Who Pays the Piper

In December 1917, the American journalist H. L. Mencken published a column in the New York Evening Mail about the history of the bathtub. It was an unremarkable piece — no scandals, no revelations, just a quiet account of how the humble tub arrived in American homes, with dates, names, civic controversies, and the satisfying detail that President Millard Fillmore had installed one in the White House in 1851, lending the contraption its first official respectability.

There was one small problem. Mencken had invented the entire thing.

He admitted it nine years later, in a nationally syndicated confession. He called his column “a tissue of absurdities, all of them deliberate and most of them obvious.” And then he described what had happened in the years between publication and confession: his invented facts had entered learned journals. They were cited in Congress. They crossed the Atlantic and were discussed solemnly in England and on the continent. They settled into standard reference works. “Today,” he wrote, “I believe they are accepted as gospel everywhere on Earth.”

Not by idiots. Not by the uneducated. By journalists, historians, and presidents — people who had every professional reason to check, and who did not check, because the story had already appeared somewhere reputable, which meant it did not need to be checked, which meant it would appear somewhere else reputable, which meant it did not need to be checked.

Mencken had a word for the audience at the end of this chain. He called them the booboisie. He was not entirely kind about it. But he was precise.

The First Copy Is the Only Copy

Michael Farquhar, cataloguing centuries of press deception in A Treasury of Deception, opens his chapter on journalism with Thomas Jefferson’s observation that the only reliable truths in a newspaper are in the advertisements. Jefferson lived in a world of hand-set type. The mechanism he was describing does not require any particular technology. It only requires a chain — and a first link that nobody checks.

Today that chain has a name: the wire agency. AFP. Reuters. AP. DPA. And their national equivalents, distributed quietly across every European country. These agencies generate the raw material. Thousands of newsrooms receive it daily, reshape it lightly, place a journalist’s name at the top, and publish. The editorial decisions — what exists, how it is framed, which voices appear, which questions are not asked — were made somewhere upstream, before most readers, and most journalists, ever encountered the text.

The Mencken problem, in other words, has not been solved. It has been industrialised.

The Clothes Nobody Mentions

There is a particular quality to the present moment in European public discourse that students of history will find familiar, even if they cannot immediately name where they have seen it before.

A continent increases its weapons spending by orders of magnitude and calls this a peace initiative. Central banks print money at a pace not seen in living memory, and analysts speak of “manageable inflation targets.” An energy policy dismantled with remarkable speed is described, in the same breath, as visionary and irreversible. Mainstream editorial lines on questions of war, economy, and social transformation achieve a uniformity — across countries, languages, and outlets that once prided themselves on independence — that would have been logistically impossible to arrange twenty years ago.

Not one voice in the major outlets pauses to ask whether the arithmetic is correct. Not one asks who will pay, and when, and how much. The clothes are exquisite. Everyone says so.

Hans Christian Andersen, who understood these mechanisms perfectly, was also not entirely kind about it. But he was precise.

This is not a new pattern. What Farquhar documents across ten parts of his treasury is that institutional deception is not exotic — it is the recurring, structural preference of concentrated power. What changes across centuries is not the impulse but the elegance of the infrastructure.

Farquhar documents one instance that deserves a moment of attention here, because it is the cleanest demonstration of how this works at full scale.

Sometime in the eighth or ninth century — the precise date remains unknown — someone produced a document purporting to be a legal decree from the Emperor Constantine the Great, written in the fourth century, granting Pope Sylvester I and his successors supreme authority over the entire western Roman Empire. Not just spiritual authority. Territorial, political, legal authority. The document was called the Donation of Constantine, and for approximately seven hundred years it served as the foundational legal instrument of papal power over European rulers. Kings were crowned by its authority. Emperors were humbled under it. Wars were justified by it.

In 1440, a scholar named Lorenzo Valla examined it carefully and demonstrated, through linguistic analysis, that it could not possibly have been written in the fourth century. The Latin was wrong. The terminology was wrong. The document was a forgery, almost certainly produced to serve a political purpose in exactly the era when it first appeared.

What happened next is the part that matters. Almost nothing changed immediately. The institutional architecture built on seven centuries of the document’s authority had its own momentum. The forgery had long since become structural. By the time truth arrived, the power that truth was supposed to correct had already made itself permanent.

The document did not succeed through violence. It succeeded because it controlled what people believed to be documented fact. The forgery was not the trick. The administration of certainty — maintained across generations, taught in schools, cited in courts, invoked by emperors — was the trick. Truth, when it finally appeared, was a latecomer to a house it no longer owned.

We have pointed at this inversion before, in different forms and different centuries, across several articles on these pages. The shape recurs. The costume changes.

The Breadcrumb

You would not believe — or perhaps, if you have been reading here for a while, you would believe exactly — which independent news agencies and broadcasters are sponsored to carry their masters’ narratives. Not by shadowy private interests this time. By an institution that collects its operating budget directly from the citizens whose information environment it is shaping.

This is not a theory. It is a transaction. Documented, itemised, and — here is the part that deserves a moment of quiet appreciation — publicly available. At taxpayer expense.

A Belgian journalist named Filip Michiels recently did something simple and rather old-fashioned. He searched a database. The EU Financial Transparency System — which records, in considerable detail, every significant transaction of EU public money — is open to anyone with a browser and the patience to use it. What Michiels found there concerns the funding relationships between EU institutions and the major European media organisations that report on those same institutions. His investigation will be published in the Flemish magazine Doorbraak, in the March edition arriving in stores from March 26. It has not yet appeared. Which means the institutions named in it have not yet had occasion to not respond to it.

We will not reproduce his findings here. That is his work, and it deserves to be found in his own words, in print, as it was intended. What we will say is this: the database he searched is public, the transactions are documented, and the database itself is here — ec.europa.eu/budget/fts — should you wish to begin looking before the magazine reaches the shelf.

The Mencken problem, you will recall, was not that the facts were hidden. It was that nobody looked.

Why Nobody Looks

This is the question Mencken’s story actually poses, and it is more interesting than the hoax itself.

His readers were not stupid. His fellow journalists were not lazy by nature. What happened was structural: once a story exists in a credible place, the cost of checking it exceeds the benefit. The chain self-perpetuates. And if — this is the part that matters — if the chain is designed from its first link to produce a particular kind of output, then checking becomes not merely unnecessary but, in certain professional climates, unwelcome.

There is an old word for a narrator who is paid by the institution he covers. Journalism schools used to teach the distinction carefully. The word is not journalist. The old term, still found in the dustier corners of press ethics textbooks, is stenographer. It is not an insult. It is a job description.

The word is also not disinformation, though it is worth noting that the institutions now most loudly defining that term are, by an interesting coincidence, the same institutions whose funding relationships Michiels documented. In an upside-down world — and we have written about the inversion mechanism before, in contexts ranging from symbols to education to the deliberate narrowing of what may be thought — the one who names the lie is often the one most invested in its continuation.

Mencken had another observation about the professional class that manages public information. He noted that the easiest way to maintain a false narrative is not censorship — censorship draws attention. The easiest way is to ensure that the people positioned to question it have a professional and financial interest in not doing so. Not through instruction. Through structure.

He was describing 1917. He was precise.

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Filip Michiels’ investigation into EU media funding is published in Doorbraak magazine, March edition, in stores from March 26, 2026. The EU Financial Transparency System is accessible at ec.europa.eu/budget/fts. Thomas Fazi’s analysis, Brussels’s Media Machine (2025), reached independent conclusions from the same public sources. The Mencken bathtub account is documented in Michael Farquhar, A Treasury of Deception (Penguin), Part II: “All the News That’s Slipped to Print.” The Donation of Constantine is covered in Part IV: “State-Sponsored Deceptions.”