The internet’s immense scale means there’s no such thing as pranking your little neighborhood or hometown paper anymore. Almost every fake news concoction — whether just joshing or brimming with venal intent — has the potential to reach much of the world. It’s thereby stripped of its home context, rendering it easily misunderstood and potentially dangerous.

Should people therefore rejoice that our surveillance society has made it more complicated for kids to play tricks on their elders? No way: Harmless pranks — those that play with life’s absurdity or point out our foibles or even enlarge the soul — are too valuable to sacrifice to the campaign against disinformation.

Here’s a challenge for tech innovators: Concoct a way for playful pranksters to thrive without being defanged. You might be surprised at how much pleasure you can make possible. As artist Robert Colescott, whose work is featured at D.C.’s Rubell Museum, put it, “It’s the satire that kills the serpent, you know.”

 Originally published in The Washington Post