Of all the fabricating journalists Young covers, perhaps none sting worse than Jayson Blair. Jayson Blair’s false reports for The New York Times, Discovered in 2003
#ZIPPY THE PINHEAD TRUMP MOVIE#
With forged hand-written notes from Hughes and the doubt created by the famed magnate’s isolation, Irving’s scheme was eventually undone through a bizarre series of events featuring a cast of characters-including a Swiss artist’s wife and a Danish singer mistress-seemingly from a movie (which it would, in fact, become in 2005 with Richard Gere starring as Irving).Ĥ. In a truly lucrative hoax, journalist Clifford Irving took advantage of Howard Hughes’ social silence in an attempt to bilk his publisher, McGraw-Hill, out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Clifford Irving’s 1971 “Autobiography” of Howard Hughes Re-named Zip, Johnson-who would have a long, successful career as a sideshow-would eventually lend his image to less racially-charged characters like Zippy the Pinhead and the Coneheads of Saturday Night Live.ģ. Johnson’s unflattering haircut, meant to exaggerate and create the illusion of a pointed head, has lived on to today. “It” was in reality William Henry Johnson, who, Young points out, looked very much like an ordinary man. Barnum’s exhibition of a black man as the “missing link” in Darwin’s recently released Origin of Species was so famous as to be seen by the Prince of Wales. Merely one of the most famous and skin-crawling of the 19th century’s racial sideshows, P.T. Barnum’s 1860 Exhibition Titled “What is It?” What does seem clear, Young writes, is the striation of the Moon civilization’s resonance with terrestrial readers.Ģ. Coming a year after the anti-abolition riots, Locke’s complex hoax is tough to pin down as either anti-slavery satire or racist fever-dream. This society featured fantastic creatures and two races of Moon-men-including the monstrous Man-Bats, which Young says are a stand-in for black people. Below are five examples of hoaxes Young examines, which speak to the place of pain and race in our deceit.Ī six-part series of articles eventually revealed to be the work of Sun editor and reporter Richard Adams Locke, the “Great Moon Hoax” claimed that astronomer Sir John Herschel had discovered had discovered a civilization on the Moon. The book’s surprisingly doleful turn feels almost like a hoax itself, albeit a fantastic and important one a reader may dive in expecting lighthearted fair (at least until Trump) and is struck instead by each hoax’s true evil. While Bunk stretches from Barnum to Trump and touches on most every flavor of falsehood in between, Young’s x-ray vision finds the true through-lines which bind them all together: an exploitation of grief, pride and race.
Kevin Young’s Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News proves a thorough history of the titular cons.
0 kommentar(er)
