"Fake News": The Emergence of a Post-Fact World

[pbrower2a]

(01-14-2017, 03:18 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: The public trust is essential to the legitimacy of any government.  Whatever weakens faith in a republic's institutions and leaders invites extremism from the Right or Left.  The Fourth Estate is just one of the pillars on which our democracy relies.  That the first amendment in the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of the press underscores the essential nature of a free and vibrant press to our republic. 

But more and more lately, the phrase "fake news" has seeped into our public discourse, never more apparent than in President-elect Trump's first press conference.  When CNN's Jim Acosta attempted to ask Trump a question, the following testy exchange took place in the glare of the media spotlight:

"Your organization is terrible," Trump told Jim Acosta when he tried to ask a question.

"You're attacking us, can you give us a question?” Acosta replied.

"Don't be rude.  No, I'm not going to give you a question. You are fake news," Trump shot back, before calling on a reporter from Breitbart.

I count on Donald Trump relying upon the 'reptilian press' to get his message out. The Personality Cult is already forming around someone whose behavior is disgusting and who has shown no qualms about saying falsehoods and no willingness to retract the falsehoods when they are exposed as such. For the President-Elect the culpability for anyone disagreeing with him is with the person who fails to believe in him.

I had severe distrust of him before the election, and I see no reason to believe that I will change my opinion of him unless he starts telling us verifiable truth.

News media will have to decide whether they will get access to the president and  likely Congress as well at the cost of becoming conduits for propaganda or having to turn away from official sources. We may have the situation in which an organization like CNN must  turn completely away from politics to such traditional non-news as culture, 'fashion', show biz, stock and commodity markets, weather, sports, science, and consumer technology. Because the intellectual discourse of Donald Trump is roughly at the level of the National Enquirer, that is about the level of communication that will exist on politics. For the rest of us we may have nothing but rumor. When the ruling elite decides what the news is, as in the old Soviet Union, we get little but propaganda.
I fear that the "fake news" meme has entered the American lexicon, bandied about almost as an epithet.  One of the more troublesome aspects of the growing prevalence of "fake news," especially in a highly polarized society such as ours, is that one man's "fake news" is another man's "truth."   

Quote:In a recent article historian Frances Fukuyama seems to suggest that "fake news" is symptomatic of the emergence of a post-fact world.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoin...ma-2017-01

Some excerpts appear below, minus Fukuyama's many references to Donald Trump, who certainly has no monopoly on mendacity among politicians of whatever stripe:

One of the more striking developments of 2016 and its highly unusual politics was the emergence of a “post-fact” world, in which virtually all authoritative information sources were called into question and challenged by contrary facts of dubious quality and provenance.

The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s was greeted as a moment of liberation and a boon for democracy worldwide. Information constitutes a form of power, and to the extent that information was becoming cheaper and more accessible, democratic publics would be able to participate in domains from which they had been hitherto excluded...

"Cheaper" does not mean "better". On occasion someone has a camcorder and a story. Imagine such a scenario as the JFK assassination happening again* -- there might be hundreds of people with moving images to supply to news media. On November 22, 1963, there is but one reliable video source -- that by Abraham Zapruder, himself a prosperous businessman. Motion-picture cameras and film were expensive, intru8sive, inconvenient, and difficult to use in 1963. Fast forward to 9/11, and people who had camcorders (far more people) had good reason to get them out.

(By the way -- that's why I ask people attending a strike, protest, or demonstration to take cameras along and be prepared to use them. The official story could be very different from reality, especially should there be violence.

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Quote:The development of social media in the early 2000s appeared to accelerate this trend, permitting the mass mobilization that fueled various democratic “color revolutions” around the world, from Ukraine to Burma (Myanmar) to Egypt. In a world of peer-to-peer communication, the old gatekeepers of information, largely seen to be oppressive authoritarian states, could now be bypassed.

While there was some truth to this positive narrative, another, darker one was also taking shape. Those old authoritarian forces were responding in dialectical fashion, learning to control the Internet, as in China, with its tens of thousands of censors, or, as in Russia, by recruiting legions of trolls and unleashing bots to flood social media with bad information. These trends all came together in a hugely visible way during 2016, in ways that bridged foreign and domestic politics.

Use of bad information as a weapon by authoritarian powers would be bad enough, but the practice took root big time during the US election campaign...

The United States may be becoming an authoritarian regime this very month. Donald Trump is more like the authoritarian leaders of China and Russia than like... Angela Merkel. But know well -- your network affiliate might be interested in your local strike, protest, or demonstration, especially if something goes violent. Where the courts and cops are honest, they may want to crack down on violence in protests. If counter-protesters decide that to "Make America Great Again" requires people with baseball bats attacking protesters -- then such merits exposure.

Just remember -- the segregationist cause in the Jim Crow South died because maintenance of the racist order required violence to make it work. We need not drain the swamp: we need only shine a blinding light upon it.

Quote:The traditional remedy for bad information, according to freedom-of-information advocates, is simply to put out good information, which in a marketplace of ideas will rise to the top. This solution, unfortunately, works much less well in a social-media world of trolls and bots. There are estimates that as many as a third to a quarter of Twitter users fall into this category. The Internet was supposed to liberate us from gatekeepers; and, indeed, information now comes at us from all possible sources, all with equal credibility. There is no reason to think that good information will win out over bad information. 

[Indeed, I would interject here that a modified version of Gresham's Law may apply: "Bad journalism drives out good."]

The ultimate gatekeeper is undeniable truth. Political violence of any kind is not part of the American heritage; it must be done in comparative secrecy to have its intended effect. Criminal acts such as beatings and arson merit and get no privacy.

Quote:[i]This highlights a more serious problem than individual falsehoods and their effect on the election outcome. Why do we believe in the authority of any fact, given that few of us are in a position to verify most of them? The reason is that there are impartial institutions tasked with producing factual information that we trust. Americans get crime statistics from the US Department of Justice, and unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times were indeed biased against Trump, yet they have systems in place to prevent egregious factual errors from appearing in their copy...[/i]

[i]The inability to agree on the most basic facts is the direct product of an across-the-board assault on democratic institutions – in the US, in Britain, and around the world. And this is where the democracies are headed for trouble. In the US, there has in fact been real institutional decay...[/i]

About half of all Americans live in one 'factual' universe and the other half lives in another. Which universe will prevail? We are in a race that will determine whether truth shall win out or raw power will crush anything in its way.

[url=https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/the-emergence-of-a-post-fact-world-by-francis-fukuyama-2017-01#]

Quote:And yet, the US election campaign has shifted the ground to a general belief that

Quote:everything has been rigged or politicized, and that outright bribery is rampant. If the election authorities certify that your favored candidate is not the victor, or if the other candidate seemed to perform better in a debate, it must be the result of an elaborate conspiracy by the other side to corrupt the outcome. The belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to a dead end of universal distrust. American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead, partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life.

Quote:Fukuyama's conclusion troubles me not a little, and casts some doubt in my mind as to whether we have really embarked on any real regeneracy in this Fourth Turning.  Still smells like unraveling to me.

I am tempted to believe that the longer that people adhere to 3T habits, the harsher the 4T gets and the worse are the personal results for more people.

*I am using these horrible event as an illustration of one of the best-known events of its time. No repeats -- please!