The press creating villains out of thin air is nothing new

The mainstream media, especially in the United States, has become very infamous (at least among everybody who pay attention to current politics and aren't far-leftists) during the past four years by creating a villanous tyrannical dictator, based on pretty much zero evidence, out of a man who has pretty much no history of the things that the media blamed him for. Indeed, there really is no evidence that Donald Trump would be some kind of tyrannical racist whose plan was to make America into a dictatorship and take over the world. In fact, there's plenty of evidence of the contrary (there are many clips of many interviews he had well before he ran for president of him denouncing the far-right, the KKK and the racists.) But the mainstream media made him into a tyrannical dictator, and the world believed it. And history will most probably believe it for decades to come, because history is written by the victors.

This is nothing new, however. The mainstream media has always abused its power to vilify people they don't like.

Take the example of one Joseph Bruce Ismay. There's a chance that name might sound slightly familiar, especially because of a very famous relatively recent movie (which was for quite a long the highest-grossing movie of all time). Namely, James Cameron's Titanic. You might remember who he was in the movie, based on actual history.

Indeed, Joseph Bruce Ismay was the chairman and director of the White Star Line, the shipping company that owned the Titanic. Famously he was aboard the ship when it sank in 1912, and was one of the survivors. He died in 1937.

He is widely known as a greedy and dirty coward, and depicted as such not only in Cameron's Titanic, but also pretty much all the previous movies on the same subject, most prominently in the 1958 movie A Night to Remember. He's almost always depicted, especially in Cameron's version, as a clueless and greedy businessman who ordered the captain to sail at an unsafe speed because he wanted to make headlines. And more prominently, he has been known and depicted as a complete coward during the sinking, who did nothing to help anybody and who selfishly entered a lifeboat even though there was a "women and children first" order in place. In both of the big Titanic movies he's depicted as sneaking into the boat with an extremely guilty and scared expression, shivering in fear of him being called out, yet allowed by some member of the crew who didn't dare to say anything in the face of such cowardice and selfishness.

This is, in fact, not merely the movies taking artistic liberties and inventing drama. Ismay was and to this day largely is known for this greed, cowardice and selfishness, a dirty coward looking only for his own life and not caring about anybody else. In fact, his life was ruined after the Titanic because of this infamy. His reputation was completely destroyed, sending him into a deep depression from which he never really recovered.

You might guess where this is going.

Indeed, almost all Titanic historians of any repute highly doubt this characterization of the man. There is literally zero evidence of any of the above claims (other than, rather obviously, that he entered one of the lifeboats and survived the sinking). On the contrary, some survivor testimonies paint a rather different picture of the man, telling that he was very active during the ordeal, helping people enter the boats and organizing the crew. He did enter one of the last lifeboats to leave the ship, and it's unknown whether he was ordered into it or whether he entered because there was space and there was nobody else to take it, but there is no evidence that he did so opportunistically out of greed and cowardice. Even if there was some cowardice, there's zero historic evidence of it.

In fact, Titanic historians know exactly where these slanderous rumors started and were propagated. Or more precisely, by who: William Randolph Hearst, a businessman and media mogul, owner of several American news organizations. Indeed, Ismay and Hearst had become enemies in the past because of some financial disputes, and Hearst took the opportunity after the sinking of the Titanic to start a massive smearing campaign against Ismay, inventing all those stories and character traits out of thin air.

And Hearst was extremely successful. Ismay's reputation was destroyed, it never recovered, and history came to know about the "fact" of his cowardice and shameful actions during the sinking... even though there's literally no evidence of any of it. No survivor testimonies, nothing. The only source for these claims are the smearing campaign articles in the newspapers owned by Hearst.

While Ismay's reputation has partially recovered during the last few decades, very long after his death, it will probably never fully do so, and people may well still think of him as a dirty coward for the foreseeable future. Films like Cameron's Titanic don't exactly help.

So the mainstream media destroying a person's reputation is nothing new. It has happened during the entire history of humanity, it's happening right now, and it will keep happening probably for as long as humans exist.