Think fake news is a new phenomenon? Think again. Dr David Clarke from Sheffield Hallam University looks at a 100-year-old story that fooled the world.
Fake news, false stories that masquerade as real news are not new.
In the spring of 1917 some of Britain's most influential newspapers published a gruesome story that has been called "the master hoax" - and I think we finally have proof about where it came from.
Britain was at the time trying to bring China into the war on the Allied side.
In February a story appeared in the English-language North China Daily News that claimed the Kaiser's forces were "extracting glycerine out of dead soldiers".
Rumours about processing dead bodies had been in circulation since 1915 but had not been presented as facts by any official source.
'Smell of burnt limes'
That changed in April when the Times and the Daily Mail published accounts from anonymous sources who claimed to have visited the Kadaververwertungsanstalt, or corpse-utilisation factory.
The Times ran the story under the headline Germans and their Dead, attributing the claim to two sources - a Belgian newspaper published in England and a story that originally appeared in a German newspaper, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger on 10 April.
That German account by reporter Kal Rosner described an unpleasant smell "as if lime was being burnt" as he passed the corpse factory.
Rosner used the word "kadaver", which referred to the bodies of animals - horses and mules - not human bodies.
Later, The Times carried a longer article quoting from an unnamed Belgian source who described in grim detail how the corpses were processed.
Image copyright National Archive
A cartoon published soon afterwards by Punch presented the ghoulish story with the caption "cannon fodder - and after".
The German government protested loudly against these "loathsome and ridiculous" claims.
But their protests were drowned out by public expressions of horror from the Chinese ambassador. China declared war against Germany on 14 August 1917.
However, until now no one has been able to discover conclusive proof that would settle the mystery of who created the story - and who authorised its transformation from a false rumour to officially-sanctioned "fact". I believe we now can.
Read more:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-38995205No one ever said the English were scrupulously honest with other nations ...
