Was effective after the publication of the stories

was effective. After the publication of the stories related to
the observations about the Moon, the New York Sun
became the daily newspaper with the highest circulation
(Standage 2017).
Even if the “fake news” term is new in the current usage,
in the news practice the use of fake news is almost as old as
journalism itself. Other examples of fake news are given by
Cincinnati Commercial Tribune (Cincinnati, OH), 7 Jun.
1890 and by Impartial Observer (Richmond, VA), 9 May
1807 (Merriam-Webster 2018).
Fake news has even contributed to change the course of
history. In 1898 social networks did not exist, but the
newspapers were already fighting for the audience. In the
last decade of the 19th century the term yellow press was
coined to define the sensational journalism that kept New
York World , ruled by Joseph Pulitzer, and New York
Journal , from William Randolph Hearst. What nowadays
would be considered fake news allowed EEUU to declare
war against Spain in Cuba, which stopped being a Spanish
colony after some months of armed conflict. Hearst blamed
Spain for the explosion of the US battleship Maine in the
port of Havana despite not being true. “Destruction of the
war ship Maine was the work of an enemy”, wrote New
York Journal as the first headline of the front page, and
added: “Naval officers think the Maine was destroyed by a
Spanish mine”. The text was accompanied with a drawing

Sociology and Anthropology 7(5): 212-219, 2019 215
of the alleged attack.
In the USA, the “fake news” term has been associated
for a long time with the political satire programs. Today,
the term is essentially associated with disinformation.
4. Mass Media in Romania after 1989
The mass media in Romania has started in 1989 with 2
hours of broadcasting of the public television and a few
central daily newspapers and has reached today over 300
radio and televisions licenses and daily newspapers. After
1997, as an editor-in-chief at the public television news
department, I observed a few trends in the Romanian mass
media, which led to the continuous decrease of the
audience market share of the television channels.
Firstly, I observed a continuous decrease of the
information content of the news and its transformation
more and more into entertainment. The infotainment has
rapidly installed itself, which led to emptying the
information in the news bulletins. The pieces of
information that concerned companies were considered
forms of advertising and thus they were eliminated under
the excuse that they were disguised ads. In fact, it was a
disguised plea from the companies for advertising that
generated those events that normally would represent the
subject for regular news.
The second tendency that now characterizes the
Romanian media and that began to manifest itself strongly
after 1989 is the fusion between the information and the
commentary. This phenomenon is so extended that it
became a model for all the television channels in Romania.