Have I Got Fake News For You!

Ian Hislop on his surprise at discovering how the spread of baseless stories is as old as the media itself…

- Hannah Davies

As editor of satirical magazine Private Eye and a Have I Got News for You team captain since the show’s inception in 1990, Ian Hislop knows a thing or two about the rise of fake news stories in the media and online.

But as he discovers in his new documentary, Ian Hislop’s Fake News: A True History this week on BBC4, fake news has actually been wreaking havoc for centuries, long before the dawn of Facebook.

There was official British fake newsmongering during World War One, when lurid stories were spread about German factories manufacturing soap from corpses, while one newspaper convinced millions of 19th-century New Yorkers that there were unicorns living on the surface of the moon!

Here, Ian, 59, tells TV Times the frightening impact fake news can have on democracy and reveals what to expect when Have I Got News for You turns 30 next year…

What would your definition of fake news be?

Well, what I mean by fake news is information that people know isn’t true which they deliberately disseminate for their own purposes – it’s quite sinister really.

That’s different to Donald Trump’s definition, though. When he talks about fake news, what he’s talking about is real news that he doesn’t like! He has this rather brilliant strategy of saying anything he doesn’t agree with is fake news. He’s an extraordinary purveyor of fake news himself, but then accuses everyone else of doing it!