The next statement is True. The last statement is False.
A Story About Fake News.
At the peak of the political campaign for the next president of the United States many news stories began to erupt in attempts to shift the image of both candidates. Many times these stories were presented in the form of click bait and were funded by major corporations simply for the benefit of advertisement. However, the majority of the people that fell into this spiral of internet news links took this as truth and simply believed the information that was fed to them. I mean after all isn’t the point of the news to be honest and unbiased in the information it produces and presents to the people?
Sadly over the past two almost 3 decades the news (Television, newspapers, online articles ex…) has begun to focus on news that appeals to the masses rather than remaining true to the information that it reports. In many ways it has become more of a form of entertainment rather than the only source we have for truth. The issue then arises, in the fact that society has now no true source for unbiased truth. The most current Presidential Election in the U.S. seemed to be represented as a nothing more than a fight between two immature adults picking at each other like two teenage girls running for prom queen. Regardless of which candidate you feel should have been elected, the media showed both candidates as jokes and many times stories arose that pushed for this concept to be spread throughout the country. So where did the line become blurred between investigative news and entertainment broadcasting?
Fake news has now become a very big topic here in U.S. recently as it was discovered that a group of teenagers from Macedonia decided to exploit the U.S. election by writing several false news stories about the candidates and using advertisement funding to mass produce and distribute these stories on the internet. They were able to make thousands of dollars just from advertisement funding and by using social media sights such as Facebook they created a chain that spread all over the U.S. reaching millions of young adults. Although these stories were false many young people in the states perceived many of these stories true event to the extent that some reached live television coverage.
This shows how due to the mass media portraying the candidates as such immature people, the rest of the nation did not think to question such exaggerated stories. For example in the film Tere Bin Laden by Abhishek Sharma, we see Americans once again being fooled and deceived by a country across the world for economical benefit. Western ideals pin these countries as being of lower education, but as one of the young people involved in writing the fake news pointed out is that just because the U.S. sees them as a lower class country doesn't make it true. In many ways its a reflection of the news the wrote.
However, is what these young people form a country across the world that have no connection to the election themselves any different from that which our news does to us today anyways. They falsify information to create a certain ideology that is meant to sway the thought of the masses. The real question then becomes “What can be consumed as real news and fake news?” If mass media today is so focused on the concept of what story will sell best rather than what the actual facts are, then we can never fully receive news that is simply unbiased and true. I guess what was once news is now simply entertainment. After all, wasn’t that what this election was? Just another reality TV show pinned as news and fed to Americans as entertaining. It only become a serious issue when they realized the only truth came after the show was over and we had elected a president.
