"Otto Von Bismark Calls For United Prussian States; You Won't Believe What Happens Next!"
The World routinely exaggerated or flat-out invented crime and war stories. During the Spanish-American War, they slapped a drawing of a young woman's naked ass on the front page and accused perverted Spanish soldiers of forcing innocent women to strip for them. The same thing happened during World War I -- American papers fabricated stories of German troops cutting off the breasts of Belgian nuns, because if the country was going to war anyway, it might as well get nice and angry about it.
But even that wasn't new, because critics have been calling out this kind of baseless crap since the invention of the printing press. Alexis de Tocqueville supported the free press, but noted that they "frequently lead the citizens to launch together into very ill-digested schemes." Voltaire called out the Vatican via bullshit pamphlets which blamed the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 on divine wrath, complete with stories of devout survivors who were saved by visions of the Virgin Mary. A false 19th-century American story about Irishmen stealing Bibles from public schools led to attacks on Catholic churches, and that was an improvement over the 18th century, when a man's suicide became a fake story about a father murdering his son for wanting to convert to Catholicism, which led to said father being tortured to death. Say what you will about Fox News or CNN, but at least they haven't tortured anybody to death.
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