The True Story of Fake News
In The True Story of Fake News, conspiracy theoriest Mark Dice “exposes” what he perceives to be lies told by the mainstream media. Mark Dice is a radical conservative, known for his claim that the US government orchestrated the September 11th terrorist attacks. Unbeknownst to me when I bought the book, the text is far less focused on media tactics and strategy, and much more focused on harassing liberals at the expense of minorities in the US. While he criticizes the media for painting conservatives as “racists, sexist, homophobic”, the entire book blatantly reinforces those stereotypes. There is an entire chapter titled “normalizing insanity”, which refers to allies of the LGBT community as mentally ill. The book is so derogatory that it is difficult to differentiate between the author’s hateful opinions and factual information.
Throughout the book, Dice constantly makes huge blanket statements, most of which are very offensive, without giving sufficient evidence to back up his claims. For example, he uses the example of “rare” police brutality incidents, commenting that stories involving a white police officer and a black suspect are overemphasized in the media, and “in reality, the vast majority of killings of black men are armed and dangerous thugs with criminal histories”. It is the use of terms like “vast majority”, that really need concrete statistics to validate being published in a book. In addition, Dice refuses to look at situations from all sides. In this case, he should have compared the number of police brutality incidents involving innocent black men, versus the number of incidents involving innocent white men, and allowed those numbers to evaluate the significance of racism in our justice system. When he does occasionally cite sources, he carefully chooses outlets such as the New York Post, a low-brow gossip magazine, rather than say CNN or other trusted news sources.
However, if you can turn a blind eye to all of the offensive comments in the book, there are a few valuable points in Dice’s analysis of the mainstream media. First, the media is able to lie to us simply by choosing what stories not to or not to share. Although Mark Dice uses this point as an opportunity to attack the supposal lack of attention to crimes committed by undocumented workers, he is correct in that the media has the power to magnify stories that align with their own ideologies, and brush those that do not under the rug.
Another important point the author makes is that fake news is nothing new. Misleading information has always been prevalent in the mainstream media, and people have capitalized on the term to excuse the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. There has always been, and will always be, huge pressure on the media to get people’s attention, which, in a multi-billion dollar industry, sometimes overrides the importance of honest reporting.
Lastly, Dice emphasizes the power that both the media has and that advertisers have, and the danger that can arise if that power is placed in the wrong hands. He refers to the news as a tool, but one that can quickly become a weapon. Old cigarette advertisements are a perfect example of this. Dice shares that to promote cigarettes, American tobacco companies once had women light up cigarettes at a parade since at the time women smoking was seen as taboo. The New York Times then published an article titled “Group of girls puff up cigarettes as a gesture of freedom”. While the newspapers thought they were supporting women’s rights, really they had fallen into the ploy to promote cigarette smoking.
Regarding the “fake news phenomena”, this book does not do the topic justice. It is frankly ironic that this entire book is about exposing fake news when the text itself includes an abundance of misleading, biased information. While part of me wonders if my own liberal ideologies caused me to miss the point, I’m also aware that Mark Dice is a con artist, whose talent is pulling information from anywhere he can find it and putting it all in words that will convince people of his own beliefs. He even criticizes Instagram for deleting his own personal posts that violate their terms of service, and openly writes that in one of these posts he calls Lana Del Ray a “skank” and in another he shares a photo of a white family with a caption that reads “White People: The only race you can legally discriminate against”. He continues on to make the claim “they want people to believe that racism is a one-way street, when in fact many in the black community harbor hatred for whites,” as if they don’t have any reason for such hatred? Throughout the entire book, I honestly felt that I could poke holes in nearly every argument Mark Dice made. To anyone hoping to learn the REAL truth about fake news, this book is not the place to look.