How to fight ‘fake news’? Tell the truth

We used to laugh at fake news. When the National Enquirer told us Bigfoot had been found, we shared a chuckle and moved on. But fake news isn’t funny these days because too many people seem incapable of distinguishing it from real news.

Teenagers in Macedonia can dream up absurd things, post them to a website, and millions of people around the world will read and believe every word.

Ayoung man in the United States told the Washington Post he makes about $10,000 a month making up stuff. The money comes from companies that put their ads next to his fake stories. Even when you’re paid just a few pennies for a thousand clicks, it becomes serious money when there are millions of clicks.

Fake news caught our attention during the American election campaign. Nonsensical stories about Hillary Clinton kept popping up and a great number of people found them credible. Bad enough. But things became very unfunny this month when a fake news story inspired a man to visit a pizza parlour in the Washington, D.C., area armed with a semi-automatic rifle. He fired three shots before he was arrested. He didn’t manage to hit anyone, but he did manage to say he was “investigating” a story he read online. The story said the restaurant was the hub of a child sex slave ring run by friends of Hillary Clinton.

It’s at least as easy now to read fake news on the internet as real news. In the last few days you could read about the world’s first prison staffed entirely by robots, how the FBI killed John Lennon, and about refugees in Europe gang-raping little boys.

The fact that even one person believes any of this is sad. That fact that countless people believe it makes you wonder whatever happened to the triple-digit IQ, and how we’re ever going to find enough human ingenuity on the planet to overcome problems like climate change. It is dispiriting.

But there’s a silver lining in all this. Fake news could save real news.

Now, more than ever, we all need news sources we can trust. That has long been a selling point for what we now call mainstream media (or old media). They should be pressing that advantage now. That’s their brand — truth.

But newspaper readership is in free fall. Broadcast news organizations scratch for ratings in a crowded field. They’ve reacted to these existential threats by diluting their product. They’ve cut newsroom staff. So too often, they chase easy stories instead of important stories. They choose to feed readers and viewers what they want rather than what they need. They give reporters and editors fewer resources. Standards slip. Mistakes creep in.

Desperate to be first with some tidbit of information on Twitter, for example, even the best news organizations have made mistakes. And though they didn’t mean to mislead, it’s really just more fake news. If even the respected names in news cannot be trusted they are doomed, and as a functioning democracy, so are we.

But what if the old-timers returned to their roots and worked harder than ever to make truth their most important product? Might that be the magic ingredient for success?

A lot of fake news is ridiculous on its face. Donald Trump is not going to insist that his national security briefings be limited to 140 characters, as one site headlined recently. But some fake news is, shall we say, plausible. There’s a story online, for example, that Barack Obama will start his own media empire when he’s finished being president of the United States. The story cites “sources” for this inside information, just as so many real news stories do. So how do we know whether to believe it or dismiss it?

I’d say, consider the source. The old mainstream media can still argue that they can be trusted. This newspaper has run stories in the past that would have looked right at home on a fake news site. The mayor of Toronto smokes crack cocaine? Hilarious! But because it was on the front page of the Toronto Star, it was entirely credible (and indeed, turned out to be true).

Big news organizations like the Star, the Globe and Mail, CBC News and CTV News have spent decades building and protecting their reputations for honesty and trustworthiness. They can proudly say they stand for the truth. It’s the one thing they should never compromise, no matter how trying the economic times. Mark Bulgutch is the former senior executive producer of CBC News and now teaches journalism at Ryerson University. His latest book is That’s Why I’m a Journalist.