Fake News and the Power of Truth

There’s a new term in town. Right before the election, on November 6, the New York Times reported, “Media’s Next Challenge: Overcoming Fake News.” As if on cue, the Washington Post declared: “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say” (Nov. 24). The narrative was even uncritically repeated last Tuesday night (Dec. 6) by some professors at UW-Casper. 

Though “fake news” may be new to us, it has actually been around for about a decade. UrbanDictionary.com defined way back in January of 2007 as: “Parody of network television newscasts that exploits the absurd in current events for humorous intent rather than being concerned with providing complete and well-balanced information.” “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart, “The Colbert Report,” and “Real Time with Bill Maher” are given as examples.

That’s quite different from today’s meaning. Instead of pointing to political comedy, Mainstream media is now using it to refer to a couple of hundred web sites that use splashy headlines and vague sources to make click-bait for advertising profit, many of which are geared toward the politically-minded of all stripes. Fair enough.

But by making a second, more nefarious claim — that the Russian government is controlling some of these sites in order to sway the elections — they have veered into the same baseless sensationalism that “fake news” is all about. 

CNN admitted as much on Dec. 2, saying that this charge remains, “unsupported by even a shred of evidence.” And on Dec. 7, the Washington Post was forced to add an editor’s note to the above mentioned article admitting that it “could not vouch for the validity” of any of the hundreds of web sites alleged to be fake news, much less in control of the Russian government. 

In fact, this is how fake news has always worked. Mention something that is obvious to everyone, then attach to it — without evidence — the new thing you want them to believe. For example: “We have found actual dinosaur skeletons (true) which have been Carbon 14 dated as 50 million years old (demonstrably false).”

Judging from the sources pushing the Russian story, and their demonstrable political bias, it is at least equally plausible that the Russian narrative is just one more “fake news” story designed to sway the election the other way.

Be that as it may, Laura Hancock, political reporter for the Casper Star Tribune, begins her article about the professors at UW-Casper on Dec. 6, “Fake news, which is believed to have influenced the election, isn’t going away.” It is amazing how many questions can be begged in a single sentence. 

A careful reader might want to ask some of those questions. For instance, who is it, exactly, that believes fake news influenced the election? Does this person have any factual grounds for their belief, or is it blind faith? Grounds, or no grounds, is the charge actually true? And if it is, did the “fake news” influence the election in Clinton’s favor or Trump’s? 

If you asked these questions to a cross-section of Wyoming voters, you would likely get wildly different answers. In fact, on Dec. 6 the New York Times ran the headline, “In News, What’s Fake and What’s Real Can Depend on What You Want to Believe.” Knowing the New York Times, I suspect that the reporter probably had religious believers in mind, but never even recognized her own unwavering faith.

You see, the problem with “fake news,” whether it is generated from the right or from the left — whether it is intentional propaganda or blind faith guided by wishful thinking — is that without the tools to sort truth from falsehood, people have no other recourse than to retreat into their own echo chambers, AKA “safe zones,” and hear only what they already believe.

Not only is the truth lost by this terrible idea, so is community. A culture that cannot reason together in a free marketplace of ideas is a culture that is easily divided and used by identity politicians and the special interests that enable them. This is tragic and destructive. 

Sadly, we are already quite far down this path. The divisions and hostility, which seem to be growing among us every day, are not the result of racism or sexism, nationalism or any other “ism.” They are the result of our inability to communicate across the aisle. They arise from a despair that truth is either knowable or known.

Giving up on the idea of truth, we resort to power — governmental power, corporate power and media power.  Power is used to redefine terms. Power is used to declare winners and losers before the debate is begun. Power is used to punish those who do not agree with us. Power is used to shut down opposing points of view that we know “cannot be true” but we lack the ability to disprove them.

Like “fake news” itself, the temptation to settle matters of truth by power is nothing new. We have been doing it since we first threw temper-tantrum when mom told us we couldn’t have a piece of candy. But just as temper tantrums cannot alter the truth, shutting down the opposing view cannot help us form a closer community. Nor can it help us come any closer to understanding the truth or each other.

We have a lot of work to do. Identity politics and the politicians that use them have been slicing and dicing us into angry mobs for far too long. Instead of uniting in a shared truth, we have fragmented into one group that believes this truth, and another that believes that truth, and on and on and on.

To the extent that education has stopped teaching our children how to think, teaching them instead what to think, we have done ourselves no favors. The politicization of every science from astronomy to zoology, from sociology to biology, only continues the trend. Instead of seeking the truth itself, we see whatever “truth” advances our cause.

The first step on the road to recovery is the mere admission of this fact. Those who believe that truth actually exists can be serenely confident that they are not the only ones capable of finding it. Whether by an excellent teacher, or by the school of hard knocks, we all come to know the truth in one way or another. And sources that hide the truth in order to maintain their own agenda will make themselves irrelevant as their cover-ups become increasingly ridiculous and transparent. 

The second step to recovery is to rediscover the liberal arts — the arts which free us from the chains of deception and equip us to live as the human beings that we are. It would be fine start for all of us to relearn the basics of logic. Learn to identify a logical fallacy when you hear one; learn how to ask critical questions; learn the importance of checking sources and cross-examining witnesses.

The last thing we need is for some “high priests of news” to tell us which news is news and which news is not. That’s the arrogance that got us into this mess. So let the “fake news” have its day. It will fade away like every other fad. The truth itself is all that is needed for a healthy community. Truth produces its own light. Instead of driving people into cages, like a shining light, it draws people to its source.