Published: June 2026

Has anyone seen the famous journalist Wenlock Jakes?

Who was Wenlock Jakes?

Supposedly the “highest paid journalist of the United States,” this infamous figure features in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 classic, Scoop!, a satire of editorial egos and reportorial incompetence. Jakes is hugely influential, despite—or because of—his loose grasp of facts. 

Jakes’s misreporting changes the course of history. Having overslept on a train in the Balkans, he gets out in the wrong country. Undaunted by this minor inconvenience, he files a colorful, made-up dispatch, featuring every cliché of his trade: “barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window.”

Other newspapers hurriedly send their correspondents to match this extraordinary story. They find everything quiet, but as Jakes is still filing his daily 1,000 words of “blood and thunder,” they join the pile-on, adding their own sensationalist coverage. The result is a financial crisis, a state of emergency, famine, mutiny—and a real revolution. 

Jakes is a fictional parody. But his spirit lives on in Europe today, particularly in the work of media outlets from the “old West”. BISC will chronicle and showcase their work. Here are a few examples.

The Baltic States in the International Imagination

image
previous arrow
next arrow

Sensationalist narratives of Baltic vulnerability, societal tensions and inflated accounts of military and strategic weakness certainly attract attention, but they can also do real damage, to morale at home in the Baltic states and to EU and NATO solidary.

BISC’s director and founder, Edward Lucas, has for decades been leading the fight against such reductive commentary and reporting – pointing out its dangers, its fallacies and how best to respond.

Here are a recent examples of his punchy takedowns of bad reporting by Wenlock Jakes’s successors.