The 21st Century and the Prevalence of Fake News
Fake News. Perhaps President Donald Trump’s phrase ever since he started to use it late in the 2016 presidential election race, calling much of the negative coverage about both his election campaign and his character (even when the coverage had evidence and hard facts behind them). Trump is, surprisingly, right about some things, and Fake News is one of them.
The media is biased. That should come as no surprise to anyone. The 2017 general election here in Britain showed that in abundance with only the Guardian supporting Labour and the majority of other papers hedging their bets with Theresa May’s Conservative Party. This led to the majority of news readers being presented with overwhelmingly negative (and nearly always highly over-exaggerated) coverage of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party.
Similar attacks were flung at Trump on a nearly daily basis during the 2016 election, but, to everyone’s surprise ( and in most cases, shock) he won and is now president. This didn’t change the media’s attitudes though. Instead they became more fervent in their crusade against Trump. Sometimes justly, sometimes unjustly. An example of this is when Trump condemned the violence “on both sides” after the outbrake rioting, fights and the death of Heather Hayer during the ‘Unite the Right’ rally and it’s subsequent counter-protests back in August.
I have little love for Trump, but I have to admit that I found the media’s backlash over trump condeming the violence of both sides of the conflict in Charlottesville baffling; many people, both journalists and the public, attacked Trump for ‘not condemning the “literal” Nazis’ at Charlottesville. Despite the fact that he did. He condemned both sides. That includes the neo-Nazis, the KKK members and white nationalists, all of which actually had a rather small presence at Charlottesville as most of the protesters at the rally were Republicans with mostly moderate views — the chanting and tiki-torches didn’t exactly help their cause, however. Both sides also includes counter protesters such as Antifa, the suspected propagators of the violence at Charlottesville and the ‘Battle for Berkeley’ that occurred earlier in the year. The media criticised Trump for blaming Antifa and other counter protesters, despite the FBI invstigation into Antifa that led to the group being labeled as a domestic terrorist organisation in September. Despite the group being classified as terrorists, the video evidence of them propagating violence and arson, along with their assaults on journalists (a clear violation of the United States’ First Amendment), some media outlets such as Vox ardently defend Antifa as if they were simply the peaceful protesters that they claim to be.
Fake News is everywhere. There are countless narratives being pushed all the time by media outlets large and small as well as by the average person with an agenda. Propaganda for one political ideology or another has infiltrated so many different forms of media — from the way social media platforms treat their audiences to various forms of entertainment and late night show hosts becoming more and more political — that it’s hard for anyone to be able to form their own opinion or get all of the necessary information to fully understand what happened at certain events (the recent mass shootings in America are a perfect example: so much is left out by outlets that have pro-gun control sentiments, sentiments that I share with them, that the truth almost becomes distorted buy the constant agenda pushing). It needs to stop. It’s time that the news became objective once more and for intentionally misleading your audience like so many news companies do to become punishable.
With thanks to Toby Menzies-Sacher
