When can we believe what we read?

I once tried to invite Johnny Depp to open a chocolate factory.

Working on a local paper, near where the Willy Wonka actor was rumoured to keep a second home, I spied a chocolate factory that had come up for rent.

Here I thought to confect the world’s greatest local news story: “Charlie and The Chocolate Factory Star Opens Chocolate Factory”. I set about tracking him down.

Stories of Depp’s West Country hideaway date back to the 2000s, when he was said to be considering enrolling his son in Taunton School. 

But the stories, always denied by Depp’s agent, were never corroborated. So it was to my surprise that when I Googled “Johnny Depp’s house” that the first result purported to reveal the location of the star’s bolthole. 

In a tell-all interview, Depp had disclosed the purchase of a £13 million 19th century mansion, “complete with a fully functioning dairy farm”, in the small Somerset village of Kingston St Mary. 

In the interview, which can still be read on the websites of The Independent, MailOnline, Hello!, Metro and The London Evening Standard, Depp confesses to being a shy kind of guy, and gushes about the locals.

“I can go into shops without being surrounded by people wanting selfies. I don’t mind that up to a point, but sometimes it gets a little too crowded.”

Unfortunately for me, no such property actually existed, and I was no closer to extending Mr Depp his invitation to the grand opening. But I had perhaps stumbled upon something even better.

To my mind, there was something uncanny about the “interview”. The quotes — like “I like going to places, seeing things and meeting people” — did not carry Depp’s voice, and the photos were of Hadspen House, now a hotel near Wincanton.

I sourced the original interview to Somerset Life magazine, and a journalist, Bernard Bale. Bale had hundreds of bylines to his name, and interviews with A-listers from Tom Cruise to Barack Obama under his belt.

Online, Bale claims to have begun a career on Fleet Street at the age of 15, when he got a job on the Daily Express. On his website he boasted to have “never once been accused of misquoting” and of being “one of the most experienced and successful writers of our time.”

In pursuit of Johnny Depp, and curious about the story, I reached out to Bale by phone. He told me he had interviewed Johnny Depp on numerous occasions, but that the interview which appeared in Somerset Life had been based on quotes provided by the star’s agent.

I quizzed him on some other curious articles, exclusive interviews with Madonna on her 60th and 63rd birthdays, and an interview with George Clooney which had appeared on the front page of The Sun.

He was good enough to advise me on how one day I might, like him, be able to secure an interview with Michelle Obama:

“First of all, don’t tell lies and don’t embellish what they say. That way you get accepted. You can use other people as references and you get in a situation where you give respect you get respect.”

He lamented the changing world of journalism, “Now you’re more likely to get email quotes or telephone quotes or whatever”, a far cry from the good old days when he was part of an “elite mob” sitting around a buffet talking to the stars.

It occurred to me that for his work, Bale ought to be almost as well-known as the late Sir Michael Parkinson. I had to get to the bottom of how this unknown Grimsby-based journalist was scooping sit downs with Nicholas Cage and Lily Allen.

I contacted editors who had published Bale in the past — but I was made to feel like a detective who had arrived in a small town where something wasn’t quite right.

Some put the phone down on me — others, eventually, spoke off the record. “Don’t touch this with a bargepole”, I was told. But some stood by their man, including the editor of Dogs Today, for whom Bale had delivered an interview with Barack Obama. 

I found Bale had been co-director of a company with Paul Elliot, the Chuckle Brother, indicating he did have some genuine proximity to celebrity, but I wasn’t sure what to make of his claim to having rubbed shoulders with the likes of George Clooney. 

When I tried to shop the curious case of Bernard Bale to the papers, somewhat unsurprisingly, they weren’t overly keen, and one tabloid which did take it up, would go on to kill it after discovering they had paid Bale in the past. 

It would take two years of investigation to prove, to the satisfaction of lawyers, that there were questions to be asked of Bale’s interviews, which included a sit down with Will Smith for Dogs Monthly, George Clooney for Derbyshire Life and Tom Cruise for Equestrian Life. To be clear, I’ve seen no evidence that the interviews were not obtained legitimately. But I can’t help wondering about how they were obtained and how they were conducted.

We all know not to believe everything you read in the papers, and yet, we often do. In the course of my investigation I began to consider how much we can trust what we read, which is when I came across the case of Stephen Glass.

Glass, who worked for The New Republic in the 1990s, made international news after being fired for fabricating, in part or in whole, most of his articles for the magazine.

The events of his short career at The New Republic would later be retold in the film Shattered Glass, with Hayden Christensen as the disgraced writer. It tells how the talented Mr Glass dazzled his bosses with fantastic stories, rising through the ranks until an expose by Forbes unveiled him as a writer of fiction as well as fact.

To give Glass his due, he was a terrific writer. In an article entitled “Hack Heaven”, dated May 18, 1998, he recounts how a teenage computer hacker defeats the firewalls of a software company, hacks their database and is subsequently offered a top job by the firm.

The problem for Glass though, was there was no such hacker, no such company, and the restaurant where the meeting supposedly took place, was actually closed at the time he claimed to have been there.

But his stories were taken at face value by his bosses. By virtue of being a writer at The New Republic, he was bestowed the trust due to a writer at The New Republic. Similarly, Bale, who his long history on Fleet Street, and his self-reported friendships with Hollywood’s biggest names, apparently did enough for editors to overlook some of the questions to be asked of his articles.

But credentials don’t appear to be a prerequisite for this kind of creativity. Some of the biggest blags appear to have come from perfect nobodies. Shortly after The Guardian ran my story on Bale, The Observer published an expose on the Sunday Times best-seller, The Salt Path.

By chance, I had also been close to The Salt Path. The first I had heard of the book, a memoir by Raynor Winn detailing her walk, with husband Moth, along the South West Coast Path, was when the film adaptation began filming in Minehead, again in the purview of my local paper.

Looking back to my reporting from the time, I wrote that the film was “based on author Raynor Winn’s book of the same name, which tells the true story of her husband’s diagnosis with a terminal illness”:

Following the diagnosis the couple were made homeless by a business deal gone wrong, and went from living in a farmhouse to claiming £48 a week in tax credits.

Raynor and her husband then set off the walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path, armed only with a tent, sleeping bags and £115 in cash.

But there may have been as many questions to be asked of Raynor’s experiences as of Johnny Depp’s dairy farm. The Observer reported on allegations that Winn, real name Sally Walker, lost the family home over debts accrued to settle a criminal allegation, that Walker is alleged to have embezzled money from her workplace, and that far from having nowhere to go, the couple owned a house in the south of France.

I don’t recall where I sourced my information on The Salt Path, though it was probably from the publisher. By virtue of that information appearing on the website of a reputable source, it was true for my purposes.

While in the course of my investigation I began to imagine myself with a third eye, seeing what so many news desks could not, I had, like them, propagated something which was, at the least, not “unflinchingly honest”. My coverage of The Salt Path was as uncritical as The Sun’s breathless reporting of George Clooney’s plans to buy Derby County.

It then clicked how the story of Johnny Depp’s dairy farm went viral – its publication in one credible source gives permission to the next, leading to a cascade. While this might seem obvious, it was only when I found I had been part of the chain, did I fully absorb the lesson. In some cases, these chains stretch unbroken for decades. 

Those who have seen the film Catch Me if You Can might be familiar with the name Frank Abagnale. Spielberg’s film, which is based on Abagnale’s 1980 book of the same name, and stars Leonardo DiCaprio as the author, a self-proclaimed conman who impersonated a doctor, an airline pilot and a lawyer.

Abagnale claimed that as a teenager, he cashed fake cheques worth $2.5 million, and became a sort of international man of mystery, conning his way around the world with the authorities chasing his tail. The book recounts that after being caught, he took up a job with the FBI, and Abagnale has dined out on his reputation as an expert in fraud ever since.

Since the story first surfaced, there have been questions surrounding its veracity. In 1978, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story entitled “A Convict Who Makes Up Crimes”, after Abagnale appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, with the paper declaring “Johnny is Conned.” 

Despite an abundance of questions hanging over the book, it was ultimately made into a hit film and entrenched in the cultural canon as a true story. Newspaper coverage from the time billed the movie as the “true story” of the “ultimate conman…who used his wits to get rich and get laid.”.

The book and the film continue to be the subject of scrutiny. A 2020 book revealed Abagnale was imprisoned at the time he claimed to be carrying out his most famous cons. 

In 2023 the New York Post reported on new allegations that Abagnale’s story was a fabrication, and that his only con was making claim to the book’s historicity. Sources who spoke to the Post said there was “no evidence” Abagnale had ever worked for the FBI, and that his criminal record amounts to a string of petty offences, including stealing photography equipment from a summer camp.

AARP, for whom Abagnale worked as a fraud ambassador, has since disassociated themselves with the author, writing on their website that “many of his tales have since been debunked.”. But Abagnale, like others mentioned in this article, continues to stand by his claims, and more people than not probably still assume his story is “unflinchingly honest.”

With few exceptions, these kinds of stories are impossible to debunk. Google’s AI overview, for example, still asserts that “Johnny Depp primarily resides in a sprawling 19th-century countryside estate in Somerset, England.”

Only last week was Bernard Bale referred to in the press as having “writ­ten an estim­ated 25 mil­lion words dur­ing a long Fleet Street career.” Raynor Winn continues to publish books with Penguin, and Google gives Abagnale’s website as the second search result for his name, where readers are told he is “one of the world’s most respected authorities on the subjects of cybercrime, identity theft, scams, forgery and secure documents.”.

It’s clear why these stories have such enduring appeal. We would all like to believe a terminal illness might be cured by the mystic qualities of a rural pilgrimage. The archetype of the loveable rogue, personified in Catch Me If You Can, is irresistible. It’s nice that this or that A-lister likes our particular part of the world, or is interested in our football club. 

In an age of AI, the idea of “fake news” and “misinformation” is causing more anxiety than ever, and no doubt it is a real problem. From deepfakes of Martin Lewis promising get rich quick schemes, aiming to part the vulnerable with their cash, to Indian bot farms polluting the internet with rage bait to generate advertising revenue on X. 

Ultimately, fake news thrives because it tells us what we want to hear

But while the technology is new, the problem is not. Stephen Glass never asked you to transfer your ISA into a Nigerian bank account, but he did, nevertheless, perpetrate a fraud on his readers. And he did so by appealing to his readers, in much the same way as an AI hoax might be used to manipulate a vulnerable victim, or deceive a person desperate to believe.

Ultimately, fake news thrives because it tells us what we want to hear. A fabricated article about a minor change to Britain’s pigeon population is unlikely to travel far. But a tantalising tale, a once in a lifetime opportunity, or a cause for hope will spread like wildfire. Perhaps instead of blaming the technology, we should look inwards, and question the ease with which we come to believe that which we would like to be true. This doesn’t mean that that which seems questionable is necessarily untrue, of course. But we should ask the question.

Three years on, I still cannot prove whether Johnny Depp ever had a house in Kingston St Mary. But I think he might have.