01-14-2017, 03:18 PM
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 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."
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.
[/url]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...
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 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."]
[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]
[url=https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/the-emergence-of-a-post-fact-world-by-francis-fukuyama-2017-01#][i]And yet, the US election campaign has shifted the ground to a general belief that 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.[/i]
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.
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 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."
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.
[/url]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...
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 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."]
[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]
[url=https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/the-emergence-of-a-post-fact-world-by-francis-fukuyama-2017-01#][i]And yet, the US election campaign has shifted the ground to a general belief that 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.[/i]
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.