For everybody reading this, that time of ‘aha!’ or radical realisation that ‘fake news’ is HUGE and is reshaping our lives is obviously different. For me, the realisation that something was off came in 2013.
I was then a not-so-satisfied editor/occasional-anchor at CNN-IBN. I had swapped a highly visible but dispiriting career as an anchor for an invisible but equally deadening role behind the scenes. I’d had about 12 years of experience in reporting, anchoring and ‘desking’, and felt something terrible had gone wrong with my career. It would be some time before I understood that what had gone wrong was not me and my equally despondent colleagues, but the structure of the news industry.
We’ll come back to news in a later post, but the point I’m making here is that for me, it all started there—with my noticing that something was deeply broken in TV news. From there, it was short hop to figuring out that people increasing distrusted the media, and from there, it was a quick skip to understanding that the public was being divided sharply along all lines.
By the time ‘Fake News’ became a familiar term, I had a startup dedicated partly to dealing with polarisation. It was only late in 2018 however, that I realised that everything in the information sphere was affecting us.
This included:
a news industry that was not functioning as it should
the speed and velocity of ‘fake news’
politicians and political parties who were weaponizing social media
technological platforms who could not longer control their creations
And so on.
Here’s a drawing that illustrates my journey.
So what was your Year Zero, when you realised that we’re living in a world that has been altered radically by these forces? As you mull this over, I’ll get to the point of this piece: which is that the term ‘fake news’ is completely inaccurate, because the challenge we’re facing as a society is much, much bigger. We’re constantly fed a cocktail of false news, yes, but also half-truths, truths that have been manipulated, propaganda, general bullshit* and more.
A better term is ‘information pollution’. The official term is ‘information disorder’ but I prefer the former because we can more easily imagine a solution to pollution.
In a piece in Washington Monthly (January 2019) the authors use the term ‘digital pollution’. They cite the cleaning of the river Thames in the 19th century as a model for today’s challenge and write, “a problem without a name cannot command attention, understanding, or resources — three essential ingredients of change.”
Our challenge definitely has a name, and the world over, there is plenty of attention, understanding and resources being devoted to addressing it.
But it’s not popular as of yet. Information pollution or information disorder aren’t the terms we, the people, like to use, but maybe it’s time to start doing so. Worst case scenario, if we do have to use the term ‘fake news’, I urge you to use air quotes (even if not quite in the way Stephen Colbert is doing down below!).
Notes:
By ‘information’, I refer to anything and everything. Or “anything that can be sorted in a binary (i.e, 0,1) format. Texts, photographs, audio soundtracks, films, and data streams are all forms of information.” This definition comes from Professor James T. Hamilton at the Department of Communications at Stanford University in his book All the News That’s Fit to Sell.
I use the term ‘Bullshit’ in a very specific sense. It is different from lies, because lies have a relation to the truth. In other words, lies are a clear departure from the truth. But bullshit is completely indifferent to the truth, and is all “about producing a certain impression in the minds of people.” These words are from a philosopher from Princeton University Harry G. Frankfurt. In 2005, he published a must-read short book called On Bullshitin which he concludes, “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
In the next issue, I’ll take up another aspect of information pollution. Here’s to inoculating ourselves! Do hit ‘reply’ to reach me with thoughts and do forward this to your friends and family.