FAKE NEWS BEFORE NEWS EXISTED

On the evening of February 21, 1814, a man in the uniform of a British officer stepped off the Dover road, announced that Napoleon had been cut to pieces by Cossacks, and set the London Stock Exchange on fire. Government bonds soared. By the afternoon the story had collapsed, several fortunes had changed hands, and the exchange discovered what every village had known for four thousand years: information that cannot be checked is still information people will bet on.
We are told we live in an age of fake news. We do not. We live in the aftermath of a brief and very strange holiday from the normal condition of the human species.
For almost all of recorded history, nobody could check anything. There was no bureau to call, no archive to consult, no second source. What people knew about the world beyond walking distance arrived by mouth, carrying no receipt. That system had a name - rumor - and it was not a malfunction. It was the cheapest information network ever built, it ran empires, it emptied cities, it started wars, and, inconveniently for everyone who moralizes about it, it was right a great deal of the time.
This book proposes a definition sharp enough to argue with. A rumor is not a false statement. A rumor is a claim whose only warrant is that people are saying it. Truth has nothing to do with it. From that single blade the book cuts through four thousand years: Assyrian relay riders and Roman gossip, medieval poisoning panics and the terror that swept France in the summer of 1789, the newsletter merchants of Venice, the pamphlet wars, the telegraph, the wartime rumor clinics, the jokes that served as a free press behind the Iron Curtain, and the machines now humming in our pockets.
Along the way it makes an uncomfortable argument. The era of professional verification - reporters, wire services, editors, corrections - lasted roughly seventy years and was paid for by advertising revenue that no longer exists. We keep measuring the present against the one period in human history that was abnormal, and then panicking at the result. The internet did not break the world's relationship with truth. It restored the older one, at speed, with better graphics.
Written with wit, unusual clarity, and a refusal to condescend to the dead, this is a history of everything people believed before anyone could look it up - and a field guide to the questions that separate a claim worth acting on from a claim that is merely popular.
Keywords: rumor, misinformation, history of media, propaganda, conspiracy theories, information, journalism