Good journalism is vital to a functioning democracy, but the current “fake news” narrative disingenuously casts the news media as benign sources of truth. This approach is clearly appealing to the mainstream news industry but is it helpful?
“Fake news” is an ahistorical term that makes disinformation and propaganda seem like new phenomena. It conveniently asks us to forget about the lies, bias, and infotainment absurdities regularly peddled by mainstream news while focusing our attention on Google, Facebook, and Macedonian teenagers.
This defensive stance is perhaps understandable given the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine journalism. But Trump is not the source of the problem, although he certainly is exploiting it. The deeper problem concerns media trust and credibility, which has declined steadily over the past two decades (Edelman 2017; Gallup 2016), and the capacity of citizens to make informed choices.
So far, the “fake news” narrative prompts media industry leaders to ask “how does fake news spread and what can be done to stop it?”. An alternative focus on the public presents more troubling questions: “why do people believe false information in the first place” and “why don’t they trust mainstream news?”
Concentrating on isolated symptoms (“fake news”) or isolated measures of correction (fact checking) is an inadequate response. Although corrective measures are important, they primarily assume the problem is about a deficit of correct information. Yet, for all the false and biased news available online, there is plenty of good information. The issue is whether people know how to find it and whether they are willing to accept it.
A recent Stanford study found that young “digital natives” lack the basic critical skills to evaluate online information. Unconcerned about information sources and swayed by high production values, students struggle to distinguish between professional journalism and partisan material from interest groups.
Moreover, psychological studies suggest that the relentless flow of digital information tests the limits of cognitive processing (Klingberg 2008). It creates a myopic focus on the present with almost no time to think. Neil Postman identified a similar “now this” mode of thinking in TV news, which creates a “world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events.”
If, as Postman argues, the news already began to slide towards disjoined infotainment in the broadcast era, how can it now distinguish itself as a serious discourse when it’s forced to beg for attention among the inspirational quotes and cat videos of Facebook and Twitter?
For some people, disengagement is a natural response to information overload. For others, repeated exposure to false information instills an illusory truth that is resistant to correction. Crucially, false beliefs are not sustained due to a lack of correct information. Rather, “false beliefs become politicized, disseminated, and integrated into individual belief systems”(Nyhan 2016). Put less academically by Malcolm Muggeridge, “people do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to”.
In this context, the underlying problem with “post truth” and “fake news” is not just about shoring up a struggling news industry under attack, although that is hugely significant, it is also about improving the capacity of people to make informed decisions about the information they consume. This problem extends far beyond the capabilities of the news media. Primarily, it concerns the role of education – specifically, in politics, civics and critical reasoning - in empowering citizens to make informed decisions. After all, truth and facts are meaningless if the public at large are unable or unwilling to recognise them.
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