WITH DAN AGBESE
OMBUDSMAN
could influence the American voters that many of us regard as among the most sophisticated and the most politically aware in the world, spare a thought for what fake news could do and is probably doing to elections in third world countries. The danger is frightfully present and bone-chilling.
I draw attention to fake news for one good reason. 2017 is about to slide off our radar; 2018 looms in the near horizon. Indeed, by the time you are reading this, 2017 would have virtually run its allotted time. The significance of that is that the new year is the year the 2019 general elections actually begin. The editors and the reporters of the Daily Trust titles need to prepare for the possible avalanche of fake news in the electoral process. Information will be manufactured and given out as facts. And because of the ambition of editors and reporters to scoop other editors and reporters, they fall for the exclusive without knowing the news is fake.
Fake news comes from all sorts of places and organisations. The social media and on-line newspapers and magazines are the richest sources of fake news. They peddle fake news because it attracts healthy advertisement revenue for the publishers, hence the sensational headlines that are not often related to the stories they purport to tell. Fake news gets by through deceit because it is a sophisticated form of propaganda.
How do you identify fake news? Mainstream journalists and other information professionals are working hard to help editors and reporters identify fake news and prevent it from getting into their publications. It is no mean task given the variety of the sources of fake news. What would save a news medium from being used as a purveyor of fake news is a strict regime of fact checking by editors and reporters. The seven types of fake news identified by Claire Wardle of First Draft News are intended to help readers, not editors and reporters. When you pass off fake news as authentic news, do not ignore the fact that the eyes of big brothers and big sisters are keenly watching to see if your story falls into one or more of these identifiers offered by Wardle: 1. Satire or parody (“no intention to cause harm but has potential to fool). False connection (“when headlines, visuals or captions don’t support the content). Misleading content (“misleading use of information to frame an issue or an individual). False content (“when genuine content is shared with false contextual information”). Impostor content (“when genuine sources are impersonated” with false, made-up sources). Manipulated content (“when genuine information or imagery is manipulated to deceive,” as with a ‘doctored’ photo). Fabricated content (“new content is 100 per cent false, designed to deceive and do harm”). 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.