Contents:
I. America's Greatest Hoaxers: Franklin, Poe, Twain, and De Quille
1. English Traditions: Ben Franklin's Satire and Hoaxes
2. To the Moon in a Balloon" Poe's Horrifying Hoaxes
3. American Humor: Mark Twain and Dan De Quille

II. Journalism's Most Successful Hoaxes
4. Fooling the Masses: Astronomer Sees the Moon's "Bat-men"
5. Reinforcing a Stereotype: Railways and Revolvers in Georgia
6. Helping the Public? Wild Animals Escape in New York
7. Is the Press Too Powerful? Chicago's Awful Theater Fire
8. Improved and Updated: The Hoax That Caused a War
9. An Enduring Hoax: H. L. Mencken's Fraudulent History of the White House Bathtub
10. The End of an Era: New York's Sin Ship

III. Common Themes
11. Chicago's Hoaxes: Beating (and Embarrassing) Your Rivals
12. New England's Gentler Humor (and New York's)
13. Radio and TV Hoaxes: Dolls, Monsters, and Martians
14. April Fools' Hoaxes: Pelicans, Sharks, and Baseball
15. Hoaxing the Hoaxers: Fooling the Media for Fun and Publicity

Epilogue: A Change in Ethics: Firing the Guilty

Appendix: Ben Franklin's Parable against Persecution

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p xix
"...During the 1860s, for example, about four hundred daily newspapers were published in the United States. By 1900, the number had jumped to two thousand. Cities such as Philadelphia and New York had more than a dozen English-language dailies. As recently as 1933, Washington DC, had five. Only one, the Washington Post, has survived.

...Newspaper jobs were also much different" less respectable, but more adventuresome and carefree. They were low-level, white-collar jobs that attracted the upwardly mobile - immigrants, their children, and the youths raised on farms and in small towns. Newspaper jobs rarely attracted gentlemen. The upper classes thought of newspaper people as drifters and drunkards who led exciting lives but pried into other people's private affairs.

Few of the journalists were well educated. Many had not graduated from high school, and some believed that it was a disadvantage to have graduated from college. Journalists who had attended college sometimes tried to hide that fact "as though it was a stretch in prison." An editor at the Chicago Tribune also discouraged marriage, fearing it would interfere with his staff's work. If a reporter wanted to get married, the editor might threaten to cut the reporter's salary, or even to fire him."


p 147 - reporters regularly had close contact with police and also were known to kidnap witnesses of crimes or even the accused:
"The suspect in another murder was captured by police in Wisconsin. A squad from Hearst's Examiner sped to the town. Posing as Chicago policemen, they flashed fake badges and brought the suspect back to a Chicago hotel. The suspect gave the reporters a detailed statement, and the police and other journalists read it in the Examiner. So their story would remain exclusive, the reporters waited a day or two before returning their prisoner to the Chicago police."
However many of the tales of the Chicago press of the 1900 that were handed down were retold and exaggerated. So it's hard to say that all of the incidents are 100% accurate.