Captain Granville Fortescue, the well-known American war correspondent, in his recently published book, “What of the Dardanelles,” gives an example of how stories—not to call them by another name—are manufactured and disseminated by means of the Press all over the world:
The rumours of a revolution in Turkey have been so many and frequent, that I must state they have not the least foundation in fact. Why should the British public be fed on these silly canards? Time and again I have read long dispatches from Athens and Mytilene, which purport to describe the troubled conditions in Turkey. I remember an item that told of a riot in Constantinople. Reference was made to the looting of the Pera Palace Hotel by a “stop-the-war” mob. On the date mentioned in the dispatch I was in this hotel. The whole story was pure invention. Personal observation convinced me, that Constantinople was the most normal of all the capitals of the nations at war.
Sir William Osler, the eminent physician, in a speech recently delivered at the Leeds Luncheon Club, said that:
In a great crisis like the present we are all a bit surcharged emotionally. Judgment becomes difficult, and we become weak-minded and believe anything any Ananias says. Who could have dreamt that so early in the war there were so many liars in the country as the men and women who saw the Russian troops? An instability of this sort leaves us an easy prey for the Yellow Press. Think of all the legless, armless, eyeless Belgians that crowded their columns. All had been seen by these perverters; few, if any, by the camera. What a triumph of unstrung nerves was that matter of the war babies.
Russians, mutilated Belgians and “war-babies,” were said to be in our midst, and yet it took us weeks to learn the truth. We shall indeed be hysterical if we allow ourselves to be hoaxed about alleged events in the recesses of Asia Minor.
It is well to recall that Sir Henry Layard in the report of the Bulgarian atrocities, from which we have quoted, stated that: “there are persons, and amongst them I grieve to say Englishmen, who boast that they invented those stories with the object of writing down Turkey, to which they were impelled by a well-known hand.”