“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Mark Twain (1835 – 1910), pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, American writer and humourist.
The word ‘fake’ invokes deliberate deception, it hints at cunning disguises meant to dupe customers into buying an ersatz product. Applied to news, ‘fake’ seeks to undermine the populace’s basic understanding of the way they are governed. It aims to cheat readers and viewers of the very means they must have when they come to elect a workable administration.
The phrase, ‘fake news’ is a neo-oxymoron. Just as ‘rotten eggs’ are not eggs but a potential poison, fake news is toxic to the communal mind. To even use the adjective ‘rotten’ about good eggs at breakfast is to make marmalade seem palatable. To call reliable news ‘fake’ is to allege a crystal of cyanide in the sugar bowl.
‘Fake,’ when applied to news, is thus as harmful to society as any other pejorative epithet is to a person or group. Were it not that ‘the F-word’ has better uses, ‘fake’ would be best banned from civic discourse and henceforward referred to by the polite only in this Bowdlerized form.
In part, the devil in news rests not with the media itself, but with the human minds it addresses. Though powerfully skeptical, the brain, with the intensity of an opioid addiction, longs for certainty and a feeling of security. It yearns to believe with the group, to be led. No wonder we are extremely gullible and easily conned, the more especially so when initial doubts are overcome. Turkeys never vote for Christmas; but the weaker among these fowl gladly opt for fattening foods in mid-October. Alas, like any business, the media must supply what its customers want.
Nonetheless, to discriminating, intelligent persons, those of us blessed with the ability to winnow wheat from straw, there obviously exists a section of the senior media that, albeit imperfectly, honestly tries to purvey reliable, relevant, useful, agenda-free, and perceptive information to a society that cannot remain free without the unfettered access to ideas, data, cold facts, and a variety of opinions. The very word ‘fake” applied to such sources it intended to obscure the only lens through which the public may perceive its government’s use of power for good or evil.
The word ‘fake’ bully’s democracy. It bad-mouths free speech. It slanders and libels the decent, objective media. It sways the wobbly mind. Laughable, in this one sense, the word ‘fake’ is itself ‘fake.’
What an oddity it is that the powerful, dictatorial, narcissistic figures, all of whom have successfully subsumed unto themselves far more than their allotted fair share of power, seem to think they still need popularity, of all things to maintain their dominance. They do though, as they feel that in this cause they must kill an unfavourable press. In doing so, they steal their subjects’ access to both sides of the debate and, thus, to informed consent. The foolish tyrant smashes presses, closes TV stations, and imprisons journalists. How much smarter a tyrant is it who uses one pejorative to discredit all criticism? And how easy? When your every word reaches billions?
“Fake news isn’t new,” says Cornell Clayton, a political science professor at Washington State University (WSU). “It often accompanies populist revival eras in politics. These things go hand-in-hand.” Clayton, who directs WSU’s Thomas S. Foley Institute of Public Policy and Public Service, adds, fake news explodes in popularity in times of political polarization and distrust of “the establishment” – mainstream media included.
A 2016 study carried out by Stanford’s Graduate School of Education assessed more than 7,800 responses by middle school, high school, and college students in 12 American states, on their ability to assess information sources. Researchers were shocked by students stunning and dismaying consistency to evaluate information at even as basic a level as distinguishing advertisements from articles. It’s not that readers are stupid, or even necessarily credulous. It’s that the news format is easy to imitate and some true stories are outlandish enough to beggar belief.
The promise of the Internet is that it is a great democratizing force, allowing everyone to express his or her opinion, and everyone to have immediate access to all the world’s information. Critical thinking is something we must all adopt as an active and ongoing process.
Ultimately, the problem of the fake-word is that this self-serving assertion of duplicity diminishes reliable news, steals the good name of genuine news, and makes it poorer indeed. To place hard news alongside rumour and innuendo is to sully it and rob citizens of a profound right. Credibility is funny stuff in these troubled times.
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