Fake news is in the news at the moment, primarily IMHO because the candidate for POTUS that the press didn’t like won. But fake news has been around forever - call it gossip, propaganda, rumour, whatever - and we’ve had to apply our brains to sort out the true from the false by checking. So I submit that the present brouhahaha is simply an excuse for the intellectual laziness of people.
No, it’s an attempt to excuse blatant lies told to persuade fools to support a conman like Trump.
As opposed to the blatant lies told about Palin, for instance? Or the blatant lies told by the likes of Pravda during the Soviet era? Or the blatant lies told by the North Korean regime? Or…
If Facebook has taught me anything, it’s that people are really fucking gullible. I mean… REALLY fucking gullible!
That had already been proved by daytime radio/tv and before that, supermarket tabloids.
What has changed, in my view, is that the internet and in particular social media has changed the speed and scale at which information can spread. It also effects the trustworthiness of information. We are social creatures and disposed to believing what our fellow tribe mates tell us.
I do agree that that it is just another way of saying, people don’t think critically. And that’s why I think we have to start teaching critical thinking in school.
No, I don’t think so.
Yesterday, I read a story on NPR about Figgy Pudding.
From the story:
“And despite its moniker, the dessert features neither figs nor plums.”
Still curious about this dessert, I checked the wiki.
“Figgy pudding is made with figs (other references state that it was made with plums not figs[1]) and was popular as a Christmas pudding in the British Isles. The pudding may be baked, steamed in the oven, boiled or fried.[2]”
Both of these sources are supposedly to be trusted.
There was another story in the news about the dinosaur tail in amber. This made me curious about amber and so I googled it. I looked at several links and found one that made a serious effort to point out that amber is NOT sap but rather a resin, only to look at the next site that calls it sap.
My two examples may be minor, but there’s an awful lot of conflicting information out there and it can sometimes be difficult to know what the “truth” really is.
So no, I don’t think it’s fair to blame laziness.
The “figgy pudding” one isn’t too hard to figure out; first of all, it isn’t really a contradiction at all. “Does figgy pudding contain figs?” is the kind of question to which the answer is simultaneously “yes” AND “no,” just like “Do chocolate chip cookies contain butter?” – it depends on who’s making the dish, and what recipe they’re using. In fact, both the Wikipedia article and the NPR one acknowledge that there are versions of the dish with figs, and versions with other kinds of dried fruit.
As for whether amber is resin or sap, a bit of Googling turns up a handful of commercial sites aimed at non-specialist audiences that call it sap, and a great many more sources, mostly academic sites, that take care to point out it isn’t sap but resin. It’s not too hard to figure out that the University of California Museum of Paleontology is probably a more reliable source than AmberCompany.com.
It wasn’t the fake news that made Clinton lose, it was the FBI director. Or was it the Russian hackers. Or the stupid founding fathers who made the rules using the electoral college. Or the stupid third party candidates who had the audacity to run and steal Hilary’s votes. It couldn’t be that people outside of the liberal coasts were tired of hearing Hillary’s shill Dalek voice.
To expand on my earlier post, I guess what your examples reveal is that there are several distinct skills people need to sort through conflicting information. First, you have to be able to distinguish between questions that have no single, correct answer (“What is the recipe for X?” is pretty much always such a question, regardless of what X is) and questions that do (“Is amber sap or not?”) You also have to be able to distinguish between reliable and less-reliable sources, figure out the overall scope and purpose of the source (it matters, for example, that the NPR source is based on an interview with a woman who works at an 18th-century historic home and has experience with a specific recipe, whereas the Wikipedia article is attempting to cover all possible versions of “figgy pudding” from the 16th century onward) and to recognize language in your source that tends to suggest something more complicated than a simple yes-or-no answer (in this case, both NPR and Wikipedia are basically saying “sometimes it’s got figs in it, and sometimes not,” they just differ on whether the fig version is the usual one).
None of this is actually HARD, but it does require a certain amount of knowledge, judgment, and practice. We definitely need to do a better job teaching these skills in schools.
I agree. It wasn’t any of these things. The blame lies squarely in the failure of the electorate to put reason above emotion (read: the masses are asses). Thus, we get the gov’t we deserve.
Also, it has multiplied an effect that had begun with the 24/7 news cycle, which is the erosion or loss of editorial mediation. In earlier time, respectable outlets cared about getting it at least somewhat right to protect their reputation, propaganda arms tried to make sure they were consistent with the official line, and even tabloid scandal sheets had to worry about not getting sued too often. But when the aim becomes who says it first regardless of accuracy, or just “throw it out there and make him have to deny it”, that falls apart. And tough to threaten to sue @asshat4321truthy .
Which is not to say in this networked age people don’t find that, for instance, Webster’s, Wikipedia, a specialized dictionary on the subject, a trade journal article and a mass news article all use or define the same term differently, and interpret it as meaning it’s unsettled, or that there is no reliable source, rather than apply different contexts.
Glenn Greenwald documents a recent instance of fake news spread by mainstream outlets. Turns out stories about the Wikileaks Podesta emails being inauthentic or doctored, were at their origin, deliberate disinformation invented by Marco Chacon.
The “fake news” issue isn’t being pushed as an excuse for people’s intellectual laziness, it’s being pushed as evidence of it.
[Sthephen Fry at QI’s desk]
Give the man there all the points!"
[/SFQID]
IMO the money quote from that article is[
That’s a century or more old, isnt it?
The one does not preclude the other, but the stuff I’ve been reading seem to be of the excuse orientation.
It confuses the discussion when you use neologisms that aren’t in the dictionary. Stick with the standard Engrish as she is wrote, okay?
One of the semi-unique things about how news is treated now is also the apparent rejection of real news alongside the embrace of fake news. Trump encouraged his supporters to boo and even target the traditional news media as liars and Hillary supporters, while embracing Breitbart and 9/11 and Sandy Hook truther Alex Jones. And he dismissed and disdained government-provided facts from the FBI Director’s opinion about Hillary’s email criminality to DOL unemployment numbers to the CIA’s assertions of Russian hacking and election influencing and ultimately to the legitimacy of the election itself (popular vote was rigged by millions of illegals voting for Hillary).
And Trump has managed to get the mainstream Republicans to go along with him by having Mike Pence jump through hoops to justify and defend all of his lies and having Paul Ryan and other Congressional Republicans dismiss or excuse them. 2+2 now equals 5.
Good point. 24 hour news radically shifted how and what type of news was presented, for obvious reasons, they had to have enough to fill up 24 hours and so justify their existence. To some degree, news has always been a product to some degree, but the 24 hours news channels increased this tremendously. Now they had to market themselves as something you had to watch or else (in the sense that you won’t be safe because you won’t be informed).