THE “FAKE NEWS” CONUNDRUM
It ought not to come as a surprise
that a demagogue shouting “fake news“ obtains considerable automatic agreement
from his followers, and does so in a world that is overwhelmed with information
and where most everything yet is actually knowable and verifiable if you have
the time, the time, the time, the patience the patience and the knowledge and
capacity to verify.
The matter of the current
Trumpian edition of Fake NewS is scarcely merely a matter of normal human, or
if you like, mammalian dread as which it
can be accounted in the instance of Welles’ WAR OF THE WORLDS in 1938.
„Fake“ &
„News“, two words not found co-joined until recently, yet in
a short time the phrase has come to
sound as though it had been around for years, loud and clear…. to obscure, to
defeat, at least to throw into doubt even the most obvious and rationally
ascertainable truths such as the contribution of human activity to the heating
of the planet & its exponential consequences.
“We” all
know a fake when we see it! Except for
the one’s we miss, or the ones we get used to living with, or where we think
what the hell what does it matter.
Then there are the true believers,
say, the Seventh Day Adventist, but how do you prove to them that there are
barking up the wrong tree? How can news even be fake? News is news, is new or
old hat, but then it ought not to be called news, should it, except by
sleepyheads.
“Fake” is a word that you learn while you are
still young. “That’s a fake,” the kid is
told about a wooden nickel! (I have never seen one!) The first fake experience
a kid will have is of a false nipple, an appeaser for the longing for the real
thing. “Real” & “fake” will be
concepts coupled as diametrically opposed in the kid’s mind.
A “falsie”
in adolescence does not refer to a wooden nickel but to whatever it takes – tissue
paper, padding of any kind - to make believe it is a mature breast, an
enhancement to make a young girl appear more mature and attractive and to
enhance her sense of womanliness in the making., which will disappoint the
callow boyfriend’s hand. –
The concept
“false”/ falta seeps into one’s
American being at an early age, never to be disabused, but to be augmented by
an increasing number of experiences of buying, being subjected, being fooled by
matters that are not what they seem. The breast that the mature lover caressed
is of silicone! – No wonder that my caresses fail to elicit the anticipated
response, no wonder that the news so often elicits the response “same same.”
On the basis
of the above observation you could conclude that the truthfulness of the news that
all kinds of media convey is susceptible to serious doubt; the only news you therefore
end up trusting are your bodily sensations, what you see and feel and hear;
everything mediated is susceptible to doubt. Whose word do you trust? Family, friends &
then there are those who take the Bible literally.
To above
cited reasons to distrust the news are then added instances when the
government, not just a corporation, has lied to you, to the public. Propaganda. Propaganda in an Orwellian world. And has lied for generations. And in the most
important matters of war and peace.
In addition,
keep in mind the human propensity to deny unpleasant news, for denial, for
wishful thinking, for fantasy, for misunderstanding.
Thus,
shocking as it continues to be, it is not all that surprising that a demagogue
might succeed in devaluing truthful news by screaming “fake” at everything that
is critical of him and that disagrees with his views, and have his followers
act as his chorus; although, I must say, it continues to surprise that such a
major onslaught, even on the most obvious of truths, should find such a wide
responsiveaudience. Dommage. And yet another factor comes into play: How much available
time exists for the average working stiff to obtain, dwell on and possibly
check the truthfulness of the news, local, national, international? Should
there be doubt as to a story’s truthfulness how long will it take, on average,
to verify – not all that much, say, of a local warehouse fire, although there
may be residual doubt as to the fire’s source.
A national story will take hours to track. Imagine being eighteen years old: how long will
it take to have a fair idea of the whys and wherefores of the sixteen-year old Afghanistan
war, whose origin dates to Carter/Brzezinski’s destabilization to draw in the stupid
Russian bear, the Soviets; that is, to the Cold War. Dwell on the long, propaganda-filled
stretches that you need to traverse in this Orwellian world to reach something
approximating truth! Think about the
news sources! For example, here in Seattle we have but a single newspaper, it
aggregates its out of town news, mostly from AP, Blomberg, McClatchey & the
New York Times; two weekly local news sheets of the Village Voice type; a few T.V. stations whose news output scarcely
differs; some variants in cable and radio news and commentary; a locust plague of info-bits on social media
if you choose to expose yourself to it;
a number of political and civil interest blogs.
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