The true history of

The first documented case of fake news, according to Mr. Love, reaches “as far into the past as a bogus eighth-century edict said to be the pope-friendly words of the Roman emperor Constantine.”

Fake news began to flourish in the United States during the late 19th century and continued into the early part of the 20th. In those days, Mr. Love writes, “newspapers trafficked in intentional, entertaining hoaxes.”

In 1917, for instance, the New York Evening Mail ran a story by H.L. Mencken about the forgotten 75th birthday of the bathtub. The article, which Mr. Love calls “a great classic newspaper hoax,” lamented that “not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer” and “not a plumber fired a salute” in commemoration of the purported anniversary. Mencken praised President Millard Fillmore for bringing one of the first tubs to the White House, thereby giving the fixture “recognition and respectability in the United States.”

Mr. Love says the hoaxing instinct “infected newsrooms ... to a degree that most of us find puzzling today.” The subjects of such hoaxes, he writes, were normally “oddball pets and wild weather, giants, mermaids, men on the moon, petrified people (quite a few of those), and (my favorite) the Swiss Navy.” Hoaxing was a way for publishers to fill space and attract readers, he says. For a journalist, “it was sport, a freelance fee, or a ploy to keep his job.” Strangely enough, he adds, “readers didn’t seem to mind too much.”

Today, Mr. Love writes, fake news comes “not just as satire but disguised as the real thing.” He notes a 2006 study which found that 69 news stations had run “clearly marked government- or industry-produced video news releases as unbiased news during a 10-month period.”

The article, “Before Jon Stewart,” is available on the magazine’s Web site.