“A few months ago, one of the New York yellow journals sent a woman reporter to write up the strike in the cotton mills, and one day telegraphed her to interview the mayor,” wrote Elizabeth Banks, an American journalist who had relocated to London, in 1898. “When the Navy ships in the morning started to do an after-action review, they couldn’t find any evidence that an attack had actually taken place,” says Daniel Hallin, a communication professor at the University of California, San Diego, and author of The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam. The bigger threat, she says, mirrors what happened in earlier eras — with the German corpse factory, Gulf of Tonkin, and Elaine, Arkansas, stories: People in power use the mass media to spread misinformation widely.