False information, fake news and a wearying cycle of hollow promises

THE OLD saying that the best things in life are free is not necessarily true when it comes to news and where we get our news.

I have spoken before about an Israeli historian and thinker, Yuval Noah Harari. He wrote that excellent book, Sapiens a fascinating trip through human history delving into the events and developments that brought us to where we are today.

His subsequent work, Homo Deus, which I haven’t read, speculates on our future as a species. He is about to release a third book entitled 21 Lessons for the 21st Century looking at some of the major questions we currently face.

In this book, due to be published at the end of the month, he looks at, among other things, the whole notion of ‘fake news.’

As an historian he reminds his readers that fake news isn’t a phenomenon of the early 21st century. Propaganda, myth, hype, and half-truths have been part of our reality since we straightened ourselves. He reminds us of the Nazi and Soviet propaganda machines that convinced whole nations to engage in murder and mayhem for a supposed ‘higher cause.”

In an extract from the book published in last weekend’s Observer he quotes Hitler’s PR guru Joseph Goebbels who summed up his methods when he said, “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”

In present day America, much of the support for the Republican Party and Trump comes from blue-collar workers and lower income groups despite the fact that the policies of Trump and the GOP are invariably designed to further advantage the advantaged. They have successfully convinced even the poorest Americans that protecting the freedom to be whatever you want to be is the only way to get out of the trailer park.

Any other way is socialist and un-American. The fiction that anyone can be the next Rockefeller is peddled so effectively it convinces people to consistently vote for policies, parties and politicians that do them damage.

Housing crisis

But we do not need to go to America. We have plenty of fake news here. We are being told day in and day out that the housing crisis will be solved even though the housing stock is contracting, rents are going through the roof and the government has no intention of buying land and building social housing.

It is abundantly clear that only an aggressive policy of land purchase and house building on the part of the government will ultimately end the shame of rampant homelessness and put housing within the reach of young people. But the right foot is firmly on the pedal and the right hand has a firm grip of the tiller in this government.

Their ingrained neo-conservative instincts of the current Government will only allow them to create the conditions for the entrepreneurial class to enrich themselves out of the public purse. In the meantime, Government ministers grunt and groan and obfuscate and hide as they wait for the market to make its decisions for it.

Returning to the issue of fake news, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that advertising is the thin end of the wedge. I know there are standards set and guidelines to be followed but we still hear advertisers tell us their dental products are ‘preferred by nine out of ten dentists’, that their pain relief products are ‘favoured by four out of five doctors’ and that their cars do best on Ireland’s roads.

Advertising takes up huge amounts of space on radio, TV, in newspapers and on our smart phones.

We are bombarded with it in thousands of ways every hour of every day and while we are aware that the claims of the advertisers aren’t entirely accurate we watch and read and listen.

We have become accustomed to an acceptable level of fake information.

It isn’t a huge leap from that to fake news and this gives rise to the question are we applying the same filter to news as we are to advertising?

Are we becoming selective about what we choose to believe and accept as fact ?

This is most urgent when it comes to issues such as climate change. The bulk of scientific evidence is pointing to the reality that the

WE ARE BEING TOLD DAY IN, DAY OUT THAT THE HOUSING CRISIS WILL BE SOLVED EVEN THOUGH HOUSING STOCK IS CONTRACTING, RENTS ARE GOING THROUGH THE ROOF AND IT’S CLEAR THE GOVERNMENT HAS NO INTENTION OF BUYING LAND TO BUILD SOCIAL HOUSING

climate of the world is changing for the worse because of the actions of human beings. This evidence and the potentially disastrous outcomes it points to makes for uncomfortable reading and demands that we change our behaviour collectively and individually.

If we apply the same filter to these facts as we apply to advertising then we may end up filtering out what we don’t want to hear, becoming ostriches with our heads in the sand as our doom enfolds us.

Nowadays much of our news is free but my friend Yuval Noah Harari warns us that if we want good reliable information we must pay good money for it.

“If you get your news for free then you might as well be the product,” he warns, “It is the responsibility of all of us to invest time and effort in uncovering our biases and in verifying our sources of information.”