What does Fake News mean?
Is it a specific activity whereby ad revenue is generated on outrageous headlines on websites designed to look like a media outlet? Or is it simpler: publishing news that is fake? Or is it, as it seems to have become in some quarters, a handy accusation to mete against news that sits uncomfortably with your confirmation bias?
“Secretary Brunnell Declares Fake News About His People is Being Telegraphed Over the Country,” ran a Cincinnati Commercial Tribune headline…on the seventh of June, 1890.
Many of those who have watched the proliferation of the term since 2016 may be surprised to find the phrase used in its entirety 125 years ago.
It seems like such a modern concept, or at least, it did when Buzzfeed ran “How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News,” in November 2016. The story was the source of what many people considered the definition of Fake News in the brief window before the emergent Trump administration began to adapt the phrase, arguably reverting its meaning to its original usage.
Macedonian youths were cleaning up by producing counterfeit online news platforms laden with Pro-Trump headlines and exploiting gullible social media users to do so, according to Buzzfeed’s report. Silverman and Alexander’s investigation into tech-savvy Macedonian teens, and the wave of consternation which followed regarding the role and extent of social media giants like Facebook’s responsibility for the spread of pre-election misinformation, as well as Google’s role in making such sites lucrative, gave Fake News a narrow definition: hastily cobbled together websites designed to mimic the style of news outlets, which generate clicks by posting “news” designed for readers to click on, but which exhibit little or no attachment to the truth.
As this graph of usage of the phrase by MIT analytic tool Media Cloud demonstrates, in October 2016, there were very few sentences being produced including the term Fake News, and even on the day Buzzfeed first published their story, just 462 sentences were being written including the term. These numbers grew in the following weeks, but it wasn’t until the media’s darling Donald Trump used his first press conference following the election to label CNN as Fake News on the 11th of January that we really see a spike, with 22,500 sentences being published with the term on that day.
Trump shifted the goalposts by starting to refer to legacy news outlets whose practices he called into question as Fake News. CNN had reported on the unverified story of an alleged Russian dossier on Trump, a story first, controversially, published by Buzzfeed.
As Nieman Lab curator Ann Marie Lipinski noted at Harvard’s “Journalism in a Post-truth Era” symposium in late January 2017, “We thought we knew what ‘Fake News’ meant, but now it’s been co-opted to also include error as well as manufactured falsehoods.”
(It’s worth noting at this point that the 2016 conversation on Fake News was largely centred around US media, and therefore most if not all of the resources I’ve linked to so far are US-based. Repercussions in European media practice, tech giant responses in other global elections, and the limited examples of Irish cases in point will be referred to in later chapters.)
“It’s a vague and ambiguous term that spans everything from false balance (actual news that doesn’t deserve our attention), propaganda (weaponized speech designed to support one party over another) and disinformatzya (information designed to sow doubt and increase mistrust in institutions),” director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT Ethan Zuckerman wrote.
Zuckerman identified the pitfalls of bandying about a term with no commonly understood meaning, but failed to identify the perils present in allowing a narrow definition of the term.
In breaking the Fake News story, Buzzfeed ring-fenced the Fake News problem as:
-off-shore (non-American)
-politically partisan (Republican)
-a Web2.0 problem: clever teens can quickly mimic the style of “legacy” news platforms with simple tools. (non-professional)
-platform-based (specific websites) rather than practice-based (specific journalistic requirements)
But allowing Buzzfeed and “big” media to frame Fake News as platform-based rather than practice-based is problematic.
It ignores many of the very large problems arising amongst a younger generation of media practioners: inability to identify plagiarism, no verification, lack of named sources, content harvested from social media, etc. If the working practice is no different – ie, conducting quick sweeps of the web for replicable, clickable content rather than genuinely gathering and generating news stories, what differentiates a digital intern on a legacy title from a Macedonian teen in their bedroom? Can both, or neither, call themselves a journalist?
Not to mention the instances where large and supposedly trustworthy outlets have proven themselves to be, either through error or intent, spreading fake information themselves:
(A note on source here: I linked to the only available footage of the moment BBC1 broadcast footage of people waving Indian flags as live celebrations in Tripoli following the fall of Gaddafi in 2011. The only places this footage remains is in “alternative” media, and no apology or explanation is archived on the BBC website. It’s hard to imagine how it would be technically possible to broadcast live from India instead of Libya, and this incident and the BBC’s lukewarm response to it played into the hands of those inclined not to trust legacy media. The web gives great scope for transparency and accountability, discussed further in Chapter 3, not used in this instance.)
It also ignores the unofficial role large media businesses have now adopted in policing and verification. Organisations like ABC and AP have entered partnership with Facebook to provide fact-checking services, with the potential for creating a monopoly on truth. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, as the saying goes, and we only need to revisit the UK’s phone-hacking scandal and subsequent Leveson Inquiry for a reminder of how low large, unmonitored, profit-driven newsrooms with no ethical framework and no culture to support working practices will go.
In allowing large media conglomerates to narrowly define Fake News to exclude their own practices, we are ignoring the role of “traditional” media in eroding trust in media institutions by dispensing with some of the cornerstones of solid journalistic practice in the online first onslaught, the rush to produce click-bait and compete with New Media products.
“Newspaper had been running the equivalent of a very nice high-end steakhouse,” Iris Chyi Hsiang, author of a study on print’s rush online said in an interview with Politico media reporter Jack Schafer. “Then, McDonald’s moved to town and started selling untold numbers of cheap hamburgers. Newspaper thought, “Let’s compete with that,” and dropped the steak for hamburger, even though it had no real expertise in producing hamburgers. What they should have done is improve the steak product.” In other words, by upping the ante on the quality, scope and reliability of journalism, to contrast rather than compete with the click-bait interlopers of New Media.
And the New Media giants themselves occupy a curious hinterland, where no-one is sure if they are media or not; for the purposes of accountability and work practice they often are not, whilst in crying “press freedom” as a defense, they are. Further discussion on this in Chapter 3.
The resulting glut of fast-food information is causing a serious case of indigestion in media consumers, with dire effects on trust; according to the latest Gallup Poll, over half of Americans now say that news networks are “often inaccurate.” In 1987, 37% believed this to be the case, but this rose to 55% this year. The figures were almost exactly reversed when Americans were asked if the media “gets facts straight”: 55% agreed with the statement in 1987, while 36% agreed in 2017.
Possibly even more crucially, 62% believe US Media are partisan, up from 47.5% in 1995. Most believe the bias to favour Democrats over Republicans. The argument that the behaviour of legacy media was actually a factor in driving Trump supporters to social media, and by association to Fake News, gains ground in light of the Wikileaks Podesta email revelations.
When Clinton campaign manager John Podesta had his emails hacked and released by Wikileaks, the cache contained innumerable embarrassments for journalists of high standing: Mark Leibovitch, chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, NYT White House Correspondent Maggie Haberman, (“We have had her tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed,” Clinton press secretary Nick Merrill wrote in one circulated draft memo), and former Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein, now of Vox and MSNBC, were all spoken of as allies of Clinton’s campaign. One journalist from the Politico website, Glenn Thrush, actually emailed Podesta paragraphs of his copy, saying, “Tell me if I fucked anything up.” Thrush has now been made White House correspondent for The New York Times.
In Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers media educator Mike Caulfield, in his chapter on “going upstream” to find sources, says: “Maybe you get lucky, and the source is something known to be reputable — some recognizable source such as the journal Science, or the newspaper The New York Times. Again, if so, you can stop there.”
Clearly, this is not always the case.
Since Walter Lippman’s seminal 1922 work, Public Opinion, the link between how individuals form their worldview, and the consequent ease or difficulty for governments in manufacturing consent for pressing a particular course of action, and the role of the mass media has been well examined. Journalists are storytellers, but also, in collaboration with a publication’s editorial team, they are the gatekeepers, aggregating, curating, and filtering information streams too large for time-poor media consumers to themselves navigate.
Web plurality has given us countless blogs and small sites doing very valuable work in public accountability and “monitoring the centres of power,” the role veteran journalist Robert Fisk believes journalists and the press should have. When the actions of mainstream journalists such as those in the Podesta leaks speak of a “parasitic, osmotic relationship between journalists and power,” as Fisk says, trust is eroded and media consumers put the nail in the coffin of what Thomas Pettit has termed The Gutenberg Parenthesis, returning instead to a medieval world of gossip, emoting and tribalism.
There have also been many small, independent and initially activist media sites that have provided a plurality of voices and themselves grown to form a regular part of public discourse. In allowing large media organisations to determine what is fact and what is not, masked by the opaque practices of social media platforms like Facebook, we run a very real risk of impoverishing these voices, culling future news media competitors and further alienating public trust.
So, I’m going to err in favour of a practice-based rather than purely platform-based definition of Fake News with which to progress.
Fake News: A news story published (printed, broadcast or disseminated through online platforms) which is demonstrably untrue, and which has not been subject to standard processes of verification, fact-checking and sourcing prior to publication.
Which, ironically, gives me a fantastic click-bait headline for sharing this chapter of my project to social media.
I Never Thought I’d Say I Agreed With Donald Trump. Here’s What Changed My Mind: