Reality Bites
Source: The 7 Worst Examples of Fake News From the Mainstream Media – John Hawkins
The current rage over the preponderance and influence of ‘fake news’ is amusing because I’ve been writing about this stuff for many, many years. From the smallest of manufactured news items concerning some straw man issue to the grand scale concoctions regarding Global Warming, fantasy narratives have been common reportage in the mainstream media for a long time. What seems to have turned the zeitgeist from tolerance to outrage is that now, fake news is widely blamed for causing the election loss of the candidate from the left.
Not to be deterred, the fake news business is turning its guns against Donald Trump, attempting to discredit his creds even before he puts his hand on the swearing in bible. We’ve alluded many times to one of the biggest ironies in modern culture and that is, historically, people’s access to information has never been better, yet they are as likely to be uninformed, or more correctly, misinformed as ever.
We can blame to some degree, the internet business model. Many ‘news’ sites have been created over the past decade to compete somewhat with the established oligarchy of news outlets. With free access notionally provided by the internet news sites, whose revenue models are based on clicks instead of subscriptions, people increasingly defer to them as information sources rather than read more in depth coverage. Who hasn’t turned on their browser and scanned through Google News or MSN News?
While this may give an overview of the headlines of the day, nobody makes money on headlines, so the tactic is to make people click further on the page. The standard model is to create an attention grabbing headline such as “Dog has sex with man” and then follows up with clickbait such as “12 reasons why this can ruin your marriage“. Internet users have to navigate a minefield of “What celebrity X looks like today is amazing” stories in order to get to legitimate news stories. How else to explain the ubiquity of Kim Kardashian stories if not for their ability to attract clicks from people desperate to catch up on her most recent adventures? When stories such as “10 things that Trump did in Moscow” come to light, the line between fake and reality truly disappears. (I mean, who doesn’t want to know at least what 5 of those things were?)
They’ve dumbed down the news business to emulate the format pioneered by Cosmopolitan magazine, famous for cover stories such as ” 6 best ways to keep your man” and “7 ways to a sexier butt“. With the ascension of Donald Trump to the Presidency, we can expect at least 4 years of fanciful news from some of the more hysterical partisan news websites. But that’s not the root of the issue; the real threat is the proliferation of fake journalists. While it’s easy to disregard anything from sites with names such as TMZ, MTV, or Rolling Stone, there is more and more evidence that stories from outlets such as CNN, New York Times and Washington Post, are nakedly partisan and often fanciful in their telling.
One of these days, Donald Trump will actually do something shocking… and we won’t know if it’s true.