Abstract: Whether the headline was "Dewey Defeats Truman," (1948), or "Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby" (1993), fake news is not new.  Librarians and information professionals have been concerned about its creation and dissemination for a long time. Judging from mentions in the popular press, fake news became a "thing" around 2016; a search of all publications on Factiva from 1984 to 2015 results in around 12,000 documents that mention the phrase. A search from 2016 to 2018, however, uncovers more than 200,000.