Today it’s Facebook. 350 years ago it was the coffee house. In the late seventeenth century, as Markman Ellis tells in his book on the cultural history of the coffee house, there was panic in British royal circles that these newly-established drinking salons had become forums for political dissent, rebellious attitudes and the spreading of untruths. In June 1672, Charles II issued a proclamation ‘to restrain the Spreading of False News, and Licentious Talking of Matters of State and Government.’ ‘Bold and Licentious Discourses’, it continued, had grown to the extent that
Men have assumed to themselves a liberty , not only in Coffee-houses, but in other Places and Meetings, both publick and private, to censure and defame the proceedings of State, by speaking evil of things they understand not, and endeavouyring to create and nourish an universal Jealousie and Dissatisfaction in the minds of all his Majesties good subjects.
I have written an article on the contemporary debate about fake news (it will be published in the New York Times on Monday), but it is worth reminding ourselves that there is nothing new to these fears. Around a century after the coffee house panic, in the early years of the American republic, Thomas Jefferson worried about press lies and slanders and lamented that ‘a newspaper that stuck to true facts & sound principles only… would find few subscribers’. ‘It is a melancholy truth’, he continued ‘that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of its
benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood.’ In an echo of today’s debate about the ‘post-truth age’, Jefferson worried that
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.
posted by f. sheikh