Matt Rippy plays several roles for BBC 4’s radio drama Ship of Lies.
This year’s buzz word is ‘Infocalypse’ – which is to say that information and news is now so easily manipulated, that facts are becoming impossible to verify and reality is losing its gravitational pull.
In Ship of Lies, Ron Hutchinson focuses on the beginning of the modern era when the telegraph had just been invented, to see how even then, corporations were quick to manipulate data and even the news to influence markets and expectations to their advantage. An examination of the sequence of ‘reported’ events in the 36 hours after the Titanic sank indicate that the use of ‘distraction tactics’ and cries of ‘Fake news’ were already in evidence more than a hundred years ago.