Half-truths, untruths and screaming headlines
This past week, when my wife, Ella, was sick with bronchitis and depressed about the victory of president-elect Donald Trump, she escaped into the soothing, low-stakes world of Downton Abbey, a popular period drama about a noble British family that resides in an enormous countryside estate at the dawn of the 20th century. Downton Abbey is a place where picking up the wrong fork at dinner is a sin on par with manslaughter, as is walking into the servants’ quarters unannounced and wearing to supper what you wore to lunch.
Needless to say, all of this made Ella very happy.
She laughed hard, for instance, when Mr. Carson, Downton’s officious butler with a heart of burnished gold, struggled to use the telephone for the first time.
And she laughed again — even harder — when Lord Grantham, the estate’s patriarch, balked at his young niece Lady Rose’s suggestion that Downton Abbey get (gasp!) a radio. But I didn’t laugh. In fact, I couldn’t laugh, not just because I had already bingewatched Downton Abbey ages ago, but because the apparently absurd, change-wary world no longer struck me as quaint and escapist, but as uncomfortably familiar.
The stretch isn’t as hard as you might think. Like the characters on Downton Abbey (both upstairs and down), we too live at the relative dawn of a new century, in a state of social, technological and political flux. And like the “poor devils” on Downton (to borrow a phrase from Lord Grantham), we also appear to be navigating this new world like (to borrow a phrase from Mrs. Patmore, Downton’s exasperated cook) “a bunch of chickens with our heads cut off.”
For proof of our own extreme cognitive dissonance, a hundred years post- Downton, look no further than the deluge of doomsday predictions and anxious monologues that continue to dominate our social media newsfeeds day in and day out, partly the result of Trump’s improbable victory and the piqued conservative reaction to liberal anguish about that victory. But even more the result of the very revolutionary online media we’ve had to navigate, an innovation as problematic as, yes, the radio once was.
In fact, the online universe is also instrumental in another development that might be even more troubling: This is the growing charge that phoney and fabricated news stories, consumed and shared en masse on Facebook, have begun to take a far greater role in deciding our elections and shaping our democracies than the legacy media institutions that ruled the 20th century.
In other words, Goodbye New York Times, Hello the Daily Currant, Breitbart and Clickhole. Today, nearly half of American adults get their news from Facebook, and a lot of that news, unknown to the people sharing it, originates from media sources that are not merely biased, but often satirical, hyperpartisan and deliberately misleading.
If you don’t think this is a problem, you either aren’t on Facebook or you’re a spokesperson for the social network itself.
Facebook, predictably, tried its very best this week to deny that it had an outsized influence on the U.S. election. According to a spokesperson from the social network, in a written statement to the Star, “While Facebook played a part in this election, it was just one of many ways people received their information — and was one of the many ways people connected with their leaders, engaged in the political process and shared their views.”
In Facebook’s defence, there are people around who still read print newspapers and listen to the radio, but this group (much like the lords and ladies of Downton Abbey in 1916) is a quickly dying breed. According to the American Press Institute, “Fully 88 per cent of millen- nials get news from Facebook regularly, for instance, and more than half of them do so daily.”
Given those statistics, here’s hoping that they (i.e. we) take to heart the advice of Melissa Zimdars, a Massachusetts college professor, who recently compiled a list of phoney and misleading news sites that peddle half-truths, untruths and screaming headlines written specifically to get our goat.
If an online news story “makes you REALLY ANGRY,” Zimdars writes in a Google Document she’s made available to the general public, “it’s probably a good idea to keep reading about the topic via other sources to make sure the story you read wasn’t purposefully trying to make you angry (with potentially misleading or false information) in order to generate shares and ad revenue.”
Amen. We have a duty to ourselves, to our democracies and to future generations to brush up on our media literacy skills. And we have a duty not to scoff at new media, as Lord Grantham and Mr. Carson scoff at the radio, or to kowtow to it (as they eventually do), but to use it subversively, with a healthy dose of skepticism, and to use it to share information responsibly.
This is nothing more than paying it forward. Before we know it, our great grandchildren will be escaping the madness of their own day (ahem, climate change) to indulge in TV dramas about the early 21st century, a time and place when their ancestors attempted something called “the mannequin challenge” and swallowed wholesale phoney news stories about the end of the world. Let’s try not to give them too much material to roll their eyes at. Emma Teitel is a national affairs columnist.