But that’s true of the Left as well. And any other subject matter from music to mechanics. If you agree with an author on one thing, you’re more likely to listen to her about something else. And if you agree with the author, you’re more likely to listen to the rest of the site or newspaper or TV channel. Isn’t that part of the reason behind syndication?
I thought this article about Macedonian teens making lots of money amplifying American far-right fake news stories through Facebook was pretty interesting:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38168281
I believe that post-truth is a term that has significantly broader implications than “fake news”.
To me it’s associated with the reality that, just to use one example that’s on my mind, a certain Tangerine Dream Machine could consistently lie and be exposed as a liar, and a large group of people didn’t care. It’s a bigger problem than whether some people lack the ability or training to be analytical thinkers. It’s that people do not care if what they hear is true in the first place. Even when confronted with evidence that what they have heard is false, they are unmoved. Hence, post-truth, because “truth” is irrelevant.
The fake news on facebook seems relatively easy to combat simply by point it is fake and the source in unreliable. I was very impressed by how many facebook readers started checking their facts or at least dismissing fake stories and started calling them out on their own. If one politely points out fake news stories without name calling and arguing a lot of folks pay attention and will mend their ways.
There has been, in the last few decades, a huge helping of “gotcha” in the news coverage of politicians, especially ones that the press doesn’t like very much. If the disliked politician says something off-the-cuff, journalists pounce on it to gleefully declare that it is not literally true (see the $4B Airforce One kerfuffle). No matter how small or insignificant the matter is.
An average man in the street, though, especially one that is a bit of a fan of the politician in question, gets tired of the “gotcha” game. Yes, $4B may not have been the literal truth, but the allocated $3.2B and the statement that the final cost is not known is close enough to it. No, there may not have been literally thousands of Muslims celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey, but there have been enough reports about such celebrations at the time to point to them and to shake your head.
Repeat that silliness several times and the press starts looking like the boy that cried wolf. Combine that with the reticence to pounce and pound into the ground the actual, egregious, lies of politicians that the press likes (such as Reid’s outrageous and cynical fabrication about Romney’s taxes that Reid basically admits now were complete lies) and you get the “post-truth” phenomenon.
There is no one who is the impartial arbiter of truth anymore. Not that there has ever been an absolute arbiter before, but there were some somewhat trusted sources. For lots of people, there is no such thing anymore.
You seem to be upholding my point.
I disagree that all press reporting is “gotcha”. IMO that seems a facile dismissal of information that contradicts whatever narrative that particular individual might prefer. While it may be true that groups of people now feel free to dismiss all unwelcome information because it’s “gotcha journalism”, it doesn’t change the fundamental point that they are ignoring “truth” because it disagrees with something they’d rather hear. People who embrace “post-truth” are really perpetrating the ultimate “I reject your reality and substitute my own.”
This still leaves us post-truth in a way that extends beyond who is doing the reporting. To respond to the question posed by the OP, I don’t think that “post-truth” explains laziness. I think laziness is too kind a term. Post-truth America exposes willful ignorance in a wide swath of the population.
This is not about truth, it’s about trust. Most people can’t judge the truthfulness of something they don’t see with their own eyes, thus having to rely on trusted intermediaries to educate them. This was always so, just that the trusted figures changed.
In any case, quite some time before Trump, 65% of Americans believed in Heaven, 42% in ghosts, 36% in UFO’s, 26% in witches and 18% believe the Sun revolves around the earth. A Zogby poll from 2006 found that 42% believed that there was a cover-up re. 9/11.
And so on, and so on.
Obviously there are a lot of persuasive people out there peddling what we think is complete nonsense. So the problem is not The TruthSUP[/SUP] but the marketing of the truth, and just who those marketers are. It was not so long ago that the scientist types made bigger miracles than God, so they were trusted. Nowadays, many of the best and brightest just work for Wall St., or, even worse have perfectly idiotic economic theories that surely fit the past data. And some of them are well paid to model your thoughts in more and more sophisticated ways to sell you The Stuff you don’t need. And maybe, just maybe, some of the really caring ones work for pharmaceutical behemoths selling Patent Epinephrine for $300 a shot for kids just about to choke to death.
So, you get it ?
I’m among those who believe we have crossed a threshold. I agree that news outlets have always been slanted in one editorial direction or another, but never to the point where we’re all forced to question whether there are such things as objective facts at all.
But now that we’re here, what does it mean? Maybe we won’t try to raise money for political campaigns anymore; we’ll just donate to the media outlets that tell us the things we like best to hear? And maybe your donation allows you to write your own story that makes the candidate you hate look bad? If you donate at the Gold level, your story gets on the homepage. At the Platinim level, it goes on the Facebook feed of everyone in the world.
In fact, I can’t see any reason for political campaigns at all. Or candidates. Who needs them, when can pay our favorite media outlets to produce computer-generated characters who run for “office”? They can even script the debates, since the real ones obviously don’t make any difference.
If I had a billion dollars, I’d start that media model up right now. And I wouldn’t even have to hide it; I could do it openly and blatantly, because apparently NO ONE WOULD FUCKING CARE!!! Come on everybody, invest in my fake news company, it’s gonna be huge! Being FUCKING LIED TO is the new black!
Well one critical difference is the candidate himself using, and indeed making, fake news e.g. “millions of illegals voted in california” “orlando neighbours saw bomb parts, didn’t report it” (both paraphrasing)
Politicians always twisted facts, or omitted key details to support some argument, but they didn’t generally make shit up.
Also of course, that pizza place getting shot up is evidence that something significant has indeed changed.
I think that the “post-truth” idea is a response by the masses to the fact that “news”, or if you prefer “information” is simply white noise now. It didn’t used to be. For those who are young, and don’t remember life before Teh Intarwebz:
Growing up in the 60s and 70s, I did not have access to news 24/7/365. If it was national news (that is, news broadly interesting to people across the nation), I could usually access it three ways: a) read a morning newspaper (for me, the Los Angeles Times, b) watch the “evening/nightly news” on one of the three national networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) at somewhere around 6 pm (usually preceded by a local news broadcast), or c) catch a “breaking news” announcement (very rare), where the national network headquarters would interrupt local feeds (for example, when Kennedy got shot). In between those times, I had very little ability to know what was going on outside my little slice of Heaven in the desert of California. (Yes, there was radio, too, but it didn’t add that much, really).
Now, under those circumstances, the amount of information available upon which to make up your mind was fairly limited. And we generally accepted what we heard as pretty close to the truth (though I will point out that the fact that my generation became increasingly aware that it wasn’t always so was a good part of the reason for the fact that we started disbelieving the establishment). After all, if CBS screwed up a story, ABC and NBC were cheerfully willing to tell everyone just how badly they had blown it. Same with newspapers. So, there was limited info, generally acceptably true, that you could access.
Now that’s not to say that information of a questionable nature didn’t get propagated. “Urban legend” as a term goes back to the 30s. But the point is that there was a limited amount of information available, and we as a society tended to suck up what we could, and felt that the truth of that information was important.
Fast forward to today: information is available all the time, and shoved at us from all directions. You get it from hundreds of television channels, you get it from thousands of internet sources, and it’s literally showing up every day over and over again on your personal phone-like devices. It gets to the point where all that information is like so much white noise; people’s eyes just glass over at how much of it there is. And that explosion of information has come with a drop in the quality of information: most of us who read this Board know just how “informative” the “History Channel” can be. So instead of caring about the authenticity of the information, all we care about is information that supports our pre-disposed viewpoints. Yes, that’s a bit lazy, but then again, just how much time does the average person have to sort through everything that comes at them, and figure out if it’s “correct” or not? 
It’s the “money quote” because it validates what you already believe. And there you have it.
Hmm… I have a hard time accepting that, but perhaps I’m the wrong generation?
I knew she was a shill for Big Finance. Hadn’t realized she was shilling for the Daleks, as well.
(Or is this how fake news spreads?)
I do note that, so far as I could tell from checking out the various investigations into the question of whether Breitbart, Bannon, etc. are racist (as much of the less mainstream liberal media seemed to tout), the result was that it did seem to be they are genuinely mostly anti-political correctness and the leftist readers simply failed to appreciate the humor. (Note: Not an endoresement.)
I wouldn’t call “fake news” a problem contained solely to the right side of the spectrum.
Unfortunately the majority of us got the government we don’t deserve.
I was unfriended for pointing out fake news on facebook. I was banned from a sub on reddit for the same thing. I had many people tell me that snopes was a liberal site and not to be believed under any circumstances. I truly fear for our republic. We have been owned by Putin and Bannon, Trump is just a useful idiot trying to save his flailing business. All of the Repubs who are licking the boots of these guys are traitors to the republic.
24 hour news way predates the internet, though. I’m 39 so I obviously remember a time before the internet. But the first cable news station started in 1980, and I don’t remember before that given I was 3. So it’s not just those who are too young to know life without the internet who have never known life without 24-hour access to news, it’s people as old as their early to mid-40s, and man, that’s sure a lot of people.
True, though cable news wasn’t widely available that early; I recall living in Sacramento in the mid-80s and waiting the eternal wait for the city and county to select a provider, then get cable provided. Which didn’t happen before I left in 1986.
I remember when fake news was limited to the super market checkout. Now it arrives via cable, Facebook, email links from my brother-in-law and the interwebz…
Depends on the area, I guess. We got cable with a full compartment of channels in MA during 1983 and it had been around a while at that point.
Depends on the area, I guess. We got cable with a full compartment of channels in MA during the summer of 1983 and it had been around a while at that point.