Mondoweiss
The 'fake news' story is fake news
Philip Weisson May 6, 2018
Judy Woodruff of PBS News Hour
Almost every day on public radio or public television, I hear reports about
how fake news is undermining our democracy. These high-minded reporters and
anchors seem truly to believe that a feverish menace is overwhelming the
minds of once-sensible people.
This story is itself fake news for several obvious reasons. We've never had
more good information than we have now; people are as well-informed as they
want to be. There will always be outlets purveying lies; that is the nature
of communication. And the insistence on the "fake news" issue is an effort
to assign Trump's victory not to those who brought it to us (the electorate,
and the incompetence of the Clinton campaign) but on some nefarious agents.
The fact that we have more and better information today than ever almost
goes without saying. When I started in the news business more than 40 years
ago, few reporters carried tape recorders, largely because they worked for a
guild and were never subject to correction. Today there are countless
outlets, thanks to the internet, and important events are almost always
recorded. The amount of data we have on public figures is vast compared to
even ten years ago.
We can all argue about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing; but we
are today awash in information. That information is more reliable than it
has ever been before. My own work on Palestine and the Israel lobby has
shown me that global consumers can get more accurate information about that
conflict than they've ever had. Yes, as we assert here all the time, the
mainstream US media is in the tank for Israel; but it's not as if better
information is not available at your fingertips, much of it from Europe and
Palestine, often citizen video.
Before the internet, alternative sources were much harder to obtain. You had
to subscribe to journals, or go to Hotaling's newsstand in Times Square for
out-of-town papers. The best example is sports. I had to hope the newsstand
had the late edition of the Times, or that the Times carried the box score
for my hometown team. Today I can find out any score and see videos of my
team's performance in an instant. And the destruction of the guilds by the
internet has brought us sharp commentators who would never had access to the
media traditionally (like this tweeter I turn to every morning to get the
score).
"Do you trust everything you read on social media?" an ad for WNYC radio
asks. They used to say the same thing about newspapers when I was a kid! The
idea that information used to be a clean pool before all the clever internet
liars arrived is a delusion on the part of entitled reporters of the fake
news storyline. Storytelling is a primordial human experience. It is rooted
in the need for knowledge to enhance our survival. We tell stories in an
effort to make our lives better, more fulfilling, more understandable. And
from the beginning of the story, there were lies. Some say that human beings
have tongues in their mouths to deceive others, while some fiction writers
will tell you that artifice is the soul of story. We all learn to sort out
sincere and truthful from exaggerated and bogus. No, we don't always succeed
as readers and listeners at that job, but we try. Just as reporters seek to
convey accurate versions of events despite their limitations; and artificers
seek to construct more perfect tales to relate social and psychological
quandaries.
There are surely hundreds of thousands of news sites today (millions?) where
there used to be thousands of news outlets. The great preponderance of these
sites do as we do here, try and present the most genuine version of events
they are able to. As Ezra Pound once said, there is only one standard for
writing: accuracy of statement. It's not rocket science, but it is a
struggle.
Are there sites that try to hoodwink readers? Of course. There have always
been sensational papers, yellow journalism, scandal sheets, rumors,
disinformation, boys crying wolf, and unreliable sources. Readers have
always had a duty to sort this out. How many of us feel that we can size up
the accuracy of an unknown site in a few seconds, from one sign or another?
Readers are way more sophisticated than the fake-news reporters believe them
to be. More than that, we know that some of the biggest lies originate from
authorities. Which gives rise to conspiracy stories, going back to
Shakespeare.
The claim that liars and fake-news sites handed the election to Donald Trump
is fiction. A democracy gives the franchise to a lot of stupid people, on
all sides. People believe what they want to believe. No doubt the internet
has served to socialize information, tailoring it to tribal audiences (I
seek out that baseball tweeter because we are likeminded, still our team
can't win), but it's not as if information was objective before. The belief
that people were manipulated into voting for Trump may be comforting to
those who love the neoliberal elitism and interventionism of the post-9/11
world, but it doesn't answer the complex reality that is American society.
The smartest reporting on the 2016 election was the study showing that
Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin all had high casualty rates from
America's wars; and that these voters regarded Clinton as pro-war. And
Clinton failed to campaign in Wisconsin and Michigan, even as her surrogates
advocated for regime change in Syria on the cables. Those factors would seem
to be as determinative as anything else that the big papers have told us
about the debacle November 8. It would be a lot better if they would
actually interview Trump voters, rather than lecturing us about fake news.
The claim that the Russians are behind fake news and they threw the election
is just more fiction from a Democratic Party determined to have a new cold
war in order to excuse itself from its failures to reach the white Obama
voters who voted for Trump. Do people really think that the ads Russians
placed on Facebook, or the data that Trump allies had access to through
Cambridge Analytica, swayed people to vote for Trump? Is that how youmade up
yourmind? Maybe a few fools changed their vote because of lies; but again
that does not go to the real dynamics of the 2016 race. People disliked
Clinton for good reasons. People sought a disrupter for good reasons.
If Russians were behind the Wikileaks hack of the Democratic National
Committee emails, maybe we should be thanking them. The hack exposed real
corruption: on my issue, the Clinton team's active efforts to sell Clinton's
stance on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to big pro-Israel donorsas
a way to salve them for her support for the Iran deal. No one has disputed
the accuracy of these emails, and they are a disturbing window on how
politics works. It would be nice if the media would spend a little time on
the substance of those emails. But no, the fake news story has a life of its
own.
P.S. Judy Woodruff's picture is atop this post because she and the PBS News
Hour have taken the fake news story way too seriously. In fairness, I urge
readers to watch her interviewof two Boko Haram survivors, some of the best
journalism you will ever see.
