My First Personal Experience With ‘Fake News’

At the tender age of 9, I learned first hand—by being somewhat inadvertently part of it—all about how easy it was to promulgate ‘Fake News’. It was the fateful day when I brazenly escaped down the fire escape of the orphanage where I was placed with my three siblings when my parents split up. Through no fault of her own, my jobless mother could not afford to raise four kids when my father moved on with the ‘other’ woman who was to give birth to my two half-sisters, whom I was to meet in later life only once.

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On the morning of my ‘Great Escape’

Getting back to my first experience with ‘Fake News’. For reasons unknown, I was sent to a school outside the orphanage where I attended classes. Orphanage nuns trying to teach me how to make a “perfect” bed as my brother could do over in the boy’s wing, kept me late for school each day. My homeroom teacher had informed me only the day before, “It’ s the dunce’s corner for you next time you show up late”. On the morning of my ‘Great Escape’, I had tried to tell the nun having me remake my bed over and over again, that I did not want to sit in the Dunce’s Chair at school—but to no avail. When her lesson was over, the doors of the orphanage being closed for the day, the nun led me to the fire escape stairs, telling me I should now hurry along to school. When I reached the bottom stairs, I yelled back up to her, “Goodbye, Sister, I won’t be coming back!” with the kind of audacity that could only be owned by a defiant 9 year old. The day of my escape was a wintry one with swirling snow and howling winds, and I could read the worry on the poor nun’s face when internalizing that I was now a runaway. In my childish imagination, I was going to find my father who would be bound to take me in, leaving the orphanage behind me FOREVER!

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The store owner telephoned both the police and the press. The press, of course arrived first

Problem was I had no idea where my father’s workplace was located. Reality hit me when I was just a few blocks away, where I walked up and down the same street hoping to keep warm. The owner of a Mom & Pop-type grocery store, who could clearly see me through his store window, called out to me to come inside. Having heard too many warnings about nasty sinister strangers, I ignored him, planning to run far up the street instead. “I have chocolate bars and pop in here,” he hollered. That did it! These treats had never been offered me in the orphanage or at school. Once I was inside, the store owner asked me what I was doing walking aimlessly along the streets. Between bar bites and soda sips, I told him that I was done for once and for all with the cruelty of the nuns and was hoping to find my father. Leaving a helper to sit with me, the store owner telephoned both the police and the press. The press, of course arrived first. They questioned me about the treatment of children in the orphanage, all of them at once. I began a litany of the nuns’ offences,—exaggerating each and every one. Having long resented the nuns who stood at the lavatory door while children performed sponge baths under their watch, I added that there was something “creepy” about it, adding that the bed making teacher was “deliberately” making me late for school just for sport!

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Not one of the several reporters conducting the “interview” questioned me for validity

Not one of the several reporters conducting the “interview” questioned me for validity, instead they lined up to call their stories in by telephone to their editor bosses, citing my wild exaggerations as if they were Gospel Truths. In time two cops showed up, and most embarrassingly, one was one of my father’s first cousins. “We’re here to take you back home”, they told me. Home was the orphanage, and because the newspaper in the city where it is located was an afternoon one, I hoped that the nuns hadn’t read about my lies already. When we arrived at the orphanage, Mother Superior was standing, hands folded beneath the wide sleeves of her habit, at the front door. “Are you going to kill me, Sister?” I asked. Mother Superior took me into her office and after seating me across from her desk, said, “Teach us how to get along with you, Judi.” What this wise nun she did about by request is a story for another time. Meanwhile, my exaggerations about life in the orphanage made front page news. I’m sure the nuns ‘outed’ in the hit piece took comfort in knowing that many adults reading about them knew down at heart that 9-year-old girls have been known to exaggerate. Years later when I was a reporter at the Toronto Sun, my editor, the late, great Peter Worthington taught me: “Always keep a healthy sense of skepticism when you are being told a story for reporting in the news. “Always report both sides of the story”. With the exception of communism, I have always tried to report both sides of the story. There is only one side of the Communism story, which was the first thing I discovered when I arrived on Communist soil. Nowadays, the news is whatever salacious story ‘journalists’ can spin. And not a single one of them is only nine years old.

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