‘After Truth’: the cost of fake news
Back in the day, most schoolchildren learned about George Washington, who could not tell a lie. It turns out, the cherry tree tale was a bit of a fable. Even that lesson in honesty was a little embroidered.
“After Truth” (10 p.m. Saturday, CNN) offers the latest examination of disinformation and its impact on politics and civil discourse in the era of around-the-clock news and social media.
It revisits recent cases like “Pizzagate,” where a conspiracy-obsessed gunman shot up a shop that he was convinced was the center of a child-trafficking ring.
“Truth” also returns to Texas in 2015, when a sizable number of people were convinced that a scheduled Army maneuver, dubbed “Jade Helm 15,” was a nefarious plot by the federal government to seize political prisoners and house them in a network of Walmarts connected by a network of secret tunnels.
Like a recent “Frontline” piece on the rise of Alex Jones’ cynical use of “Infowars” to lie about the Sandy Hook school shooting, “Truth” interviews a number of reporters and academics who have long covered the disinformation beat.
But in treating “fake news” primarily as a “news” story, “Truth” implies that this phenomenon is, well, new. Is that true?
Well before the rise of Amazon, or even chains like Waldenbooks, one of the biggest networks of bookstores in the country was affiliated with The John Birch Society, a spreader of wild conspiracy theories. Decades back, angry charlatans of the Alex Jones variety were all over shortwave radio, sharing tall tales of black helicopters and secret plots by the U.N. to seize control.
And what of a culture that seems more receptive to wild disinformation? During its report on Jade Helm, the “Truth” team interviews the owner of a gun store whose business serves as a kind of “general store” clearinghouse for local gossip and scuttlebutt. But wouldn’t chatter shared next to sniper sights come preloaded with a certain whiff of paranoia, the very fear needed to convince buyers they need another gun?
When pressed about their spread of misinformation that has resulted in violence and even death, characters like Alex Jones and Sean Hannity have retreated to the defense that they are merely “entertainers.”
The breakdown in distinction between verifiable fact and mere whimsy is hardly limited to “news.” How many times has the History channel broadcast series about “Ancient Aliens,” and what would the Travel Channel be without ghosts and Bigfoot sightings?
Centuries before Facebook, the feuds between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams inspired a boom in partisan newspapers. We might learn about that on the History channel if it wasn’t so dedicated to nonsense and the occult.
› Showtime launches the four-part series “Love Fraud” (9 p.m. Sunday, TV-MA) that combines tales of humiliation, desperate lonely hearts and revenge.
We hear from a number of women, all middle-aged and all wooed and seduced by the same too-good-to-be-true suitor who suddenly turns “strange” the moment they set a date, move in together and start to share bank accounts.
Things get interesting when the victims take justice into their own hands and hire a hardboiled female bounty hunter whose own history of spousal abuse informs her zeal for settling scores with no-good men.