Title:
If No News, Send Rumors
Author:
Stephen Bates
Publisher:
St Martin's Press, New York, 1989
ISBN:
0-312-02965-9

If there is a single important source of the Urban Legend, then it must be the press. The press is both vector and subject of Urban Legends, and the reputation of the press makes it possible for the most improbable stories to make the rounds, taken at face value by all who hear them. All you have to say is, "I read it in the paper."

If No News, Send Rumors is a collection of anecdotes from the newsroom and the people who work there. The anecdotes are loosely organized into thematic groups of "Inside the Press," "Newsbeats," "Conflicts," and "Making News, Making History." Each such section is again divided into chapters. The anecdotes are grouped, often in chronological order, in these chapters. Each anecdote has a footnote, which gives information on where Bates obtained the story.

The footnotes are copious, giving in most cases several sources for the anecdotes, and providing specific pages from where the source is cited. At the end of the book, an index of mostly names is of limited utility.

For folklore aficionadoes this book is an absolute must read. It contains dozens of examples where the News was not just reported, but created by the press. In some cases, the creation of News served the financial and business interests of the perpetrators, in others, political objectives were furthered. Several anecdotes even speak of the copyright trap, of printing a bogus story to catch the competition out.

The hoaxes recounted in the book include Ben Franklin's Polly Baker, the New York Sun's life on the Moon and transatlantic balloon voyage, Mencken's bathtub, and the San Francisco Chronicle's Last Man. Two New Yorkers are named as aficionadoes of trolling, although neither of them appears to be snopes...

The book is fairly entertaining, but, more importantly, it awakens in the reader a healthy sense of skepticism where the purveyors of "news" are concerned. The exhaustive use of footnotes makes this book a useful addition to the collection of any myth debunker. I give the book an AFU bookshelf score of seven.