I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that fighting against fake news is a core academic value. This probably doesn’t surprise anyone who read my title, but stick with me for a moment. Fake news is nothing new, but it has garnered a great deal of attention over the last couple of months, as the excuse du jour for how Donald Trump could possibly have beaten Hillary Clinton back in November. The assumption seems to be that American voters are too stupid to determine what is true and what is not true. The reality, I think, is that of course many Americans are too stupid to perform this critical separation. That’s where academic forces need to bring their A game.
In order to bring the forces of education to bear, I would suggest that we have to embrace a few operating principles on the matter.
Fake News Is Not a Partisan Thing
The problem I see is that some people want to conflate fake news with “news I find inconvenient.” They set the fakeness bar far higher for news that suits their prejudices, political, social, economic, or otherwise.
In the months since Election Day, many people have taken great glee in spreading stories about Mr. Trump. A few of those stories have turned out to be true and unembellished. I suppose this is only fair, because eight years ago, many other people took great glee in amplifying any perceived negative story related to Mr. Obama.
Educated people, dedicated to the free exchange of ideas and the addition to knowledge simply cannot play in this gutter. If we cannot resolve to play on a truly level playing field, then we should get out of the whole knowledge game.
Fake News Cannot Be Determined by Source
All that terrible stuff that conservatives see when they watch MSNBC is almost perfectly mirrored by the terrible stuff that liberals see when they watch FoxNews. To suggest otherwise is rather naïve and disingenuous. We therefore cannot dismiss things based solely on their origin. Similarly, we should not accept things based solely on their origin.
In an article from The Federalist, Daniel Payne lists “16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won.” Not surprisingly, given the website’s tilt and the season in which we find ourselves, these are all stories critical of the new administration. Interestingly, though, these stories, which include a number of outright misrepresentations, have been promulgated by such shady entities as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and Politico.
Educated people pay attention to the origin of information, but they do not fall into the laziness of allowing provenance to be the only measurement for credibility.
The Best (Worst) Fake News Is Not Completely Fake
Why did the old line about President Obama being a Muslim seem to have such an incredible lifespan? When you have a man with the middle name of Hussein who had attended Muslim-infused public school in Indonesia, it’s a lot easier to sell the idea that he followed that religious path.
Effective fake news doesn’t try to sell the idea that Pope Francis is a Muslim. It doesn’t try to establish Kanye West as an Ivy League philosophy professor. What it does is take something with at least a whiff of plausibility and then spin it into a whole awful tale.
Educated people understand that “A little learning is a dangerous thing” and that a little evidence is often less helpful than no evidence whatsoever.
Some Fake News Is Simple Sloppy News
Read through that article from The Federalist linked above. Do you notice something about most of the stories mentioned there. These stories start out as legit news stories where a reporter wasn’t sufficiently careful. Instead, the reporter, perhaps driven by laziness and perhaps driven by ignorance (and perhaps driven by animosity), fails to ask enough questions and then reaches conclusions that are simply foolish.
Several years ago, the once-lionized TV newsman Dan Rather ran with a story in which four documents critical of President Bush’s National Guard service were passed off as genuine, early 1970s sources. In short order, those supposed forty-year-old documents proved to be 2000s forgeries, having been printed on a printer not even imagined in the 1970s. Rather had to have known better than to have not better vetted these documents, but in his headlong pursuit of a good story, he became sloppy.
Educated people know that truly explosive stories are rarely simple. When something seems too simple, those educated people work hard to ensure that the simplicity is not just a mask for sloppiness.
The Best Cure to Fake News is Critical Reading and Thinking
Did the outgoing Clinton administration really remove all the Ws from the keyboards in the West Wing? Did Donald Trump call all Mexicans rapists and murderers? Or for that matter, did the government retrieve UFOs at Roswell, New Mexico? Sometimes, as Paul Simon said, “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
Educated people cannot, in good conscience, play such a careless game with the truth. Of course our predispositions and the limits of our knowledge will lead us, on occasion, to believe that fake is real, but when we do our job and employ our minds, that will happen less and less often.
But until then, did you hear the outrageous thing that the Congress is planning to do this week?