What is “fake news” and why are some politicians, pundits and people in a near hysteria about it?
On August 2, 1964 while gathering intelligence in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam, press and media reported the USS Maddox was attacked with torpedoes by three North Vietnamese patrol boats. Two days later, the Maddox said it was involved in another sea battle. Then-US President Lyndon Johnson used this second incident to receive from Congress a blank check to pursue the war.
But the August 4 attack never happened. The Maddox knew within several minutes that there was not a threat: it was ‘ghost radar’ images. Further in the first incident, the Maddox fired first. It was all fake news from the US government; all lies.
The media cannot be blamed for reporting information that they had no means to verify. But more recently, during the impeachment of the late Chief Justice Renato C. Corona, the media reported false bank account information that they might have been at least partially proven or disproven.
In 64 B.C., during a fire that destroyed 70 percent of Rome, then-Emperor Nero was publicly accused by his political enemies of watching the city burn and doing nothing. Surviving records show Nero was in fact 35 miles away at his villa in Antium.
When the fighting in Marawi broke out, some detractors of President Duterte questioned on social media why the president was not on the scene or making statements, conveniently ignoring the fact and not mentioning he was 8,000 kilometer away in Moscow at the time. Fake news can be distorted or incomplete information.
Do you believe that man landed on the moon in 1969? There are thousands of web sites offer proof that it was a hoax. Are those web sites spreading fake new’s and should be avoided or banned? Or are they the ones exposing ‘fake news’?
All media must decide which stories to run and how to frame them. And this is done with unavoidably normal human-opinion bias. But Merrimack College Assistant Professor Melissa Zimdars says media bias is also fake news. A recent study from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government showed that in the first 100 days of the Trump presidency, on cable news network CNN, 93 percent of the stories was negative about the Trump administration. On the Fox News Channel, 52 percent of the stories were negative.
Which network was showing ‘fake news bias’? And who gets to decide that question?
Zimdars says news from groups that are categorized by ‘various organizations’ as being hate groups should be considered fake news. Should the lay-run Roman Catholic apologist web site catholic.com be considered a fake news- hate site by writing “The Catholic Church has always condemned abortion as a grave evil” if some ‘various organizations’ say that is hate speech?
“Fakeblock” is a browser plug-in that “flags fake news when it appears on your newsfeed. As a reader, you can report dubious sites here. Then, an independent team of journalists will review and vet the sites.”
Does the public need politicians and well-meaning experts to protect it from fake news? Cable news host Mika Brzezinski said this about President Trump: through his messaging, “He can actually control exactly what people think. And that, that is our job.”
British Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden was quoted in 1916 as saying “Truth is the first casualty of war.” If so, we are at war and we must defend ourselves and not depend on others to do so. The cure may be worse than the disease.