What’s Worse? Fake News or the Cure

I find the panic about “fake news” a little overdone.  I understand there are a lot of news stories out there that aren’t true, but it’s been that way for a long time.  The National Enquirer has been at my supermarket checkout lane for decades.  That’s pretty fake news. 

If by fake news, you mean lies, they’ve been around for a long time, too.  Hitler lied about the Jews.¹  Stalin lied about Katyn Forest.  Vladimir Putin lies all the time.  Crimea.  Ukraine.  The shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight 17.  Anybody who believes Vladimir Putin isn’t paying attention.²

It could be, with the Internet, fake news today travels a little faster and gets a broader distribution, but so does everything else. 

When former President Barack Obama was in South Africa last month to give a speech on the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth, he said:

“Unfortunately, too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth.  People just make stuff up. … [W]e see the utter loss of shame among political leaders where they’re caught in a lie and they just double down and they lie some more.  Politicians have always lied, but it used to be if you caught them lying they’d be like, ‘Oh man.’  Now they just keep on lying.”

I wonder.  Did it really used to be that politicians would stop lying when they were caught, as former President Obama seems to remember?  Or is it that the polarization in our politics – and the speed of the Internet – is just making it more noticeable when politicians keep lying – and more aggravating when the politicians doing it are on the other side?

It also could be that, instead of fake news feeding polarization, polarization is feeding fake news.  When everybody gets their own news, because they only watch Fox News or MSNBC or because they have a personalized newsfeed that only tells them their side of the story, it’s easy for people to believe that anything different from what they’ve seen is fake news.

Still, how new is just reading your own side of the story?  TV and radio may be different today than 50 years ago.²  Back then you didn’t have a choice in TV.  It was CBS or NBC or ABC.  Now you can choose.  You can watch Fox News or MSNBC – or Al Jazeera.

But we had one-sided media in the past, too.  If you want to see some examples, go to the Abraham Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois.  Look at what newspapers from the South, or even some in the North, said about Abraham Lincoln.  Some of those articles make both Fox News and MSNBC look fair and balanced.  In 1968, the Chicago Tribune endorsed the entire Republican ticket, top to bottom.  For people who think the Trib is biased today, what would they have thought then?

In any case, whether fake news is new or not, what is the solution?  Fact checkers?  A question: If politicians say things that are wrong, why do we think some of fact checkers won’t get things wrong, too?  Will we need fact checkers to check on the fact checkers?  Where does that stop?

Anybody who thinks government can do the job of policing fake news should consider whether they would trust our current president to do that – or his opponent in the last election.⁴  During the campaign, Donald Trump said he wanted to loosen the libel laws.  Now it’s the “Failing New York Times.”  And the Trump White House excluded a CNN reporter from a press event because she had asked “inappropriate questions” at another gathering.  Of course, as some may have forgotten, the Obama administration tried to do the same thing to Fox News back in 2009 (also here), saying Fox News wasn’t a real news organization.

What about the big technology firms, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc.?  Can’t they stop the distribution of fake news?  When it comes to the idea of Silicon Valley policing the news, consider that, in 2014, the co-founder of Mozilla was forced to resign because he had contributed money to a campaign opposing same-sex marriage.  Can we trust Microsoft, Facebook, Google, et al, to not apply their own views in deciding what is fake news and what isn’t?  Recently, airlines around the world have changed their websites because Beijing didn’t like the way they referred to Taiwan.  Are the big technology firms going to stand up to Chinese if they demand articles on the repression of the Uyghurs be deleted as fake news?⁵

All in all, fake news may be a problem.  It’s just that all of the solutions are worse.
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¹ For that matter, consider “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”  That “fake news” has been around for over a century, and who knows how many people have died because of it.
² Yes, I do mean anyone.
³ Because of Ronald Reagan.  In 1987, President Reagan’s appointees on the Federal Communications Commission repealed the “Fairness Doctrine,” and President Reagan vetoed a bill to reinstate it.  At the time, I supported getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine because I didn’t think government should be trying to enforce “fairness” in the media.  But I also thought it would help the liberals – because that was what the national media was at the time: liberal.  Wow, did I get that one wrong.
⁴ In 2016, one of Hillary Clinton’s campaign talking points was overturning the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United.  What many people didn’t focus on was that Citizens United involved the distribution of a film critical of former Secretary Clinton.  While the principle in the case was bigger, it is interesting to note that, if former Secretary Clinton had had her way, the government would have been able to stop the distribution of that film.  Who would want the current administration to be able to do that?
⁵ Google, which has stood up to the Chinese in the past, is now rumored to be negotiating with Beijing to re-enter China with a new search engine that would block certain websites and search terms.