Lawrence Martin-Bittman created fake news for the Czech Communist Party in the 1950’s and 60’s. Sharon McConnell tells his story in “The Founding Father of Fake News (Writer’s Digest, March/April 2019).

Martin-Bittman joined the Communist Party in 1954 at age 15. After studying law and journalism in Czechoslovakia, he became an official in the Czech disinformation service. He became a press attaché in the Czech embassy in Vienna, working to distribute false news stories to journalists. His purpose was to poison the relationships between the United States and Western Europe.

In at least one instance, he used blackmail to force an Indonesian diplomat to feed false information about a U.S. “plot” to his home country of Indonesia. As a result, anger against Americans severely damaged American influence in the region.

In another instance, he captured signatures of American diplomats from Christmas cards and placed them on false documents.

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, however, horrified him and led him to change his mind about his communist beliefs. He fled with his wife to the United States.

After a year of debriefing in Washington, D.C., he eventually became a professor of journalism at Boston University.

McConnell writes, “Think about all the damage Martin-Bittman and his cohorts managed to cause before the internet existed. . . . As a reader, it’s important to approach headlines and text with a healthy sense of skepticism . . . considering the source . . . and looking for objective sources.”

Amen.