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Media hoaxes are as old as the earliest forms of mass communication. What they have in common, regardless of whether they appear in the press, on the radio, television, or the Internet, is that they are relatively large-scale, conscious creations of falsehood: they aim at deceiving the public and the publishers often accumulate monetary gain or fame. Probably the best- known media hoax took place on October 30, 1938, when the Columbia Broadcasting Sytem radio network aired a radio drama adaptation of H. G. Wells's science-fiction novel, The War of the Worlds, directed by Orson Welles.2 The program started with a series of simulated "news bulletins" suggesting that an actual Martian invasion was in progress. As a result of the broadcast, panic ensued: crowds were fleeing, while others rushed to the alleged scene of events in New Jersey to see them with their own eyes. Although the extent of the public response belongs to the realm of urban legends, it is not at all an exaggeration to call the broadcast the hoax of the twentieth century.3
The nineteenth century had its share of media hoaxes as well. In this paper, I am looking at one of the most imaginative newspaper hoaxes of all time, which, through a remarkable blend of early science fiction and a wellconceived practical joke, tricked hundreds of thousands of readers in and outside of the United States and made a small New York-based penny paper the top- selling daily newspaper in the world.
The mastermind behind the "Great Moon Hoax" of 1835, as the incident is generally referred to, was Richard Adams Locke (1800-71), a descendant of philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). A Cambridge graduate, he had tried himself in numerous newspaper and maga2ine jobs in Britain as well as the United States before landing at The New York Sun in the summer of 1835. The brainchild of printer and newspaper publisher, Benjamin Day (1810-89), The Sun, founded in 1833, became the flagship of the so-called 'Tenny Press Era," when cheap, tabloid newspapers sought to satisfy the thriving immigrant communities' thirst for news, using simple language and covering human-interest stories. Their considerably lower price (one cent as opposed to the 6-cent price of other newspapers) and the new concept of placing emphasis...