Caveat Lector: Fake News as FolkloreAuthor(s): Russell Frank

Source: The Journal of American Folklore , Vol. 128, No. 509 (Summer 2015), pp. 315-
332
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of American Folklore Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.128.509.0315

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 Russell Frank

Caveat Lector: Fake News as Folklore

We are awash in words and images that sound and look like real news, but are
not. This article considers certain kinds of fake news as a genre of digital folklore
and attempts to sort out the differences among fake news hoaxes, pranks, satires,
and parodies. It offers examples of each and tries to show how fake news functions
as folk political commentary or folk media criticism.

Keywords
AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus: News, joke cycles, political satire,
digital media

Satire pervades the web, seeping into mailboxes and mainstream news like a spilled cup of coffee. It stains
and it won’t go away.
—thebittercup.com

Like many people, I get most of my news these days from the Internet rather than
from a printed newspaper or a television broadcast. In the spring of 2013, I read stories
on the Web with these headlines:

• Israel to Dismantle Settlements, Recognize Palestinian State

• United States to Destroy All Nuclear Warheads
• Sarah Palin Calls for Invasion of Czech Republic
• Republican Bill Demands Immigrants ‘Americanize’ Their Names

Not one of these stories was true. They sounded good, though. That is, they were
written in conformity with journalistic style. In some cases, the stories also looked
good. That is, the design of the webpage either imitated the style of legitimate news
sites or was a nearly exact replica of a particular legitimate news site.
Such material is commonly referred to as fake news. I am going to argue that some
fake news is folklore. It would then follow that the folkloric fake news that is created
on and transmitted via computers—which is most of it—is a genre of digital folklore.
But before I attempt to distinguish the fake news that is folklore from other kinds of
fake news, I want to delineate the broader category of fake news, whether folkloric
or not.

Russell Frank is Associate Professor of Communications, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

Journal of American Folklore 128(509):315–332

Copyright © 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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 316 Journal of American Folklore 128 (2015)

Journalism ethicists use the term “fake news” to refer to promotional material dis-
guised as news.1 The kind of fake news I am concerned with here can be more broadly
defined as intentionally false reports. The intentional dimension of fake news is critical
to our definition because on occasion news organizations inadvertently deliver false
reports, either because they are taken in by a hoax or they obtain information offered
in good faith that proves to be erroneous.
But which kinds of fake news can be considered folklore? I am not asking whether
texts and images created and transmitted on computers can be folklore because,
thanks to a growing body of work devoted to the expressive traditions of virtual com-
munities2 (including this very issue of Journal of American Folklore), that question,
I believe, has largely been settled. The examination of photocopied texts and images
prompted Alan Dundes to regard the mailing or faxing of such material as comparable
to face-­to-­face communication in providing “solidarity and group identity” (Dundes
and Pagter 1975:223), and to consider parody “one of the richest veins in American
folk humor” (Dundes and Pagter 1975:239).
News parody, however, has long been a staple of popular culture as well, from That
Was the Week That Was in the 1960s, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-­In and Monty Python’s
Flying Circus in the 1960s and 1970s, to The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and
“Weekend Update” on Saturday Night Live. On the print side, there is the “Borowitz
Report” (in the New Yorker) and the Onion, among others. As long as fake news is
produced for broadcast or mass circulation, it seems too professional, too individu-
alized, or too monetized for the folkloric domain of the homemade, the informal,
the amateur, the anonymous, and the shared. Those differences are harder to discern
when the same content is posted online and compared to professional-­looking con-
tent posted by amateurs. Writing about 9/11 lore, Hathaway (2005:51) observed that
the material “demonstrates how mass media and folklore are becoming ever more
closely aligned, and how the overlapping boundaries between them offer challenges
to folklorists.” The same can be said of fake news stories.
It may be helpful, in this regard, to think of the Web has having evolved along two
separate though frequently intersecting tracks: the professional and the amateur—in
Howard’s (2005) words, the institutional and the vernacular. This is not a matter of
differences in skill level or social standing between one person and another, neces-
sarily, but of the way any of us might shift from professional to amateur depending
on whom we are communicating with and for what purpose. Even Jon Stewart, the
host of The Daily Show, can be “folk” in his private communications with friends.
With so many of us using our computers for both work and play, “formal distinc-
tions between official and informal communication [are] more and more difficult to
discern,” as Ellis (2002) noted.
Another way to think of the “folk” sector of cyberspace is as a communication
underground that runs parallel to and often comments on the “above-­ground”
communication of the mass media—an instance of folklore functioning, in Dorst’s
words, as the “counter-­hegemonic rejection of the media construction of the world”
(1990:185). Complicating matters is that an Onion story or Borowitz report can morph
into a folk story when it detaches from its point of origin and circulates as a sup-
posedly true tale. Then, too, there is no way to know, without asking them, whether

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 Frank, Fake News as Folklore 317

lesser-­known purveyors of fake stories are hobbyists or professionals, or whether their

labors of love also bring in a little money.
As digital folklore, fake news is a story generated in a non-­professional social context
that uses the style of news either to parody that style, satirize issues and personali-
ties in the news, or perpetrate a hoax or prank. Not all fake news is folklore, and not
all the fake news that is folklore is digital folklore. Recall, for example, the much-­
photocopied fake news story about the discovery of “administratium,” an element
possessing 1 neutron, 125 assistant neutrons, 75 vice neutrons, and 111 assistant vice
neutrons, and found in greatest concentrations in governments, large corporations,
and universities.
Fake news is worth paying attention to and thinking about for a number of reasons.
First, it is interesting that the computer has become as much of a toy as it is a business
machine. Producing and consuming netlore is one of the ways we play while at our
computers. Second, it is interesting that some of our play takes the form of fake news:
it suggests a complicated relationship with the news. Parodies allow us to challenge
the authority of the news media as a cultural institution. Satires allow us to challenge
the authority of the newsmakers. Both forms of humorous fake news bespeak our
sophistication as news consumers. Our susceptibility to news hoaxes, on the other
hand, reminds us of just how authoritative that news “voice” continues to be, even
amid an unceasing stream of complaints about inaccuracy, sensationalism, conflicts
of interest, and bias.
There is no shortage of websites that are devoted to or include fake news stories.
The website Humorfeed.com, which functions as an online clearinghouse of satirical
websites, lists 56 “partner” sites and 5 “friends” (http://www.humorfeed.com/partners.
html). I visited most of them. A few are defunct. A few are devoted to other kinds of
satire than fake news. Several are dormant, not having been updated in at least a year.
A Google search for the term “fake news” also led me to a guide to “Faux News: 10
Best Websites for Fake News and Satire” at Makeuseof.com (http://www.makeuseof
.com/tag/faking-­it-­8-­of-­the-­best-­spoof-­news-­websites/), most of which were linked to
from the Humorfeed site. The appetite for fake news has also spawned websites that
are programmed to automatically generate fake news, sites that are devoted to news
about fake news, and even sites that offer fake news about fake news. I found my way
to fake news generators via Makeuseof.com’s “Top 3 Fake News Prank Story Genera-
tors” (http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-3-fake-news-prank-story-generators/). The
three are Wasarrested.com, Fakeawish.com, and Fodey.com. A Google search for “fake
news generators” turned up five additional sites.3
Organizing this material into categories and sub-­categories is tricky because the
intentions of the producers can only be inferred and the experiences of the recipients
will vary: a story intended as satire may become a hoax if enough people believe it.
A somewhat clearer organizing principle, therefore, is by type of website:

• The Generators: Sites that provide the tools for users to generate their own fake news
stories.
• The Cloners: Sites that launch hoaxes by copying the design of the home page of a
legitimate news organization.

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 318 Journal of American Folklore 128 (2015)

• The Wishful Thinkers: Sites that offer satire with the avowed purpose of inspiring politi-
cal action.
• The Citizen Satirists: Sites that offer satire for satire’s sake—and clearly identify them-
selves as such.
• The Enablers: Legitimate sites that inadvertently provide a platform for hoaxers.

The appearance of folklore in the news has long been of interest to folklorists.4 Here,
we have the appearance of the news in folklore.

The Generators

If you want to create a fake news story, you have at least four options:

1. If you have the writing skills, you can simply write a fake story, place it in the body of
an e-­mail, post it on your own blog, or contribute it to a receptive website and claim
that it comes from a reliable source. If you write it adroitly enough, and if the content
is plausible enough, you might get some readers to believe it.
2. If you have the design skills, you can create a story that looks like it comes from a
newspaper or a legitimate news site, even if it doesn’t sound like it.
3. If you have the writing skills, and want to create a story that looks like it comes from a
newspaper, but lack the design skills, you can feed your words to a fake news genera-
tor and get something that not only sounds like a newspaper story, but looks like one.
4. If you have neither the writing nor the design skills, you can feed information to a
story generator and obtain a story that both looks and sounds like a newspaper story.

In this section, I will explore options 3 and 4, the material that can be obtained via
the use of a story generator. The sites that require the user to write the story are like
karaoke machines. Just as the instrumentation will sound good regardless of the
quality of the singing, these sites will yield stories that will look good regardless of
the quality of the writing. Fodey.com calls itself a “newspaper clipping generator.” All
the user has to do is fill in the name of a newspaper, real or fictitious, and the date and
the headline. Then enter your story in the text box, and hit the “Generate!” button.
A similar site bears the unlikely name Nancygracemustdie.com. Its motto: “Don’t
Like the News? Create Your Own!” Here, one writes a headline, enters the story in a
text box, and clicks on “Write.” The story appears on the front page of a paper called
Star (“Your hometown newspaper 49 years”). For illustrative purposes at a meeting
of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research in 2009, I produced
a silly little story (see fig. 1).
One would think that the creator of a site that both writes and designs the story
for you would have the journalistic skills to produce a convincing news story. Not so.
Consider Newspaper.freakycowbot.com, which offers this explanation of what it does:
“‘Fake news’ is a prank script written for the sole purpose of confusing, embarrassing,
and angering your friends. Simply fill out the forum5 below and it will create a fake
news story of your choice. Our site will then e-­mail your friend telling them that ‘a
friend of theirs’ found a news article and referred it to them. It then gives them the
link to the fake story, which will look 100% authentic.”

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 Frank, Fake News as Folklore 319

Figure 1. “Legend Scholars

Invade Harrisburg”
(nancygracemustdie.com).

The user then fills in the name, gender, e-­mail address, city, and state of the “vic-
tim,” along with a fake quote. Then you select a story from only three possibilities:
“Stripper on the Loose!,” “Pumpkin Farmer!,” or “Hat Robber!” I chose “Stripper on
the Loose!” and, with permission, entered the name of the editor of this special issue
of Journal of American Folklore, with the (excerpted) result shown in figure 2.
As news writing, this is pretty weak material. Amateurish touches include “from
right here” in the “lede” (lead paragraph); the officer’s use of the suspect’s first and
middle name rather than his last name; the use of profanity; “had this to say”; and the
repeated use of the suspect’s full name and of “Madison, Wisconsin.” Still, the prose
is probably serviceable enough for a gag.
Even clumsier is the site Fuwt.com. After entering the first and last names of the
person you want featured in the story, you may choose a story in which the person in
question is one of the following: “A Jerk, A Transvestite, Ugly, Caught Naked, A Pimp,
A Pornstar, Clearly Obese, A n00b [sic], A Homosexual, A Lesbian, Scared Of Sheep,
A Swinger, Gorgeous, Loaded, Super Cool, A Bed Wetter, An Alcoholic, or Lives A
Double Life, Has Super Powers, or Wears Dirty Underwear.” A disclaimer follows:

Thank you for using our fake news generator where you can create your very own
fake news story, to trick your friends, family members and even enemies into think-
ing the fake news story is 100% real. Remember to keep checking back as we will
add more news stories so you can share extra breaking news with friends, family
members and even your enemies.

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 320 Journal of American Folklore 128 (2015)

Figure 2. “Stripper on
the Loose” (newspaper
.freakycowbot.com).

Once again I entered our hapless editor’s name and selected “Has Super Powers,”
with this result:

Robert Glenn Howard Has Super Powers

Today FUWT Can Officially Reveal Robert Glenn Howard has super powers, which
we have sene with our own eyes.
Robert revealed exclusively to FUWT Today “I am super hero, and im going to
use this super power to the full potential. I believe im the best super hero there is
and im undefeatable now” This was a large comment for Robert Glenn Howard to
say since their super power is to detect people with the same super power.

The punctuation and spelling errors are egregious, and the wording bears very little
resemblance to an actual news story. Obviously it’s hard to imagine that anyone other
than a child would think the story was “100% real.”

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 Frank, Fake News as Folklore 321

These prank stories can be considered a subtype of the parody fake news story. It
parodies the style of a news story not to mock the news media or to create an incon-
gruity by fitting non-­news content into news form, but to play a joke on the “victim.”
Despite Freakycowbot’s claim that its offerings are designed to confuse, embarrass,
and anger, neither the victim nor the victim’s friends are likely to be fooled, which
means that the victim isn’t really a victim at all, but is being honored with a gag gift.

The Cloners

Like the sites in the previous section, the Fake CNN News Generator enabled users
to create phony stories. Unlike those sites, and in common with the sites I will dis-
cuss below, the Fake CNN stories would then appear on a webpage that was indeed a
dead ringer for CNN’s site. The CNN clone was created in 2003 by a 16-­year-­old. Not
surprisingly, some of the stories—about the death of musician Dave Matthews, and
multiple versions of where celebrity twins Mary-­Kate and Ashley Olsen had suppos-
edly decided to go to college—were picked up by other outlets. According to Wired.
com, several schools issued denials in response to inquiries from reporters about the
twins’ decision, and the Dave Matthews Band’s website assured fans that the group’s
front man was still very much alive (Kahney 2003). Harmless? Not if you’re a die-­
hard Dave Matthews fan. Or if you’re CNN: the fun lasted for a week before the cable
news giant threatened legal action. The Wired story noted that the fake CNN site also
generated stories about the deaths of Jennifer Lopez, Jay Z, 50 Cent, and Nick Carter.
Other copycat sites have telltale signs that they’re bogus, assuming a visitor takes
the time to look for them. Not the Los Angeles Times, for example, uses the same font
as the Los Angeles Times, the only differences being the word “Not” that appears in
much smaller type above the name “Los Angeles Times,” and the ridiculousness of the
content. The home page is shown in figure 3.

Figure 3. “Not the

Los Angeles Times”
(notthelatimes.com).

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 322 Journal of American Folklore 128 (2015)

And here are some headlines:

• King Tut Cancels World Tour to Lead Egypt Out of Crisis

• California Sells San Diego to Erase Deficit
• Gillette Debuts the Machete, a Combo 11-­blade Razor and Gardening Tool
• White House Orders Celebrities to Stop Dying in Threes
• Spelling Bee Champ Stripped of Title After Admitting Steroid Use

And so on. The stories are nearly flawless. One example:

Kadafi says he won’t resign unless protesters figure out correct spelling of his name
Libyan strongman Moammar Kadafi tightened his grip on power today, saying
he would step down only if protesters guessed the correct spelling of his name.
“Oh man, we’re doomed,” one rebel said. “Is it Moammar or Muamar? Gadafi or
Qaddafi? Even Watson the IBM computer doesn’t know.”
News media outlets use dozens of different spellings. And Libya’s official govern-
ment website also seems confused, referring to the dictator variously as Mu’ammar
al-­Gathafi, Moamar Qaddafi, Mallomar Kandinsky and Miami Quidditch.
“He’s like Rumpelstiltskin,” one diplomat said. “The protesters keep demanding his
resignation, but they get the name wrong, so he stays. It also gets him out of parking
tickets.”

The Wishful Thinkers

Another set of clone news sites may be distinguished by their idealism from the ones
mentioned in the previous section. Instead of mocking the status quo by making
leaders and events even more ridiculous than they already are, their stories envision
a world that has come to its senses, one where decisions are not driven primarily by
greed, power lust, or zealotry. One of these sites attempts to derive a faux legitimacy
not by mirroring the graphic style of CBS News but by appropriating the name itself.
The URL is CBSbreakingnews.com. At the home page, we learn that the name stands
for Completely BS Breaking News. But the flippancy of the name is belied by the
yearning underpinning some of the stories. Sample headlines and ledes:

Israel to Dismantle Settlements, Recognize Palestinian State

JERUSALEM (CBSBN)—In a hastily called press conference, the Prime Minister of

Israel has announced that the Jewish State will start dismantling all settlements in
the West Bank and East Jerusalem immediately, and that it is ready to recognize the
Palestine as a sovereign country.

United States to Destroy All Nuclear Warheads

WASHINGTON, D.C. (CBSBN)—In a surprise announcement during a press confer-

ence at the White House, President Obama announced that the United States would
unilaterally destroy its entire arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Site founder Nick Oba calls these “Why not” stories that “address a senseless status
quo, which could be rectified with just one decision by someone in power. A few

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 Frank, Fake News as Folklore 323

phone calls from one person would be enough to transform any of these stories from
satire into real news.” The site also features Pseudo News Stories, which Oba defines
as “prank stories [that] are outlandish enough to be interesting, yet somehow carry a
ring of truth.” Among them are disaster stories, “the idea,” Oba says, “being to directly
feed people’s morbid desire to see a big, gory disaster to relieve boredom at the office,
and thereby to illustrate the sensationalism both the media and the media-­consuming
public thrive on nowadays” (http://cbsbreakingnews.com/about).
CBSbreakingnews.com began to draw attention when, after publishing a story
that the Marshall Islands had legalized cocaine, the president of the Marshall Islands
threatened to sue. And CBS Corp. sent a cease-­and-­desist demand that Oba said he
intended to “fight tooth and nail.”
Another utopian project was the fake New York Times issued in print and on the
Web by a group of political pranksters. The print edition had 14 pages of what the
creators called “best case scenario” stories. The goal, according to artist Steve Lam-
bert, was “to celebrate what we wanted, rather than criticize what we didn’t” (http://
visitsteve.com/made/the-ny-times-special-edition/).
The lead story (see fig. 4) was “IRAQ WAR ENDS.” Other wishful headlines included
“Maximum Wage Law Passes Congress,” “USA Patriot Act Repealed,” and “All Public
Universities to Be Free.” The ledes on some of the stories on the front page will give
a good idea of how well-­executed this project was:

• Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom were brought to an uncer-
emonious close today with a quiet announcement by the Department of Defense that
troops would be home within weeks.
• After long and often bitter debate, Congress has passed legislation, fiercely fought for by
labor and progressive groups, that will limit top salaries to fifteen times the minimum
wage.

Figure 4.“Fake New York Times” (nytimes-se.com).

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 324 Journal of American Folklore 128 (2015)

• Congress has voted to place ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, and other major oil compa-
nies under public stewardship, with the bulk of the companies’ profits put in a public
trust administered by the United Nations and used for alternative energy research and
development in order to solve the global climate crisis.

Volunteers distributed 80,000 copies of the paper, and the website received 300,000
visitors, and CNN, MSNBC, Forbes.com, and none other than the New York Times
itself provided news coverage of the stunt. Lambert said their goal “was not to have
anyone feel ‘tricked’ or the butt of a joke, but to be welcomed in to an inside joke
that could be shared with friends” (http://visitsteve.com/made/the-ny-times-special-
edition/). Not everyone got it, however. Consider this comment:

I saw this on someone’s desk today. My heart soared. Then I realized it was a cruel
prank. My heart fell.
Stop breaking my heart! People are dying. Our hope is for war to end. This does
nothing to hasten peace. You are wasting precious time and energy that could be
devoted to worthy causes, not sophomoric pranks. Though laughter is good medicine,
your brand of “humor” is a poisoned pill.

A third site is the Daily Currant, which bills itself as an “online satirical newspaper,”
the mission of which is “to ridicule the timid ignorance which obstructs our prog-
ress, and promote intelligence—which presses forward.” Notwithstanding the earnest
purpose, the stories are more playful than the ones in the fake New York Times. Some
headlines, ledes, and reactions from readers who believed the story, or almost did:

Bestiality Surges Hours After New Zealand Legalizes Gay Marriage

Lede: Authorities in New Zealand are struggling to contain a burdgeoning epidemic
of beastiality unleashed by its recent legalization of gay marriage. According to po-
lice in cities across the country, thousands of people descended on sheep farms and
began sexually penetrating the animals almost instantly after parliament voted for
marriage equality yesterday
Reader comment: This had me going for a minute. (http://dailycurrant.com/2013/
04/18/surges-hours-zealand-legalizes-gay-marriage-2/)

Wal-­Mart CEO ‘Shocked’ By Low Wages, Offers 25% Raise

Lede: In response to ongoing strikes at its US stores, retail giant Wal-­Mart announced
today an immediate 25% raise for all its 1.4 million American employees. CEO
Michael T. Duke said he was ‘unaware’ his employees had been so poorly paid and
after reading the demands of the strikers he vowed to fix the situation immediately.
Reader comment: This must be a joke. Their is no way he is saying this. (http://
dailycurrant.com/2012/11/28/wal-mart-ceo-shocked-wages-offers-25-raise/)

Republican Bill Demands Immigrants ‘Americanize’ Their Names

Lede: Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives introduced a bill today
requiring that all illegal immigrants in the United States “Americanize” their names.
According the legislation drafted by Rep. Steve King (R-­Iowa) only immigrants who

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 Frank, Fake News as Folklore 325

agree to take English surnames like “Smith” and “Anderson” will be allowed to apply
for citizenship under any future comprehensive immigration reform.
Reader comment: This is without a doubt the stupidest thing that the Republicans
could have come up with. Why, oh why, can’t the people in Congress focus on some-
thing worthwhile that will actually help the country???????????????? (http://dailycurrant
.com/2013/04/29/house-republicans-demand-immigrants-americanize-names/)

Sarah Palin Calls for Invasion of Czech Republic

Lede: Sarah Palin called for the invasion of the Czech Republic today in response
to the recent terrorist attacks in Boston. In an interview with Fox News, the former
governor of Alaska said that although federal investigators have yet to complete their
work, the time for action is now. “We don’t know everything about these suspects
yet,” Palin told Fox and Friends this morning, referring to Tamerlan and Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, who allegedly carried out the Boston Marathon attacks. “But we know they
were Muslims from the Czech Republic.”
Reader comment: Pleeaaase . . . 1 st chechenya not czech republic . . . Have you
ever been into czech republic? Did you analized the criminal rate in the usa com-
pared to the rate in czech? And why just invade a country because there was 2
ignorant and violent people. . . . Why not invade uk . . . Or china . . . Or portugal . . .
Or spain. . . . Gosh woman . . . U are dangerous and ignorant! (http://dailycurrant
.com/2013/04/22/sarah-palin-calls-invasion-czech-republic/)

Another sign of the cleverness of the Daily Currant’s stories is that Snopes.com feels
called upon to debunk them (I found seven instances of Snopes “red-­lighting” a Daily
Currant story). The site’s stories are prime examples of how satire calls attention to
absurd real-­world situations via scenarios that are only slightly more absurd. Given
some of Sarah Palin’s past pronouncements, it would not be surprising if she were to
have confused Chechnya with the Czech Republic and called for an irresponsible and
disproportionate response to the bombing of the Boston Marathon. The New Zealand
story realizes some of the most hysterical slippery-­slope arguments against gay mar-
riage. The only logical explanation for Walmart’s grossly exploitive compensation
practices is that the head of the company could not possibly be aware of them. The
immigration bill story aims to expose the unstated prejudice underpinning Republican
attitudes toward immigrants.

Citizen Satirists

Most of the dozens of fake news sites I visited are overtly satirical. Several have slogans
along the lines of the New York Times’s “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” A few of the
sites parody that very slogan:

• The Daily Rash: All the News That’s Unfit to Print

• Dead Pan News: All the News That’s Fit to Satirize. Or fabricate.
• Humor Times: All the News That’s Safe to Let You Read.
• Muskrat News: All the News Thats Fit to . . . Hey, Is That Duckweed?

And so on.

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 326 Journal of American Folklore 128 (2015)

Other sites make their satirical bent abundantly clear in their tagline, or in a usually
facetious “About” or Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section. First, the taglines:

• Enduring Vision: Bringing the World Satire and Love Since 1927
• News Mutiny: Satire for the Wise. News for the Dumb.
• Bongo News: Satire. Parody. Jokes.
• The Skunk: Tasteless American Satire for the Ill-­Informed
• Confusion Road: Satire that Fits Your Lifestyle
• The Chicago Dope: Never True. Always Accurate.
• Deadbrain: News · Satire · Spoof · Parody · Humor · Paris Hilton
• National Nitwit: Unusual news of redoubtable veracity from the land of the free and
home of the depraved—we both document and contribute to the decline in American
culture.
• Satirewire: News. Ish.
• Recoil: News Satire You Can Trust
• The Wired Press—Satire News: Your source for satire news and mediocre journalism
• NewsBiscuit: The News Before It Happens.
• Fake News Daily: The News is Not Here.
• Washington Pox: If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.

In a similar vein, many of the sites have concocted bogus etiological tales and staff
biographies. In keeping with its retro design and archaic language, the Watley Review
traces its origins to the editor’s grandfather, who started the newspaper while cross-
ing the Atlantic on a steamship. A supposed staffer at the Watley Review, Ernest
Wardwell, “has four academic degrees, five outstanding warrants, and two curiously
shaped moles” (http://www.watleyreview.com/staff.html). Dale MacFarland, founder
of the Specious Report, “was tragically killed in a cucumber accident” (http://www
.thespeciousreport.com/about.html).
As for the stories themselves, consider how this piece on Ross Rants (“Fair and
Unbalanced”) about chemical weapons in Syria serves as folk commentary on the
news. First, the back story.
President Obama boxed himself in when he declared that if Syrian President Assad
used chemical weapons on rebels he would cross a “red line” that would warrant some
kind of intervention from the world community. In April 2013 there were reports
that that line had been crossed. At a news conference, President Obama backpedaled.
The story in Ross Rants (“Fair and Unbalanced”):
Obama Warns Assad Not to Use Chemical or Biological Weapons on More
Than 10,000 People at a Time on a Friday Between the Hours of 10PM and
12AM During a Full Moon Between May and June
Responding to critics, President Obama took a strong stand against Syrian dictator
Bashar al-­Assad, warning him that he “better not gas more than 10,000 of his own
people on a Friday between the hours of 10PM and 12AM during a full moon between
May and June.” If he does, Obama warned, there “will be—might be—possibly could
be consequences.” (http://www.rossrants.com//Obama-Warns-Assad-Not-to-Use
-Chemical-or-Biological-Weapons-on-More-Than-10-000-People-at-a-Time-on-a

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 Frank, Fake News as Folklore 327

-Friday-Between-the-Hours-of-10PM-and-12AM-During-a-Full-Moon-Between
-May-and-June.html)

I would like to end this section with a story from Confusion Road that satirizes the
press itself.

Broad Generalizations Usually Wrong, Study Shows

Sweeping generalizations commonly reported in the news media, on subjects

ranging from science to health to politics, are usually misguided and can even be
dangerous, a new study shows. (http://www.confusionroad.com/article.php?page_
function=display_article&article_id=311)

This story offers a window into the skepticism and scorn directed toward contem-
porary journalism that motivates so much fake news. Fittingly, the story deliberately
undercuts itself by relying, as so many news stories do, on “a new study.” The story
hints at an unholy alliance between journalists and academics to promulgate bogus
ideas about the world. Another story on the Confusion Road site pokes fun at the
proliferation of dubious trend stories. “These types of news items will often use vague
expressions like ‘more and more’ or ‘increasingly’ to disguise their lack of actual data
quantifying the supposed increase.” The source who calls attention to the “trend
trend” is, of course, the fictitious spokesman for a non-­existent journalism watchdog
organization (http://www.confusionroad.com/article.php?page_function=display_
article&article_id=321).

And Then There Are the Dirty Tricksters

Hoaxers are mischief-­makers or, in the language of the Watergate scandal, dirty trick-
sters. At worst, their purpose is to defame by spreading a false, but believable story
designed to embarrass or implicate a prominent individual or institution. A milder
hoax is simply designed to get people to believe a harmless fiction. The only people
likely to be embarrassed by such a story are the believers rather than the dramatis
personae. Sometimes, though, belief in a story is enough to cause harm. An example
would be the phony Associated Press Tweet in April 2013 that a bomb had exploded
at the White House, injuring President Obama. The president wasn’t hurt by the story,
but during the brief period before the story was debunked, the Dow Jones Industrial
Average dropped more than 140 points.
A website devoted to user-­submitted news that seems tailor-­made for hoaxers is
sponsored by CNN. The rationale for the iReport site is that there is usually a lag
between a newsworthy occurrence and journalists finding out about it, gathering
information about it, and presenting it in a conventional news format. iReport allows
witnesses to newsworthy events to post the news as it happens—which means it is
posted now and fact-­checked later. The unvetted posts are labeled by CNN as such, and
false or inaccurate reports are removed—eventually—but the network acknowledges
the danger: “Sometimes people post deliberately untrue stories on iReport—about

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 328 Journal of American Folklore 128 (2015)

celebrity deaths, for example. Hoaxes are one of the risks of user-­generated content and
at CNN we take them very seriously. Fortunately, they have been few and far between
on iReport. The number of real, important and excellent iReports is far greater than
deliberately untrue stories” (http://ireport.cnn.com/blogs/ireport-blog/2012/07/02/
how-cnn-ireport-works).
I do not find it comforting that the number of true iReports far exceeds the number
of hoaxes. Mark Twain’s famous formulation applies: “A lie can make it halfway around
the world while the truth is still putting its boots on.” Sure enough, a story about the
arrest of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on child molestation charges appeared
on iReport in 2011 and gained enough currency to be thought in need of debunking
by Hoaxslayer.com (http://www.hoax-slayer.com/fake-report-zuckerberg-molestation
.shtml). Even then, staunch conspiracy theorists clung to the story: obviously the story
“went away” only because Zuckerberg had the power to make it do so. “Story gone,”
wrote one visitor to the website Godlike Productions, devoted to “UFOs, conspiracy
theorists and lunatic fringe.” “Didn’t realize he had that much power already.” Another
visitor wrote: “Story WAS up,,, now it is GONE,,, WTF,,,Oh yea,,, censorship at work.”
Savvier visitors mocked these credulous posts: “it’s user submitted you fucking idiots.
that BLOG has no source. Mainstream would be all over this otherwise” (http://www
.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1558454/pg1).
As Duffy, Page, and Young (2012) point out, even “Mainstream” debunking might
not be enough to quash a juicy story that one is predisposed to believe. If one’s dis-
trust of the “lamestream media” is great enough, such debunking only confirms the
story in question. This so-­called backfire effect (Nyhan and Reifler 2010) extends to
folklore’s very own Snopes.com, which has been accused of debunking with a liberal
bias. In the funhouse mirror world of the Web, that leads to a site like FactCheck.org
fact-­checking Snopes—and finding that Snopes is indeed a reliable source on the truth
of rumors, legends, and fake news (http://www.factcheck.org/2009/04/snopescom/).
Clearly, the “Not Vetted for CNN” label does not stop readers from seizing on a juicy
morsel of news and sending it to everyone they know.
Alarmingly, CNN says it is “confident in and excited about the future of participa-
tory journalism” (http://ireport.cnn.com/blogs/ireport-blog/2012/07/02/how-cnn-
ireport-works). But as premature reports of the death of Penn State football coach Joe
Paterno in 2012 and the deliberately false reports of the White House bombing show,
Twitter and Facebook, the primary tools of participatory journalism, are dominated
by a post-­now, correct-­later ethos, and all too often, even mainstream news organiza-
tions have succumbed to the pressure to get the news out before their competitors.
Thus, the Paterno story, originally tweeted by an editor at a website run by Penn State
students, was picked up by CBS News and the Huffington Post. At this writing, to my
knowledge, iReport is the only instance of a legitimate news organization abetting
hoaxers, albeit inadvertently.

Conclusion

This is a confusing time to be a news consumer. The proliferation of blogs and websites
devoted to news makes it difficult to distinguish between fact and rumor, between

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 Frank, Fake News as Folklore 329

fact and opinion, and between fact and fiction. An obvious solution would be to stick
with the so-­called legacy media—institutions like the New York Times or National
Public Radio or CBS News that have a track record of reliable reporting. But those news
organizations have credibility problems of their own. Fabrication scandals, notably
the revelations in 2003 that New York Times reporter Jayson Blair had been making
up stories out of whole cloth, seriously eroded public confidence in the mainstream
news media. So did the Times’s and Washington Post’s uncritical parroting, that same
year, of Bush administration claims—later proven false—that Saddam Hussein pos-
sessed weapons of mass destruction.
Those failures gave rise, in turn, to a number of websites and blogs specifically
devoted to combing through the mainstream media for errors and for evidence that
those organizations had either become too financially and ideologically tethered to
the status quo to challenge the powers that be (from a left-­leaning perspective) or
too blinded by liberal bias to give a fair hearing to conservative viewpoints (from a
right-­leaning perspective).
At the same time, ironically, the mainstream’s longstanding commitment to verifica-
tion made it seem too slow and too wedded to old media habits to keep pace with the
instantaneousness of Tweets and Facebook postings. And when they do try to compete
with their nimbler Web counterparts, they become susceptible to being “punked.”
Indeed, what motivates some hoaxers is the desire to expose slipshod verification prac-
tices when it comes to a hot story. The New York Times quotes Joey Skaggs, author of
a book called Pranks, who says he started doing hoaxes “to point out the inadequacies
and dangers of an irresponsible press” (Dery 1990). Daniel Barkeley, founder of the
Daily Currant, expresses dismay when mainstream news sources publish his stories
without verifying them (quoted in Zara 2013).
While some of the websites challenging the hegemony of the mainstream news
media evince a comparable degree of professionalism as the people they’re competing
with or monitoring, the ubiquity of computers with Internet access has also enabled a
legion of “citizen journalists” to report and comment on the news. That commentary
can address the news itself or the way the news is reported and can take the form of
a digitally altered photo (Frank 2006); a photo, advertisement, or movie poster with
captions and dialogue added; a still or animated cartoon; and parodies of songs, adver-
tisements, memoranda, press releases—and news stories. Most of these digital works
entail the creative use of recycled material, followed by the sharing of it on websites
or via e-­mail. It can range from sophomoric to ingenious, from profane to pious, but
taken together, it is the vox populi par excellence, a way for all of us to express our
wit, our values, and our estimation of whether the world is or is not making sense.
Those attributes—creative use of recycled material in the service of sharing our ideas
about the state of the world—are what help a folklorist make the case for calling this
kind of computer-­mediated communication folklore. Following Mechling (1997), we
may say it is folklore operating in the “civil sphere.” Following Juris (2005), we can
consider the exchange of fake news a kind of media activism or culture jamming.
Following Borden and Tew’s (2007) discussion of The Daily Show and The Colbert
Report as media criticism, we can call the fake news I have been discussing here folk
media criticism. No less than Jon Stewart and his ilk, the folk have come to function

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 330 Journal of American Folklore 128 (2015)

as “the fifth estate, that is, the watchdog of the (so-­called) watchdog news media”
(Reilly 2010:3).
Fake news stories range from benign to malicious, clever to insipid, polished to
inept. They may parody the rhetoric and design of serious news; mock the incom-
petence, hypocrisy, or venality of people in the news; express a yearning for a saner
world; or, as a gag, turn a friend into a newsmaker. And they may be written to sound
like news stories, designed to look like news stories, or automatically generated to
look and/or sound like a news story once one has entered names and chosen a story
template. Not surprisingly, the most well-­wrought fake news stories fool people. The
website Literallyunbelievable.com tracks credulous Facebook responses to Onion
stories. The Daily Currant has a knack for getting serious news sites to fall for its
stories. Other serious news sites have then duly reported on that phenomenon, even
complaining that the proliferation of such clever fakes “could do actual damage to
political discourse and the media in general” (O’Neil 2013). Meanwhile, the phenom-
enon provides additional grist for debunking sites such as Snopes and Hoax Slayer.
So great is the popularity of fake news that the Oakland Unseen website reports
that it is now “much more profitable than traditional print journalism” (http://
oaklandunseen.tumblr.com/post/45326693220/fake-­news-­now-­more-­profitable
-­than-­real-­news-­poynter). The Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank, is cited as
the source. But when I looked for the story at Poynter.org, I was unable to find it, from
which I could only conclude that this was fake news about fake news.

Notes
1. See, for example, Farsetta and Price (2006).
2. Notable contributions to the still small body of scholarship of digital folklore include Dorst (1990);
Ellis (2002); Fernback (2003); Frank (2004, 2006, 2011); Kibby (2005); Howard (2005); Hathaway (2005);
Blank (2009); and Duffy, Page, and Young (2012).
3. A list of sites visited follows the References Cited section of this paper.
4. See, for example, Brunvand (2001).
5. Here, as elsewhere in this essay, I have reproduced Web content as written—typos, misspellings,
and all.

References Cited
Blank, Trevor J., ed. 2009. Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World. Logan:
Utah State University Press.
Borden, Sandra L., and Chad Tew. 2007. The Role of Journalist and the Performance of Journalism: Ethical
Lessons from ‘Fake’ News (Seriously). Journal of Mass Media Ethics 22(4):300–14.
Brunvand, Jan. 2001. Folklore in the News (and on the Net). Western Folklore 60(1):47–76.
Dery, Mark. 1990. The Merry Pranksters and the Art of the Hoax. New York Times, December 23. http://
www.nytimes.com/1990/12/23/arts/the-merry-pranksters-and-the-art-of-the-hoax.html?src=pm.
Dorst, John. 1990. Tags and Burners, Cycles and Networks: Folklore in the Telectronic Age. Journal of
Folklore Research 27(3):179–90.
Duffy, Margaret, Janis Teruggi Page, and Rachel Young. 2012. Obama as Anti-­American: Visual Folk-
lore in Right-­Wing Forwarded E-­mails and Construction of Conservative Social Identity. Journal of
American Folklore 125(496):177–203.
Dundes, Alan, and Carl Pagter. 1975. Work Hard and You Shall Be Rewarded. Detroit, MI: Wayne State
University Press.

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 Frank, Fake News as Folklore 331

Ellis, Bill. 2002. Making a Big Apple Crumble: The Role of Humor in Constructing a Global Response
to Disaster. New Directions in Folklore 6. http://unix.temple.edu/~camille/bigapple/bigapple1.html.
Farsetta, Diane, and Daniel Price. 2006. Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed. Center for Media
and Democracy, April 6. http://www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary/.
Fernback, Jan. 2003. Legends on the Net: An Examination of Computer-­Mediated Communication as a
Locus of Oral Culture. New Media and Society 5(1):29–45.
Frank, Russell. 2004. When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Go Photoshopping: September 11 and the
Newslore of Vengeance and Victimization. New Media & Society 6(5):633–58.
———. 2006. Worth a Thousand Words: The Photographic Urban Legend and the Illustrated Urban
Legend. Contemporary Legend 6:119–45.
———. 2011. Newslore. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Hathaway, Rosemary. 2005. “Life in the TV”: The Visual Nature of 9/11 Lore and Its Impact on Vernacular
Response. Journal of Folklore Research 42(1):33–56.
Howard, Robert Glenn. 2005. Toward a Theory of the World Wide Web Vernacular: The Case for Pet
Cloning. Journal of Folklore Research 42(3):323–60.
Juris, Jeffrey S. 2005. The New Digital Media and Activist Networking within Anti-­Corporate Globalization
Movements. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597:189–208.
Kahney, Leander. 2003. Fake CNN Website Taken Offline. Wired.com, February 3. http://www.wired
.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2003/02/57506.
Kibby, Marjorie D. 2005. Email Forwardables: Folklore in the Age of the Internet. New Media and Society
7(6):770–7.
Mechling, Jay. 1997. Folklore and the Civil Sphere. Western Folklore 56(2):113–37.
Nyhan, Brendan, and Jason Reifler. 2010. When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Mispercep-
tions. Political Behavior 32(2):303–30. http://intraspec.ca/Nyhan-Reifler2010.pdf.
O’Neil, Luke. 2013. No More Fake News! An Earnest Argument against Satire. New Republic, May 10.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113163/daily-currant-free-wood-post-satire-no-more-fake
-news#.
Reilly, Ian. 2010. Satirical Fake News and the Politics of the Fifth Estate. PhD diss., University of Guelph.
http://www.academia.edu/670662/Satirical_fake_news_and_the_politics_of_the_fifth_estate.
Zara, Christopher. 2013. Daily Currant Editor: We’re Not Trying to Fool Anybody; Satirical News Site
Is “Not Thrilled” By Drudge Report’s Bloomberg Pizza Blunder. International Business Times, May 6.
http://www.ibtimes.com/daily-currant-editor-were-not-trying-fool-anybody-satirical-news-site-not
-thrilled-drudge-reports#.

Fake News Websites Visited

http://bongonews.com
http://cbsbreakingnews.com
http://www.confusionroad.com
http://dailycurrant.com
http://www.deadbrain.com/index.php
http://www.enduringvision.com
http://fakeawish.com
http://fauxnews.com
http://fodey.com
http://fuwt.com
http://www.godlikeproductions.com
http://www.humorfeed.com/index.html
http://nancygracemustdie.com
http://newmutiny.com
http://newspaper-­freakycowbot.com
http://noob.co.in
http://www.notthelatimes.com

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 332 Journal of American Folklore 128 (2015)

http://www.nytimes-­se.com
http://oaklandunseen.com
http://onion.com
http://recoilmag.com
http://reddit.com
http://www.rossrants.com
http://www.satireandcomment.com/index.html
http://satirewire.com
http://www.thespeciousreport.com
http://www.thespoof.co.uk
http://www.watleyreview.com

Debunking Sites Visited

http://www.factcheck.org
http://www.hoax-­slayer.com
http://snopes.com

Legitimate Site on Which Fake News Has Appeared

http://ireport.cnn.com

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