Whos Really to Blame for Fake News? Look in the Mirror, America.
Published on
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
by
BillMoyers.com
Whos Really to Blame for Fake News? Look in the Mirror, America.
by
Neal Gabler
People photographing Donald Trump with their smartphones at a campaign rally
in Council Bluffs, Iowa. (Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
Consider for a moment the oxymoronic concept of fake news, which we have
been hearing so much about lately. This isnt your typical disinformation or
misinformation generated by the government, or foreign adversaries, or
corporations to advance an agenda by confusing the public. It isnt even
the familiar dystopian idea of manipulated fact designed to keep people
lobotomized and malleable in some post-human autocracy. Those scenarios
assume at least an underlying truth against which nefarious forces can take
aim.
Fake news is different. It is an assault on the very principle of truth
itself: a way to upend the reference points by which mankind has long
operated. You could say, without exaggeration, that fake news is actually an
attempt to reverse the Enlightenment. And because a democracy relies on
truth which is why dystopian writers have always described how future
oligarchs need to undermine it fake news is an assault on democracy as
well.
The American people are accessories in their own disinformation campaign.
What is truly horrifying is that fake news is not the manipulation of an
unsuspecting public. Quite the opposite. It is willful belief by the public.
In effect, the American people are accessories in their own disinformation
campaign.
That is our current situation, and it is no sure thing that either truth or
democracy survives.
Investigations of fake news have reported that it is a commodity primarily
a way for its perpetrators, many of whom are young people overseas, to earn
money by blasting out ludicrous material for which there is an audience, and
in that respect it is no different from many of the so-called alt-right,
white nationalist sites. Commodity or not, fake news has already played a
role, perhaps a substantial one, in Donald Trumps election, especially
since his campaign was aided by Russian hackers and trolls disseminating
falsities everything from Hillary Clinton using a body double to Pope
Francis endorsing Trump to ongoing charges of voting irregularities to
Clinton heading a child-trafficking ring out of a pizzeria.
There is now a Greshams law in news as in money: Phony news pushes out real
news.
We have been heading in this direction for a long time, not because people
necessarily love the outlandishly scurrilous or because they are joyfully
conspiratorial (though both of those things are probably true), but because
it is to the benefit of the right wing, as I have written in earlier posts,
to disrupt truth. Conservatives have a near-monopoly on that disruption. A
Buzzfeed analysis of fake news found only one viral false election story
from a left-wing site.
America is now controlled by white supremacists, and the results are
anyones guess.
Stephen Colbert, during his famous White House Correspondents Dinner
appearance, quipped that it is a well-known fact that reality has a liberal
bias. It was a joke, but one with a very large grain of truth. The Drudge
Report, Breitbart, Fox News, Alex Jones and others in the right-wing media
have been peddling their own peculiar version of reality for a while now. It
isnt, I think, that any of those outlets or their correspondents
necessarily believe the hogwash they deliver. (Well, maybe Alex Jones does.)
They have been playing to an audience living in its own paranoid fantasy.
But even that may understate their rationale. I doubt Drudge and Roger Ailes
and Steve Bannon were in the fake news business to make dough from morons or
to rouse right-wing rabble. They were in the fake news business to destroy
real news and create a vacuum into which they and their like-minded allies
could march. If you think this is a paranoid fantasy, just look at the
election results. America is now controlled by white supremacists, and the
results are anyones guess.
Still, right-wing fake news could be quarantined. No one beyond Fox News
aging white male audience took it seriously as a provider of news. What
helped break down the thin walls between the right-wing propaganda press and
the purportedly real press were social media, which is how Americans
particularly young Americans increasingly receive their news. I wont
rehash the recent debate over whether Facebook bears some responsibility for
disseminating fake news. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbergs defense is that the
social media behemoth is not a media site but a connection site, and it
doesnt monitor the items to which its users connect. This is a frail
defense and a conscienceless one, like Craigslist saying that it had no
responsibility for ads offering child pornography.
But here is the thing about those Facebook election stories. That Buzzfeed
survey I cited found that as the campaign headed toward its climax, fake
news on Facebook outperformed real news in terms of engagement. Or put
starkly: Facebook was purveying more blatantly false stories to millions of
users stories that Buzzfeed also found were largely targeted at Hillary
Clinton than real news. Readers of those stories clearly wanted to think
the worst of Clinton. Facebook gave them more reason to do so. Trumps
election, then, is due partly to Zuckerbergs dereliction and to social
medias nonchalance when it comes to truth.
It is, of course, no accident that the ascendancy of fake news and the
ascendancy of Donald Trump coincided.
In this most surreal of years politically, you have to take a step back to
grasp how surreal it has been journalistically too. Of course, truth, even
in the mainstream media, has always been insufficiently and carelessly
applied. The news media are a business, not a public service, and a large
part of that business is providing what the public wants. Still, though I
may be naïve in saying so, I dont believe that most mainstream journalists
have a predisposition to lie. To take the path of least resistance, perhaps.
To lie, no. I am sure that in some way most of them feel they are serving
the truth, not just their publication, network or website. They understand
that truth is the webbing that holds everything together our only way of
making sense of things. That understanding is what separates them from Fox,
Drudge, Breitbart and more straightforwardly fake news sites.
At least that is the way it was before this year and this election. Fake
news is intended to slash that webbing. It is not intended to pose an
alternative truth, as if there could be such a thing, but to destroy truth
altogether, to set us adrift in a world of belief without facts, a world in
which there is no defense against lies. That, needless to say, is a very
dangerous place.
It is, of course, no accident that the ascendancy of fake news and the
ascendancy of Donald Trump coincided. They are made for each other two
nihilists in a pod. Trumps modus operandi is to make things up, which has
placed a special burden on traditional journalism. I hadnt imagined I would
ever see a headline like this one in The New York Times, much less a
headline about a president-elect: TRUMP CLAIMS, WITH NO EVIDENCE, THAT
MILLIONS OF PEOPLE VOTED ILLEGALLY.
With no evidence.
In the headline.
Basically, editors are now compelled to fact-check every Trump pronouncement
before even getting to the body of the story. The alternative is how The
Wall Street Journal titled its article on Trumps baseless charge: TRUMP
TAKES AIM AT MILLIONS OF VOTES.
Notice how easily the fake slips into the factual. But can one honestly
expect every editor and reporter to challenge Trump this way every day? We
all realize the media will soon tire of it. The Times already has. (And keep
an eye on how NBC News treats Katy Tur, far and away the best reporter on
television, and see if they demote her or let her continue fact-checking
Trump.) Post-truth is what the Oxford English Dictionary anointed as the
word of the year. Welcome to post-truth America.
Like many depressed Americans, I have pretty much stopped watching or
reading the news since the election. Partly, it is because I cant face the
oncoming catastrophe of a Trump presidency and the way it will undo 50 years
of social progress. Part of it is because I cant face the fact that the
truth is a shambles, and with it, our democracy.
The basic principle of fake news is that when you can believe anything, you
wind up believing in nothing. This is a revolution. But you can only place a
portion of the blame on the fake news confabulators, on their Russian
compatriots, on the alt-right white supremacists out to destroy
multicultural America, on the traditional conservative press, which happily
ballyhooed anything that attacked Democrats, true or not, and on the
mainstream press, which, with its on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand
coverage gave fake news a purchase rather than battle it tooth and nail. You
cant even lay the entire blame on the congenital truth-destroyer Trump.
The larger portion of the blame lies with the citizens of the nation that
Donald Trump insists only he can make great again. Fake news thrives because
there is a lazy, incurious, self-satisfied public that wants it to thrive;
because large swaths of that public dont want news in any traditional
sense, so much as they want vindication of their preconceptions and
prejudices; because in this post-modernist age, every alleged fact is
supposed to be a politico-economic construct, and nothing can possibly be
true; and because even rationality now is passé. Above all else, fake news
is a lazy persons news. It provides passive entertainment, demanding
nothing of us. And that is a major reason we now have a fake news president.
Democracy can wither under all sorts of forces. But those forces seldom come
from without. They almost always come from within. Perhaps the most powerful
force is also the most subtle and seemingly innocuous, one that you would
think unlikely to take down a great nation: laziness. We are a lazy people
now too lazy to hear anything we dont want to hear, too lazy to defend
the truth against those who hope to subvert it, and, finally, too lazy to
protect our democracy.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
License.
Neal Gabler
Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA Times
Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA Today's
biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at the
Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society and is currently
writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
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Whos Really to Blame for Fake News? Look in the Mirror, America.
Published on
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
by
BillMoyers.com
Whos Really to Blame for Fake News? Look in the Mirror, America.
by
Neal Gabler
11 Comments
People photographing Donald Trump with their smartphones at a
campaign rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa. (Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty
Images)
Consider for a moment the oxymoronic concept of fake news, which
we have been hearing so much about lately. This isnt your typical
disinformation or misinformation generated by the government, or foreign
adversaries, or corporations to advance an agenda by confusing the public.
It isnt even the familiar dystopian idea of manipulated fact designed to
keep people lobotomized and malleable in some post-human autocracy. Those
scenarios assume at least an underlying truth against which nefarious forces
can take aim.
Fake news is different. It is an assault on the very principle of
truth itself: a way to upend the reference points by which mankind has long
operated. You could say, without exaggeration, that fake news is actually an
attempt to reverse the Enlightenment. And because a democracy relies on
truth which is why dystopian writers have always described how future
oligarchs need to undermine it fake news is an assault on democracy as
well.
The American people are accessories in their own disinformation
campaign.
What is truly horrifying is that fake news is not the manipulation
of an unsuspecting public. Quite the opposite. It is willful belief by the
public. In effect, the American people are accessories in their own
disinformation campaign.
That is our current situation, and it is no sure thing that either truth or
democracy survives.
Investigations of fake news have reported that it is a commodity primarily
a way for its perpetrators, many of whom are young people overseas, to earn
money by blasting out ludicrous material for which there is an audience, and
in that respect it is no different from many of the so-called alt-right,
white nationalist sites. Commodity or not, fake news has already played a
role, perhaps a substantial one, in Donald Trumps election, especially
since his campaign was aided by Russian hackers and trolls disseminating
falsities everything from Hillary Clinton using a body double to Pope
Francis endorsing Trump to ongoing charges of voting irregularities to
Clinton heading a child-trafficking ring out of a pizzeria.
There is now a Greshams law in news as in money: Phony news pushes out real
news.
We have been heading in this direction for a long time, not because people
necessarily love the outlandishly scurrilous or because they are joyfully
conspiratorial (though both of those things are probably true), but because
it is to the benefit of the right wing, as I have written in earlier posts,
to disrupt truth. Conservatives have a near-monopoly on that disruption. A
Buzzfeed analysis of fake news found only one viral false election story
from a left-wing site.
America is now controlled by white supremacists, and the results are
anyones guess.
Stephen Colbert, during his famous White House Correspondents Dinner
appearance, quipped that it is a well-known fact that reality has a liberal
bias. It was a joke, but one with a very large grain of truth. The Drudge
Report, Breitbart, Fox News, Alex Jones and others in the right-wing media
have been peddling their own peculiar version of reality for a while now. It
isnt, I think, that any of those outlets or their correspondents
necessarily believe the hogwash they deliver. (Well, maybe Alex Jones does.)
They have been playing to an audience living in its own paranoid fantasy.
But even that may understate their rationale. I doubt Drudge and Roger Ailes
and Steve Bannon were in the fake news business to make dough from morons or
to rouse right-wing rabble. They were in the fake news business to destroy
real news and create a vacuum into which they and their like-minded allies
could march. If you think this is a paranoid fantasy, just look at the
election results. America is now controlled by white supremacists, and the
results are anyones guess.
Still, right-wing fake news could be quarantined. No one beyond Fox News
aging white male audience took it seriously as a provider of news. What
helped break down the thin walls between the right-wing propaganda press and
the purportedly real press were social media, which is how Americans
particularly young Americans increasingly receive their news. I wont
rehash the recent debate over whether Facebook bears some responsibility for
disseminating fake news. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbergs defense is that the
social media behemoth is not a media site but a connection site, and it
doesnt monitor the items to which its users connect. This is a frail
defense and a conscienceless one, like Craigslist saying that it had no
responsibility for ads offering child pornography.
But here is the thing about those Facebook election stories. That Buzzfeed
survey I cited found that as the campaign headed toward its climax, fake
news on Facebook outperformed real news in terms of engagement. Or put
starkly: Facebook was purveying more blatantly false stories to millions of
users stories that Buzzfeed also found were largely targeted at Hillary
Clinton than real news. Readers of those stories clearly wanted to think
the worst of Clinton. Facebook gave them more reason to do so. Trumps
election, then, is due partly to Zuckerbergs dereliction and to social
medias nonchalance when it comes to truth.
It is, of course, no accident that the ascendancy of fake news and the
ascendancy of Donald Trump coincided.
In this most surreal of years politically, you have to take a step back to
grasp how surreal it has been journalistically too. Of course, truth, even
in the mainstream media, has always been insufficiently and carelessly
applied. The news media are a business, not a public service, and a large
part of that business is providing what the public wants. Still, though I
may be naïve in saying so, I dont believe that most mainstream journalists
have a predisposition to lie. To take the path of least resistance, perhaps.
To lie, no. I am sure that in some way most of them feel they are serving
the truth, not just their publication, network or website. They understand
that truth is the webbing that holds everything together our only way of
making sense of things. That understanding is what separates them from Fox,
Drudge, Breitbart and more straightforwardly fake news sites.
At least that is the way it was before this year and this election. Fake
news is intended to slash that webbing. It is not intended to pose an
alternative truth, as if there could be such a thing, but to destroy truth
altogether, to set us adrift in a world of belief without facts, a world in
which there is no defense against lies. That, needless to say, is a very
dangerous place.
It is, of course, no accident that the ascendancy of fake news and the
ascendancy of Donald Trump coincided. They are made for each other two
nihilists in a pod. Trumps modus operandi is to make things up, which has
placed a special burden on traditional journalism. I hadnt imagined I would
ever see a headline like this one in The New York Times, much less a
headline about a president-elect: TRUMP CLAIMS, WITH NO EVIDENCE, THAT
MILLIONS OF PEOPLE VOTED ILLEGALLY.
With no evidence.
In the headline.
Basically, editors are now compelled to fact-check every Trump pronouncement
before even getting to the body of the story. The alternative is how The
Wall Street Journal titled its article on Trumps baseless charge: TRUMP
TAKES AIM AT MILLIONS OF VOTES.
Notice how easily the fake slips into the factual. But can one honestly
expect every editor and reporter to challenge Trump this way every day? We
all realize the media will soon tire of it. The Times already has. (And keep
an eye on how NBC News treats Katy Tur, far and away the best reporter on
television, and see if they demote her or let her continue fact-checking
Trump.) Post-truth is what the Oxford English Dictionary anointed as the
word of the year. Welcome to post-truth America.
Like many depressed Americans, I have pretty much stopped watching or
reading the news since the election. Partly, it is because I cant face the
oncoming catastrophe of a Trump presidency and the way it will undo 50 years
of social progress. Part of it is because I cant face the fact that the
truth is a shambles, and with it, our democracy.
The basic principle of fake news is that when you can believe anything, you
wind up believing in nothing. This is a revolution. But you can only place a
portion of the blame on the fake news confabulators, on their Russian
compatriots, on the alt-right white supremacists out to destroy
multicultural America, on the traditional conservative press, which happily
ballyhooed anything that attacked Democrats, true or not, and on the
mainstream press, which, with its on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand
coverage gave fake news a purchase rather than battle it tooth and nail. You
cant even lay the entire blame on the congenital truth-destroyer Trump.
The larger portion of the blame lies with the citizens of the nation that
Donald Trump insists only he can make great again. Fake news thrives because
there is a lazy, incurious, self-satisfied public that wants it to thrive;
because large swaths of that public dont want news in any traditional
sense, so much as they want vindication of their preconceptions and
prejudices; because in this post-modernist age, every alleged fact is
supposed to be a politico-economic construct, and nothing can possibly be
true; and because even rationality now is passé. Above all else, fake news
is a lazy persons news. It provides passive entertainment, demanding
nothing of us. And that is a major reason we now have a fake news president.
Democracy can wither under all sorts of forces. But those forces seldom come
from without. They almost always come from within. Perhaps the most powerful
force is also the most subtle and seemingly innocuous, one that you would
think unlikely to take down a great nation: laziness. We are a lazy people
now too lazy to hear anything we dont want to hear, too lazy to defend
the truth against those who hope to subvert it, and, finally, too lazy to
protect our democracy.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
License.
/author/neal-gabler
/author/neal-gabler/author/neal-gabler
Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA Times
Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA Today's
biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at the
Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society and is currently
writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
