The Introduction of this compendium used the confabulated premise of an interview with renowned public radio host Terry Gross to outline the contents herein. Despite dropping an F-bomb on public radio, the author has miraculously been invited back to Fresh Air, this time to discuss how a specific term has changed meaning over time.
Welcome back to the studio. Please don’t use profanity on-air again.
You crazy for this one, Terry!
I was hoping we could discuss “fake news.” What does that term mean today?
Honestly, I have no fuuu . . . sorry, I have no idea. Within the field of information theory, it has become a critical term, but over the course of writing this book, its popular usage has zigzagged wildly.
At the onset, “fake news” was a term of art, reserved for news parody like The Onion or Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update. But when talk show hosts like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert started to stretch the bounds of the genre, the pretend-news-complex morphed into the quasi-legitimate-news-complex. Stewart was voted the most trusted newscaster in a 2009 poll, and by 2017, New York magazine conferred their imprimatur on late-night host Jimmy Kimmel by dubbing him “our Cronkite” on its cover.
Isn’t that the “Girls Jumping on Trampolines” guy? Indeed! And that’s the way it is.
So what happened to “fake news”?
It became an emblem for something completely different.
Around the 2016 election, the media started stamping the “fake news” label on those fabricated news reports that spread virally online. To cite just one such account, millions of people shared a story claiming Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump. (Four Pinocchios!) There have been thousands of such junky stories, which SNOPES and PolitiFact have been desperately trying to tamp down, but it has been a war of attrition. Thanks to lame hoaxers, Google-rigging scoundrels, and Russian propagandists, the internet has become a fount of rotten information.
But those gunky stories are not the most common usage of “fake news” either.
True. The label “fake news” lost all meaning when Trump reappropriated it to denigrate the media and avert attention from negative reporting on his administration. He even tried to claim that he invented the term, which is just about the silliest fake news ever.
Today, “fake news” is more weapon than descriptor. Any bit of legitimate reporting can be cast as fake by anyone who disagrees with it. Whatever your politics, someone is surely deploying the term with different intent than you.
In that sense, “fake news” might be the quintessential American innovation, a perfectly circular coinage that negates itself. It is nearly meaningless, a NONCE WORD. People invent its meaning with each elocution. No one uses it the same way, but everyone wields it as a weapon against ideological foes.
In 2017, Collins Dictionary chose “fake news” as its word of the year. Good luck to them on defining it!
Why more weapon than descriptor?
Just one example: When confronted with evidence of deploying chemical weapons on his own people, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad responded, “You can forge anything these days . . . We are living in a fake news era.” The despot knows he can designate any inconvenient information as fake. The shape of the planet (FLAT EARTH HYPOTHESIS), space travel (MOON LANDING HOAX), or all of human history (PHANTOM TIME HYPOTHESIS)—they’re all potentially counterfeit.
But those are the whackjobs, the paranoid class.
We have a tendency to shake our finger at such conspiratorial hokum, but that’s a fragile reprieve. We are all to blame for this predicament. Mainstream culture (KARAOKE to HATSUNE MIKU) and new technologies (PHOTOSHOPPING to HUMAN CLONING) have perpetuated a society in which every image and sound seems potentially manipulated. We have built a theme park of post-truth, where because anything can be forged, nothing seems real. We celebrate crafty artifice, and demand engineered “experiences” every time we leave the house. Reality is pliable.
Like fabricating an NPR interview?
Precisely! It is no wonder that SIMULISM has become such a dominant pop theory. We might not be living in a computer program, but it certainly seems like we could be.
Why are we seduced by these false realities?
Heck if I know.
There is a scene in The Truman Show where an interviewer asks the producer of the show, “Why do you think Truman has never come close to discovering the true nature of his world?” The producer responds: “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.”
It’s as simple as that, which is not so simple at all.
It sounds like TRUMAN SYNDROME at a mass scale. Are we really suffering a crisis of facts?
The most important questions have shifted from if to how much. It’s a matter of magnitude.
No one wants to be a Pollyanna, looking away while totalitarians accrue power, nor does anyone wish themselves Cassandra mewling the end of days (even if, as we often forget about the myth, she was right about her predictions). It’s the most difficult question of our time: How serious is this?
It sounds like you’re hedging.
It is a consequence of a life dedicated to researching the history of deception. The past looks equally shady!
Here I take a cue from P. T. Barnum. In his book on HUMBUGGERY, he observed, “The greatest humbug of all is the man who believes—or pretends to believe—that everything is and everybody are humbugs.” In other words, we should be wary of those positivists who scream sheeple! and stake their own claims on true reality. Amongst the intelligentsia, this idea floats around: If we could just agree upon the same facts, society would resolve its problems.
That seems great!
But is also likely an illusion.
Why an illusion?
First of all, facts do not constitute reality. What we each experience as reality is formed through the goopy filters of the mind, which rearrange and prioritize those facts through various prisms, including societal values and personal experience. As UMWELT suggests, reality is as much in here as out there.
But that dodges the question: How serious is fake news?
Depends what you mean by “fake news.”
Don’t be coy. I mean the hornswoggle on the internet that is patently false.
Let’s cite some, as they say, facts.
During the 2016 election, the twenty most-read fake stories (those fabricated by fictitious news factories) were viewed more times than the twenty most-read legitimate stories (those reported by credible outlets). Facebook has estimated that Russian propaganda content reached 126 million Americans, and Twitter revealed that bots generated one out of every five political messages. Fake news stories incited a man to shoot up a D.C. pizza parlor that Reddit told him operated a Hillary Clinton–run pedophilia ring. Meanwhile, fact-checking agencies rate the president, who clearly benefits from the empirical meltdown, as uttering untrue statements 70 percent of the time.
So yeah, you could say it is serious.
Can it be fixed?
Facebook has tried taking some steps toward stemming the flow of misinformation on their platform. They started by launching an initiative to identify certain bogus stories as “disputed.” But the problem turned out to be more complicated than just slapping labels on a few links.
Research has shown that news being repeated over and over creates a sense of information fluency (MERE-EXPOSURE EFFECT), so even those stories marked “disputed” can be perceived as accurate because we have seen them before (BELLMAN’S FALLACY). Other studies suggest that labeling content as “disputed” inadvertently causes some people to believe all non-labeled stories are true. And classifying every fleck of dreck around the internet would rival Hercules sanitizing the stables.
Facebook abandoned the program, and replaced it with an initiative that instead displays related articles next to fake news stories. The saga makes the battle against misinformation seem like one of those interminable wars we fight despite knowing it is futile. Misinformation is our Vietnam.
Will it get worse?
I’ll answer by anecdote. Did you know that Borges wrote an encyclopedia? It’s true! In 1957, he published The Book of Imaginary Beings, which contains a safari of mythical CRYPTIDS from literature and folklore.
In the entry on the Chimera, he briefly discusses the history of the fantastical creature, starting with HOMER, who described it in the Iliad as broken into thirds: lion, goat, and serpent, in order from head to tail. The poet Hesiod went a step further, moving those three creatures to the front, creating a multi-headed monster. And then Virgil, in the Aeneid, added fire-breathing to the beastly arsenal. “These absurd hypotheses,” Borges finally concludes, “are proof that the Chimera was beginning to bore people. Easier than imagining it was to translate it into something else.”
Other than showing off your Borges deep cuts, what is the point?
I think we are in the late Chimera phase. People have become bored with the latest version of reality, so they are willfully translating it into something worse. You can see this drive toward self-deception foretold in The X-Files’s “I Want to Believe” and in THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, but it has spread across all of society: entertainment, media, politics, sexuality, technology.
We have become inured to the belief that all realities are equal, all ideas equal. Everyone is allowed to have “their own opinion,” by which they mean their own reality. The satiric concept of TRUTHINESS has transubstantiated into the real practice of ALTERNATIVE FACTS. Because the FILTER BUBBLE lets us inhabit any desired information ecosystem, this fever dream called reality has become less knowable than at any point in human history. We have returned to the state of blinkered troglodytes, chained to PLATO’S CAVE.
I suppose I am saying, Yes, it will probably get worse.
That’s fucked.
You said it, Terry.