Fake-y Break-y News: Are we living in a post truth society?
“I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”; “Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie”; “Better slip with foot than tongue”; based on the way we speak, it would certainly seem that we value the truth in this country. However, in a time when we constantly hear terms like “fake news” and “alternative facts” and see powerful figures repeatedly caught in lies, it can be hard not to wonder if we truly care about truth at all; have we found ourselves in a post-truth era?
“Post-truth” is defined by Oxford English dictionary as “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion that appeals to emotion and personal belief.” While I do not believe that we are truly living “post-truth”, truth clearly still has its place, we are certainly experiencing some of those defining characteristics in today’s society. President Trump exemplifies the idea of valuing emotions over truth frequently. There has been many a time when he has championed an idea, like when he stated that his inauguration crowd was the biggest ever, even though there are available facts that prove many of his ideas to be blatantly false. He has also championed the idea that there was “mass voter fraud” in the 2016 presidential election, that climate change is a hoax, and that President Obama was born in Kenya, just to name a few.
The fact that a person in such a prestigious governmental position is making these wild statements is enough to have someone wonder about how we value truth; however, what really cements the rise of emotions being valued over objective facts is all of the people that support President Trump’s ideas. It seems that many are just taking what he says to be the objective truth without taking anything to the contrary into consideration. This appears to be the true indication that we might be on our way to a “post-truth” era, that so many people choose to blindly accept an emotional statement when there established truths proving otherwise that are easy to access. However, it is important to recognize all of the people that do see these emotional statements for what they are and speak out against them. Both mass groups of citizens as well as powerful figures like Senator Schumer, Chancellor Merkel, and many others have recognized Trump as someone that seems to ignore the truth, and have expressed a strong desire to establish a framework where we respect objective facts more than flippant emotional decrees.
The idea of living “post-truth” has been enabled in the switch from modernity to the current postmodern era. In the modern era the means by which people received their information made it much more difficult to give serious weight to opinions that deviated from what was decided to be the truth. The mediums of communication during modernity, starting with the newspaper and eventually moving to the radio and then the TV, were very controlled. There were specific employees of these mediums who discovered and reported on the news- a random person couldn’t just show up and start talking unless a reporter wanted to hear what they had to say. There were also not so many different versions of each medium; for example, although this changed over time there were only ever a handful of widely well-regarded newspapers that people chose to read. When it came to Radio and TV, there weren’t many stations at all. Producing a show was expensive, and it would be tough to get on the air. Until cable was introduced for TV, there was only a handful of channels to choose from, and even fewer of them were news. This meant that the news shows of modernity were largely unified in what they reported on and what they considered news.
Much of the accepted information that was decimated came straight from high institutions like governmental organizations. Today, the opposite is true and there are hundreds of news shows, all with seemingly different ideas about the news and the truth. News shows today seem to be divided on whether they align more with Conservative or Democratic sensibilities. In the time of high modernity, however, political parties were not nearly as important. There was less of a line in the sand between the two as there is today, and crossing over the aisle was viewed as more acceptable. Post-modernity has also seen the rise of talk shows on news channels, such as Morning Joe and Fox & Friends, where the opinions of a few people on relevant news stories seem to be held as more important than the facts. In fact, Fox & Friends is one of President Trump’s favorite shows, and he has often shown it to be where he gets a significant amount of his information in regards to what is happening in the country.
Beyond TV, the post-modern era oversaw an even more significant event when it comes to how we get our information; the birth of the internet has enabled a whole new way of life. People no longer rely on news shows or papers for current events- they can simply turn on any device and immediately get any information about anything. News anchors used to be like trusted allies that people relied on to receive their news. Now in the era of content creation where masses of people making things themselves rather than relying on others for content, anyone can put anything on the internet, and many people simply accept it as true, even if it isn’t. The internet is now home to a host of “fake news” websites where false or misleading news stories are posted and then shared to Facebook. Even though these stories are often blatantly false (which can be deduced by factors such as the grammar and spelling in the article, a clickbait headline, or the aesthetic or URL of the website itself) many people who are less tech-savvy, or people who simply desire the articles to be true so that they can use them to push their agenda, choose to believe and share these false stories anyway.
The rise of fake news in today’s world can seem unprecedented, and in a way it is. Although mediums of communication have been experiencing false news stories since their invention, the rate at which we are seeing fake stories today is mind-blowing. The main reason behind it is the amounts of money that can be made from false news. Both here and in other countries such as Macedonia, where the town of Veles is considered to be a “fake news factory”, people have discovered that by creating websites with lots of ads, they can post articles on these websites, share them on Facebook and drive traffic to their site where people will inevitably click on the ads, making revenue for the website creators. There are all sorts of fake news sites involving topics such as health tips or celebrity stories, but the people creating these websites discovered around the time of the 2016 election that the stories that generated the most clicks, and therefore made them the most money, were the ones about politics, specifically President Trump. And so, the wide berth of fake news that we are bombarded with today began.
What fake news, alternative facts, and politicians who skip over the truth have shown us is that in today’s world, more than anything, one of the most important things a person can do is stay informed. With the barrage of information that deviates from the truth, if a person doesn’t take the time to dig and figure out what the facts really are it can be exceedingly easy to be swept up in the emotions of some of these misleading stories and statements. By staying informed and ebbing vigilant, a person can help combat falsehoods and spread the objective facts, maybe even convincing others who got caught up in this “fake news epidemic”.