Fake News

[supergee]

We have always been post-truth.

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[weofodthignen]

I'm skeptical because all the examples seem to be recent. Long before the fuss over the exposé on one of the US networks of documents purporting to show Shrub had shirked his duties in the National Guard—was it Dan Rather who was forced into retirement over that? But it reminded me powerfully of the medieval false decretals, like the Donation of Constantine, that were created as restorations of documentation presumed lost for legal events that everyone was sure had happened—there was debate over the biases of news organizations and whether they were exercising their power in accordance with the public trust. Over whether the Hearst papers were fair, for example. In fact there was a lot of that debate during the Vietnam War, wasn't there? And in that war the media did in fact rise to the challenge of presenting the facts to the public: the US public would never have known about My Lai otherwise. And I'm sure others can take over and point to the service performed by the "yellow press" in exposing food adulteration under the Robber Barons and so on. And public debates all through the 20th century, except for the enforced solidarity during the two world wars, about various news outlets.

On the other side ... I've been following this thread on a Wikipedia criticism site (it's way off topic and should be accordingly moved to members-only access, but for the moment I can still see it) and was struck by the quote from Mencken saying he created fake news. I hadn't been aware of that. But based on what I read there, Assbook looks bad by any standard. Did you know they'd banned the Stonekettle Station guy? And did you see this PC World report linked in one of the posts there, about an experiment using new accounts that saw the right-leaning account served a ton of right-wing "news" stories, some fake, as suggestions?

M

[supergee]

I am one of the many people who used their Facebook page to link to Jim Wright's blog post about being kicked out.