“The dog ate my homework,” the classic all-purpose excuse has morphed into “the Russians stole my election” for Clinton supporters, including President Obama.
None of those “victimized” are claiming the leaked DNC (non-government, non-election system) emails were fake, at least not yet, but somehow all this has now reappeared as an issue over fake news. Well, if there were ever a fake story that would be it because fake news – any widely-spread falsehood — has always been with us; that’s hardly news.
Long before technology ruled the roost, every major news outlet in every medium has been involved in manufacturing, promoting and disseminating fake news. The only change is that technology now allows more people to do it and do it more often as the news cycles became instantaneous everywhere.
Falsehoods always had a head start even in whispers. According to Quote Investigator, the major literary figure Jonathan Swift wrote on this topic in 1710 when he penned, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it…” That reference to flying falsehoods was made 106 years before the first working telegraph and 185 years before Marconi transmitted wireless radio signals in 1895.
Media has always been fast to the presses and s-l-o-w to retract even when caught red-handed (or blue-handed depending on your political preferences) especially once their lawyers take over management of their exposed fake news stories.
People lie and that is a self-evident fact that dates back to at least the beginning of recorded history and probably to the beginnings of human communication; philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “the lie is a condition of life.” Therefore, as long as people are involved in any aspect of news, lies will be too. The lies will range from major, totally fabricated whoppers of calculated commission to smaller lies of omission, to even smaller, but impactful, slants or biases. The old adage of safeguard was – consider the source; however, now with so many “shared sources” (legal and otherwise), it’s harder than ever to find the actual source.
One has to realize that much of the problem lies within ourselves, the news generators and consumers. Most humans believe whatever they need to believe to confirm their choices — that’s why fake stories have traction; no one is immune from this effect called confirmation bias. On the supply side that malady impacts everyone from lowly opinion writers like me to the editors of the New York Times or producers of Fox News.
A good start would be to apply the famous warning, “Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.” That advice is credited to Edgar Allan Poe by almost all of the Internet except for Quotes.net that credits English novelist and poet Dinah Maria Craik.
“The truth can be a slippery thing.” — Martin G. Richman