Fake news is a real pawn in claims of media bias
New genre targets an unsuspecting, susceptible audience There are few higher orders of faking the truth than reality television.
Fake news is in many ways a fake news story.
It is not that there isn’t more or less deliberately deceptive news. But the “fake news” notion has become part of the epistemological phenomenon offered by liberal media to explain why Donald Trump was elected and, therefore, to discredit that election. In this, fake news becomes part of a broader conspiracy the- ory of unseen forces manipulating a gullible public.
Fake news is in itself a semantic slight of hand. A decent part of the news output by both reputable and marginal news organizations has always been phony. Gossip items, celebrity profiles, PR news releases that have not been carefully vetted, statements from politicians, reports based on court filings, almost anything from a war zone, and all Hollywood dramatizations of actual events, contain a certain quotient of the inaccurate and untruthful, if not the entirely pretend and simulated.
True, the new fake news is supposedly of a higher order of fakery than more run-of-the-mill fake news. This new fake stuff is supposed to involve the deliberate creation of false stories meant to benefit Trump and right-wing conservatives and to target an un- suspecting and susceptible uneducated audience.
In other words, the new fake news is specifically for conservatives. Indeed, in this sudden news crisis, a recent article in The
Washington Post cited studies — from liberal-leaning Buzzfeed and from “a robust body of academic research” — arguing that conservatives were more receptive to fake news than liberals. This, of course, largely confirmed the basic liberal view that the electorate is divided between smarts and stupids. And indeed, Edgar Welch, the 28-year-old man who read about fake news accounts of a Hillary Clinton-directed pedophile ring operating out of a Washington pizzeria and showed up with his semi-automatic weapon to investigate for himself, does not, for sure, seem to be the brightest bulb.
But even that particular highdrama fake-news moment is not technically about fake news — at least not of the wholly cynical variety. Pizzapedo-gate is another genre, conspiracy news. Conspiracy news is not real, but it is not fake either — or at least not intended to deceive. Rather it expresses quite a passionate if bizarre belief. But however unreal and off the wall, it is not news, or a view of the world, or even of the inner reality of the mis-wired, that has anything uniquely to do with Donald Trump. There have always been conspiracy theories and conspiracy nuts. For conservatives it might be Hillary Clin-
ton fantasies, for liberals, an Oliver Stone movie — conspiracy with higher production values, but conspiracy theory nevertheless.
(Stone’s movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination takes as truth the investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison discredited by virtually everyone as entirely fraudulent.)
Fake news has undoubtedly become a Trump-related meme in part because his own statements have so often been exaggerated, grandiose, and inaccurate.
Also, he was a reality television star. There are few higher orders of faking the truth than reality television, which purports to present something real but which is, of course, made up. Everybody knows that. Or do they?
Of course, while liberals believe conservatives are especially receptive to fake news, many conservatives and Trump supporters believe there is no bigger faker than Hillary Clinton and no bigger chumps than the liberals who are blind to what they see as her quarter-century of obvious public perfidy.
In some sense, fake news is the liberal retort to the conservative charge of media bias.
In this, each side uses media for its own political agenda, a belief that, on both sides, is widespread enough to support the notions of both rampant fakery and rampant bias.
Of course, the right does not believe in fakery, and the left does not believe in bias.
Even if you believe that the news media has always sold a large amount of baloney, the problems of deceptive and inaccurate and entirely fabricated information has become, in the current thinking, all the more serious because of social media. The news media may have made up a lot of stuff, but at least it did it within certain limits and conventions, save, perhaps, for the
National Enquirer and other marginal tabloids. Social media, on the other hand, has no standards or rules. Anybody can make this stuff up. In fact, the more outrageous it is the more page views it gets.
In that sense, this isn’t really political. It just reflects the economics of online publishing.
The truth, or at least the standard version of the news has been commoditized, so you need to make up a new version if you have any hope of getting any attention. If there’s any consolation here, in the manner that digital media tends to work, this means that soon everybody will be producing fake news to get more traffic, hence fake too will be commonplace, and get no attention, if that’s consolation.
But it should also be noted that fake news is an issue that has largely been argued by traditional media, which has seen its market and long-time gate-keeper function eroded by social media.
In this, implicitly, the antidote to fake news is traditional media.
Is there now more inaccurate information and do more people believe it? Despite some instant studies, an authoritative answer, as opposed to a fake answer, is yet unavailable.