Negativland and me: Why we fall for hoaxes

David Brom was released from a Minnesota prison on Tuesday, 37 years after his conviction for using an ax to murder his parents and two of his siblings as a 16-year-old. When a friend recently told me about Brom's impending release, it stirred intense memories.

Not only did I immerse myself in the case as a reporter at the time of the murders, but I got caught up in a landmark media hoax linked to them—a prank that was ethically problematic yet brilliantly effective in skewering the news business and the moral panics of the 1980s.

I remember the moment vividly: It’s the year after the murders. I’m in my kitchen listening to the local college radio station. The DJ fires up the next track. It starts with a ringing phone. Then I hear an annoying voice leaving a message, saying:

This is Tom Krattenmaker, calling from Rolling Stone magazine. Can I speak to someone in Negativland? Can you comment on the connection that was made between your music and the ax murders last month in Rochester, Minnesota?

NOOOOOOO, comes the screaming reply on the record. I stare at the radio, stunned and confused. That’s my name I just heard but not my voice stating it. What the hell is this?!

‘Helter Stupid’

What I was hearing was a record called “Helter Stupid,” released in 1989 by Negativland. You could call Negativland a band, or sound collagists, or a culture jamming project, or media pranksters, or a radical art organization, or tricksters, or many other things.

What caused my path to cross with theirs was a bogus news release they put out during the height of the ax murder media coverage. They claimed it was their record—a track called “Christianity is Stupid,” released in 1987—that precipitated a sharp conflict between Brom and his father and drove the teenager to grab the ax from the garage and murder his family.

A lot of media outlets fell for it. Negativland chronicled their cringe-worthy responses as only they knew how to do, creating “Helter Stupid.” The album’s eponymous second track, the one in which my fake voice appears, mixes music samples with a cacophony of vocal snippets from films and television, including a San Francisco TV news station duped by the hoax news release. The result was an entertainingly brutal “evisceration of the media and a then-prevalent culture,” as the writer Cory Frye put it in a 2023 retrospective.

What was that prevalent culture? One that was gripped by moral panics fueled by a sensationalistic news industry whose output was eagerly consumed by a public all too willing to believe that rock music was foisting Satanism and other corruptions upon innocent youth.

It’s easy for me to see the value of “Helter Stupid” now. At the time I was embarrassed and angry. I had not fallen for Negativland’s hoax, and I scoffed at the fools who had. My consternation was only worsened by my faux voice being virtually the first sound on the track, and by my voice—Negativland later confirmed it wasn’t me, but a re-recording by someone at their record label—sounding so ridiculous.

It was not a complete lie, though, for Negativland to represent me on the record (complete with a gross misspelling of my last name in the liner notes). In covering the then-breaking story for the Associated Press in February of 1988, I introduced the music angle into the growing wave of national coverage. Interviewing Brom’s friends, I had learned about the teenager’s taste in bands—Suicidal Tendencies, for example—and the intense conflicts he had with his strict parents over music and other matters.

I played these up in my coverage for the AP national wire. Not to titillate, I told myself, but to puncture the developing façade that portrayed David Brom as a wonderful, happy boy from a model family. (And, yes, if the music dimension made my story more alluring and likely to draw attention, all the better.)

When I heard about Negativland’s news release, I did indeed phone them and leave a message. I was highly dubious about their claim. In my exhaustive research and reporting on the murders, I had never come across anything mentioning Negativland. I wanted to find out where they got this information and why they were putting it out. On the off chance their release was true, I needed to know.

The Rolling Stone magazine affiliation cited in my re-recorded message? That was accurate, although I’m sure many thought I was an imposter. I was under contract with the magazine when I phoned. You won’t find the resulting story in the magazine’s archives, however. Rolling Stone rejected the long-form piece I submitted that spring. I got over the disappointment and sold it to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which made it their Sunday magazine cover story on July 17, 1988. Neither in that opus nor in anything else I published about the case did I mention Negativland and their hoax media announcement.

But that’s all secondary now, and I have had friendly exchanges with Negativland’s Mark Hosler and Jonathan “Wobbly” Leidecker in recent years. What matters is that the target of the band’s late-1980s sound art is an even bigger problem now than it was then—and likely to worsen unless people’s media-intake skills gain ground, fast.

Motivated gullibility

I like having my brain cells stimulated by juicy conspiracy theories—especially, these days, if they’re suggestive of secret criminality by Trump and his enablers. I watched the 9/11 conspiracy documentary “Loose Change” back in the 2000s and was very briefly sucked into the theory that the terrorist attacks were an inside job. Then I read critiques of the theory, gave them some thought, and said “nah.”

America has long been fascinated by conspiracy theories and susceptible to them: the Red Scare, the endless speculations around the Kennedy assassination, the claims that the Apollo moon-landing was staged in a studio, and so on. We’ve had more than our share in recent years, none bigger and crazier than QAnon.

While they gobble up what’s obviously false, broad swaths of the citizenry go on rejecting what’s true, accurate, and verifiable.

Why are the fantastical theories so prevalent? Our willingness to buy into them is a big part of the answer. It’s more than gullibility. It’s motivated gullibility. We believe them because we want to. There’s something in it for us.

For sure, there’s a kind of recreational value. Conspiracy theories can be super interesting. They’re “fun” to think about and explore. But it goes far deeper than that. Conspiracy theories tap into our identities and ideologies, our resentments and contempt over what “they”—the cabals and secret-keepers and child-abusers and power-hoarders—are doing to skew the world in their favor, to perpetrate evil, and to keep us in the dark.

Conspiracy theories can fill us with righteousness and vindicate our dark views of the world. And they give us the satisfaction of thinking we are too clever to fall for the evil subterfuge.

They’re invariably wrong, of course, or at least wildly exaggerated. Yet conspiracy theories often have a kernel of validity, a kernel that’s right in front of us and easy to see. Strangely, though, many people prefer the grander, more far-fetched schemes operating on colossal scales and hidden in shadows. Sex-trafficking is real and reprehensible. Pizzagate? It makes a mockery of the actual problem and the earnest people battling against it.

‘The most gullible generation’

As with conspiracy theories, so with hoaxes. I suspect people have been perpetrating them as long as they’ve had the words to do so. Today’s technology makes them more convincing, easier to execute on a large scale, and harder to guard against.

For example, with AI’s help, you can impersonate a person’s voice, quite convincingly, and leave fake voicemail messages in their name. You can send text messages and emails mimicking the way they write. A person or a team of them has been impersonating Secretary of State Marco Rubio like this recently.

Hoaxes and imposter gambits are, at heart, deceptions. Sometimes they have a noble intent and aim to reveal a larger truth, as was the case with Negativland and their critique of news media gullibility and exploitation of tragedies. Sometimes hoaxers and imposters try to manipulate people and public opinion. Sometimes they aim to cheat or steal, as is the case with scammers who pretend to be someone they’re not so they can trick you into giving them your money and identity.

The latter is particularly a problem for older people, who tend to be less savvy with digital technologies.

Does that mean the true digital natives—the citizens of Generation Z—are less vulnerable to online hoaxes and conspiracies? Not if a recent piece in Politico is to be believed.

Under a headline calling Gen Z “the most gullible generation,” writer Catherine Kim shows how today’s 13-to-28-year-olds are uniquely overwhelmed by the “almighty algorithm” and the constant flood of misinformation in the digital world that commands so much of their attention.

Being at home in digital spaces is no advantage in this context. It’s the opposite, really—more like self-imposed confinement. Members of Gen Z tend to over-rely on platforms like TikTok to get their “news” and “information.” And, more than older generations, they eschew going to traditional news sources for reality checks.

“The ramifications are potentially huge for American politics,” Kim writes. “Without some sort of course correction, a growing piece of the electorate will find itself falling victim to fake news and fringe conspiracy theories online—likely driving the hyperpolarization of our politics to new heights.”

Course corrections

In a conversation earlier this week, I asked Hosler and Leidecker of Negativland to reflect on today’s media environment relative to the late 1980s when they released “Helter Stupid.”

“I feel like we've evolved through three or four different realities of how media gets out there and how people digest it, and their sense of what is true or not,” Hosler told me. “It's such a different world. When we made that record we weren't trying to point people towards saying, ‘All information is false, there are no facts.’ We were hoping to point people toward being discerning about how you take in information and what it means. Boy, that didn't work out.”

Leidecker added, “The lesson should be discernment, but all that has been taught is skepticism. And skepticism in and of itself is the most easily weaponized thing on the planet.”

Course corrections are definitely needed, as Catherine Kim suggests. Not to protect just the young people, but those in old age and middle age, too. Such corrections might take many shapes and forms. But to my mind none is more important than media literacy. If citizens have any hope of functioning in an increasingly bewildering and hostile media environment, and if we’re to have any chance of restoring healthy democracy, we must have tools and skills to help us discern what’s true and what’s not.

Relative to the information environments that prevailed through most of human history, the one we contend with today seems impossibly difficult. Those alive today—we’re all the most gullible generation.

It’s frustrating that conscientious folks seem to be the ones always having to play catchup. But the brains that can figure out how to use technology and epistemology tricks to deceive and manipulate have got to be capable of devising protections against the deception and manipulation.

Those who care about truth and facts have something else working in our favor—a trump card, as it were. It’s called reality, and it has a pesky habit of continuing to exist even when the liars and power-mongers are scheming to turn it upside-down and inside-out. It will have the final word.