There's a general rule that once a lie gets out into wide circulation, trying to replace it with the truth is damn near impossible. We've seen lots of examples of that here at Skeptophilia -- chemtrails, the HAARP conspiracy, the whole "vaccines cause autism" thing, and "Pizzagate" come to mind immediately. No matter how thoroughly these are debunked, they never seem to die. In fact, legislation in my home state of Louisiana to "ban chemtrails" just passed in the state House of Representatives. It was sponsored by Kim Landry Coates (R-Ponchatoula). When Coates was asked what chemicals were allegedly in these "chemtrails," she responded, I shit you not, "Barium. There is a few, some with long words that I can’t pronounce."
Which illustrates another general principle, which is that there is no intelligence criterion for being elected to public office.
This is not a new problem, much as the Trump administration has cornered the market on egregious lies in the last few years. Humans have always been credulous, and once convinced of a lie, unconvincing someone is the very definition of an uphill struggle. Take, for example, the Great Moon Hoax of 1835.
In August of 1835, writers at The Sun (a New York City newspaper, not the British tabloid of the same name) dreamed up a scheme to boost circulation -- a hoax article (complete with illustrations) claiming that astronomers had spotted life on the Moon. The discovery, they said, was made using "an immense telescope of an entirely new principle," with a lens that measured eight meters in diameter and weighed seven metric tons. Using this, the researchers were able to see living things on the Moon, including bat-winged humanoids the scientists called Vespertilio-Homo, as well as single-horned goats, miniature zebras, and bipedal tailless beavers.
The Moon, they said, was also covered with active volcanoes, but the beings there used them as power sources, allowing the Vespertilio-Homo to live in large thriving cities:
And just like today, when Trump invariably precedes his lies with "my advisors are telling me" or "I've heard from reputable sources," The Sun gave this "research" an attribution -- but they boldly named names. The source, they said, was one Andrew Grant (who was fictitious), the assistant and dear friend of John Herschel (who very much was not).
John Herschel was a highly respected British astronomer, mathematician, chemist, and polymath, son of William Herschel (who discovered Uranus). The younger Herschel had established a name for himself in planetary astronomy, and in fact had studied and named seven of the moons of Saturn and four of the moons of Uranus. So his was a canny choice by The Sun -- it gave automatic legitimacy to the article's contents.
It took over a month for the entire story to come unraveled. Pressed by scientifically-literate readers to show them the amazing telescope, they responded that it had sadly been destroyed in a fire -- the enormous lens's capacity for "concentrating the rays of light" had proved its own undoing, and completely burned down the observatory where it resided. It was only when Herschel was asked about the research and said he knew nothing about it that the owners of The Sun were confronted, and finally -- reluctantly -- they admitted it had been a hoax all along.
Interestingly, though, they never published an actual retraction of the articles. Five years later, one of The Sun's reporters, Richard Adams Locke, admitted he'd written the story, but said he'd done it as satire, to "show how science can be and is influenced by the thoughts of religion." Which seems like a pretty flimsy claim to me. I think the great likelihood is that it was a publicity stunt to boost circulation, and as such, it worked brilliantly -- The Sun became one of the bestselling newspapers in the United States, and survived until 1950.
The lie also had astonishing longevity. Even after the owners of The Sun admitted it had all been a hoax -- there were no bat-creatures, no miniature zebras, no bipedal beavers -- people still claimed it was true. The admission, not the original story, had been the hoax, they said, and The Sun's owners had only changed course because they thought the American people couldn't handle how weird the truth was. Years later, poor John Herschel was still being asked about the bat-winged Moon men and his role in discovering them.
My dad used to say that trying to clean up the results of a lie was about as easy as getting toothpaste back into the tube. And the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 illustrates another dark truth; the fact that getting suckered by an attractive lie can cause you to swing all the way over into cynicism. Some readers who found out about the hoax concluded that nothing in the newspaper could be trusted. It's like Mark Twain's observation: "You can learn too much from experience. A cat that sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again, but it probably won't sit on a cool one, either."
Cynicism, as I've pointed out more than once, is no smarter than gullibility. It's just as lazy to conclude that everyone is lying to you as it is to believe that no one is. But it's a tragedy when the media itself is the source of the lies. While I can't condone cynicism about the media, I do understand it. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, "You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts." Which is true enough, but that presupposes we can actually find out what the facts are. And when the sources you are supposed to be able to trust are themselves lying to you, it creates a catch-22 that I'm damned if I know how to get out of.
It seems to come down to knowing who to trust, which admittedly, is not as easy as it once was.
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