Fake news during the North Carolina 1870 gubernatorial election.
To back up [Governor] Holden's claim that the state was in a condition bordering on insurrection, Judge Tourgee wrote a letter to Senator Abbott of North Carolina, another carpetbagger, which was widely published during the 1870 campaign. The letter, as published, declared the Ku Klux had broken into 4000 or 5000 houses, that they had burned fourteen houses in the immediate district and that he knew of thirteen murders in the district. This letter was used with telling effect, without comment from Judge Tourgee; but after the election was over, he blandly stated that he had been misquoted. Instead of 4000 or 5000 houses opened, I wrote 400 or 500. 'I said thirteen murders in the state, not in the district.' Incidentally, it was later found that three of the men reported murdered were still alive; and it was also stated that some of the house-burnings and other acts of violence were perpetrated by supporters by Holden supporters to provoke resistance to the exaggerated Ku Klux menace. After the election, Kirk's Ku Klux prisoners were brought, before Judge Brooks of the United States district court and released."
"When the Congressional Committee completed its investigation of affairs in the state, the majority reported that 'The Ku Klux organization does exist and that it had political purposes which it sought to carry out by murders, whippings, intimidation and violence.' On the other hand, the minority report said that the outrages had been 'grossly and willfully exaggerated' and that no act of lawlessness at all had been proven except in six, perhaps eight, of the eighty-seven North Carolina counties.”
Stanley Fitzgerald Horn, Invisible Empire, the Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866-1871., pp.200-201.