Not Exactly Lying stands apart from the flood of recent writing on the phenomena of misinformation, disinformation, and journalistic deception. Donald Trump did not, as he claimed, invent the term “fake news.” But most scholars and commentators have acted as if he did, focusing overwhelmingly on the present and on the damage that false information has done to contemporary public life.While that damage is very real, I take a longer and wider view, drawing on case studies to analyze how we got where we are today. I explore how the complex relationships between truth, journalism, newsmakers, and readers/audiences evolved over the centuries since 1690 when America’s first known newspaper, Publick Occurrences of Boston, included in its inaugural (and only) issue a fake news item claiming that Louis XIV of France was sleeping with his daughter-in-law. And I argue that the true danger to public life lies less in the fashionable scapegoat of fake news than in what I call “fake journalism”—the appropriation and exploitation by partisans or activists of the outward forms of authentic journalistic practice in order to lend credibility to falsehood.For 200 years after Publick Occurrences there was no such thing as “authentic journalistic practice,” and newspapers played a variety of roles, only some of which had anything to do with information. Accurate intelligence about current events nestled in their columns alongside hyperpartisan disputation, humbugs, tall tales, fake interviews, propaganda, fiction, poetry, and the kind of reader-friendly embellishment that journalists themselves liked to call “faking.” No one expected that everything they read in the varied and jam-packed columns of a newspaper was true, but they usually felt more entertained than deceived when it wasn’t.Around the beginning of the twentieth century, however, it became increasingly clear to news organizations, citizens, reformers, and others that journalism was failing to serve the public good. They began working to establish the principles and expectations that to this day define “real,” credible, professional journalism. They didn’t always live up to their own standards, of course; journalists did, and do, make mistakes, sometimes dire ones. But they sought to make the rules clear and to hold transgressors accountable. In a talk to students at the brand-new Columbia Journalism School in 1912, Ralph Pulitzer sought both to publicize those rules—a newspaper that prints a deliberate fake, he said, becomes a “degenerate and perverted monstrosity”—and to enlist the aspiring reporters to uphold the ideals of the profession they were about to enter.Paradoxically, the birth of real journalism has also allowed for the growth and spread of fake journalism, as partisans, propagandists, and fraudsters figured out they could dress themselves up in their counterparts’ conventions, pretend to embrace their standards, and by their very presence undermine the credibility of good-faith journalistic work. As the mass media have grown ever more strongly entwined in the political system and as social media have penetrated ever deeper into our daily lives, so too has fake journalism, to the point where it has become an essential driver of the political polarization of public life.