Of klongs, dongs and fake news
The draconian Anti-Fake News Act has been abolished. Instead of blaming the media, as US President Donald Trump has, what can be done to tackle lies masquerading as news?
I HAD a “klong” moment last week. Nope, I wasn’t in Thailand and I didn’t fall into one of their canals,
klong
which is what means in Thai. It is a word that American reporters are apparently familiar with, as I discovered when I read a comment by Brian Dickerson of the Detroit
Sunday Star.
Free Press in the
According to him, a klong is a colloquial word meaning “A cold rush of excrement to the heart” that strikes journalists, usually late at night.
That is when a journalist suddenly remembers something that he or she may have “inadvertently been careless, inaccurate, or just plain stupid in print”. And it really feels bad because it often comes after the newspaper has gone to print.
I have had numerous klongs in my long years as a reporter and
The Star.
editor of Most times, it was a false alarm but there were real ones. That would lead to the question: Do we correct that mistake? If it was minor like a forgivable grammatical error, we would let it go.
But if it was major – like a horribly embarrassing typo or a huge factual mistake that would throw us into boiling hot water with the authorities or a likely lawsuit – we had to stop the press, make the correction and dump possibly thousands of copies of the paper already printed.
But apart from klongs, newspapers can also get “donged”. I am helping myself to this colloquial word, apparently used in Australia and New Zealand, which means hit or punch.
It’s a dong when a newspaper is clobbered by a mistake, like the 2012 Erykah Badu incident, that is only discovered the next day and what follows is, as Dickerson eloquently puts it, “The hour of the three Cs – confession, correction and contrition.”
In the old days, like before 2016, such mistakes – klongs and dongs – were just that. But now, mistakes and differing opinions are scorned as sinister “fake news”, a term much favoured by US President Donald Trump.
Lee McIntyre, a research fellow at the Centre for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston
Post-Truth, University, and author of explains in a CBC interview that fake news is something that is deliberately false created by someone with an agenda to convince others it is true.
Trump used it against Hillary Clinton during his election campaign and now against the US media whom he has vilified as “the enemy of the American people”.
Dickerson agrees there are some journalists who lie but points out that so do some clergymen, accountants and doctors.
However, when Trump maligns journalists as habitual, unscrupulous liars, he discredits them and undermines public confidence in whatever reported that is not his version, and shows the “ugly, deceitful face of authoritarianism”.
This is not to say journalists do not make mistakes. We do but it is never deliberate.
What most people don’t know is that the newspaper is the fastest FMCG ever. Those initials stand for “fast-moving consumer goods”. These are products that are sold quickly at relatively low cost, like beverages, fruit and vegetables and toilet paper.
Yes, yes, there are plenty of people who like to equate newspapers
The Star like with toilet paper. But unlike toilet rolls, which look and are packaged exactly the same as they come off the assembly line, the newspaper is never the same product.
It changes every day and everything in it, except for the advertisements (which may be repeated) – the news, the crossword and other puzzles, the comic strips, the obituaries, the horoscope – is different.
What’s more, journalists and their colleagues only have something like 18 hours every day to produce and distribute it.
Sure, the cynics can say, just die, you dinosaurs, since we can get news 24/7 on social media and the Internet. But who do you think does the hard work of gathering the information, doing investigative reporting and analyses, whose work is often copied, rewritten and pasted by news aggregators and bloggers?
How often do you get information and news on your WhatsApp but have no idea where it came from because the source is not credited?
Chances are, the source is a media organisation that is now struggling to stay alive.
News on digital platforms now has a longer shelf life. The good thing about going digital is that mistakes can be corrected immediately.
The bad thing is the speed of delivering news has increased like a thousand-fold, which means less time to fact-check and a higher frequency of mistakes.
Journalists are not deliberate fakers and the enemy of the state. If they are to be reviled for every honest mistake, then do we accuse Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng of dishing out fake news when he first said shortfall in the GST credit refund was RM17.911bil, only to admit he was wrong and corrected the figure to RM19.248bil?
Rather it is those who deliberately plant false news and disinformation that are the true menaces and threats.
McIntyre says fake news and its predecessor, post-truth – defined as “a state in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief ”– were first used in the 1950s by tobacco companies to convince the public there was no link between smoking and cancer.
The method? Hire so-called experts to give views that sowed doubt and confusion among the public.
In combating fake news, Dickerson urges the public to adopt a journalist’s “healthy scepticism” like asking questions, checking multiple sources and demanding evidence.
McIntyre says to overcome the lies, the truth must be repeated over and over for it to eventually sink in.
More important, he says, are educators like Scott Bedley, who teaches his fifth grade students in California how to spot fake news with a similar seven-point checklist.
Bedley is not alone. Schools around the world are introducing digital media literacy skills and critical thinking, which McIntyre believes is the key to combating fake news.
Thankfully, the Pakatan Harapan government has kept its promise to abolish the Anti-Fake News Act.
Its Education Ministry must now introduce such digital media literacy as a subject to fight fake news by creating savvy digital netizens.
The Communications and Multimedia Ministry should also embark on a campaign to teach the public at large.
After all, we all have grown-ups in our messaging groups who mindlessly share everything they get without checking and we are too polite to drop or unfriend them.
That klong moment I mentioned? It was a rather dreadful spelling
Pakatan’s first 100
mistake in the
days
pullout that I had asked to be corrected but couldn’t remember if it was done. Luckily it was.