Is this a turning point in the ‘fake news’ era?
How the latest age of misinformation and bitter partisanship have influenced the coronavirus pandemic
Welcome to Alice in Wonderland, where up is down and night is day, where contradictions ooze from the same mouth, just a few weeks later. That’s been our media world in recent decades, and especially the last few years, but something has quietly changed in 2020.
Like the simultaneous occurrence of two natural disasters, fake news and the coronavirus were bound to collide at some point, but their clash hasn’t been a battle of equals. Despite the distortions and cover-ups about the virus, Mother Nature has prevailed, often brutally.
Are we reaching a turning point in the history of fake news? Probably not, but maybe we’re in for a short respite.
Disinformation, the deliberate distortion of facts, has always existed, but in this age of social media, instant publicity, and partisan fakery, it spreads exponentially.
Amplification and virality have transformed our mass media into institutions very different from just a generation ago. It’s not that the media gatekeepers are gone; it’s that their power has decentralized as their numbers have soared. What remains, however, isn’t anarchy so much as masquerade. What you see is not necessarily what you get.
Into the world came COVID-19
Although some of the usual purveyors of falsehood have seized on the phenomenon to peddle conspiracies, the pandemic has also confronted them
with a lethal, all-encompassing force that ruthlessly challenges the lies. In short, it’s hard to remain a virus-denier for long, as even the president has discovered.
The “Patient Zero” in political prevarication—president Donald Trump—went from scoffing at the virus to downplaying it to shrugging at it to warning about it to contracting it to possibly losing reelection because of it.
He’s held more positions on it than just about anybody and struck more poses than a teen on prom night.
But whereas the president never stopped flailing at the Mueller report as a “witch hunt,” he has apparently come around to accepting the authenticity of this crisis.
That hasn’t, of course, meant that he has led effectively, or at all. Nor does it mean he’s still not downplaying it or undermining an effective response to it. It does suggest that what the so-called “adults in the room”—people like former advisers John Kelley, Rex Tillerson, and Jim Mattis—couldn’t accomplish, the coronavirus has.
It’s somewhat dampened Trump’s compulsion for incessant salesmanship and thwarted his attempt to promote an alternative reality. Although we saw him staging photo ops after his departure from Walter Reed Hospital, we also watched him gasping for air at the top of the White House steps and hear from his doctors that he was taking Remdesivir, Regeneron, and Dexamethasone, a powerful rebuttal to anyone that the virus isn’t real or dangerous, even for this most protected of American citizens.
The president still strives daily to push a competing national narrative. But the contagion isn’t bending to his will; he’s been forced to bow to its.
In fact, it’s one of the reasons that a majority of Americans, an unprecedented 75 million voters, decided to fire him last week.
You saw that defeatism in his press briefings throughout the year, where he was cowed by the moment and intimidated by the science of it all, and then last month when he was finally medevaced to a hospital because of it.
Trump’s media allies also have squirmed
A study of Fox News broadcasts this spring shows their hosts lurching from one contradictory viewpoint to another. First they accused Democrats of “coronavirus hysteria” on Feb. 28.
A month later, on March 31, they were blaming the impeachment process for distracting the president, nearly conceding the contention of critics that he faltered when more action might have made a difference. They pushed back about whether Trump ever called the pandemic a “hoax,” then acknowledged it by grumbling over whether he should have used that word and “coronavirus” in the same sentence at a rally in South Carolina.
In the process, then, right-wing pundits and their viewers have had to reconsider their troubled relationship with journalism, science and the federal government. Fringe conspiracists have at times been forced to take a back seat to actual health officials.
The fact that for a time the president was forced to share a stage or air time with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah
Birx shows that the power dynamic in Washington shifted.
While the market struggles to recover, the federal government looms as the only force capable of mounting a recovery. America’s agenda has been commandeered. For most of this year, we weren’t paying attention to sports, entertainment, or even the stock market. We’ve been too focused on immunology.
That’s because in times of great duress, citizens crave information more than ideology. That’s been true during war, and it appears to be the case now. When it comes to life and death, the facts of survival eventually outpace the spin of politics.
As former President Barack Obama put it in a video he released in April, “pandemics have a way of cutting through a lot of noise and spin to remind us of what is real and what is important.”
As for the lies and deception, they haven’t gone away. But their influence for the moment seems muffled and meek.
That’s not likely to last. It is a reason to feel relief—and maybe a little hope.
Joe Hayden, a professor of journalism at the University of Memphis, is writing a history of fake news in America.