Why Is It Unhelpful to Talk About Fake News?

Within the last two years, ‘Fake News’ has quickly become a household phrase. In U.S. Google searches, its popularity grew ten-fold in late 2016 and early 2017. The phrase is often used by–and strongly associated with–the U.S. president Donald Trump who adopted the term just before he took office in January 2017, according to BBC.

The phrase has been however, adopted by others as well. From hs.fi, Google finds more than 24 thousand hits for ‘valeuutinen’, the Finnish translation of the phrase. From nytimes.com, the hit count for “fake news” is 126 000. Now, why is this problematic? Well, as Mike Wendling of BBC points out, “the sheer ubiquity of the phrase ‘fake news’ [has] perhaps rendered the term meaningless. All sorts of things — misinformation, spin, conspiracy theories, mistakes, and reporting that people just don’t like — have been rolled into it.” When it’s used by everyone from Donald Trump to New York Times to your neighbour Matti, there’s hardly any objective standard for what constitutes fake news.

In serious journalism though, the meaning of ‘fake news’ can be quite safely be assumed to align closely with the Wikipedia definition of the phrase: “deliberate disinformation”. Even so, problems arise when serious media adopts the practice of referring to entire media outlets as ‘fake news’. In Finland, the term ‘valemedia’ has been coined for this purpose. This is also a regular way for president Donald Trump to use the phrase.

What happens when you refer to a whole media outlet as ‘fake news’? I’d argue that at that point the phrase becomes only a rhetorical device. It’s quite simple. If a media outlet is intentionally misleading, it is likely that it is not misleading for the sake of misleading. Rather, the media outlet most probably has another goal, for which lying is simply means to an end. Sometimes facts may actually support the message the outlet is trying to present. Donald Trump says it quite well: “The truth is a beautiful weapon.”

Now, if you say that a media outlet is ‘fake’, you’re probably not claiming that they only publish disinformation. Rather, you’re probably arguing that they’re publishing enough disinformation to qualify them as fake. Then, what is ‘enough’? Is the standard same for you as for others? What happens, when Donald Trump calls CNN ‘fake news’? Would you argue against it? And if you would, would your argument boil down to: “They’re truthful enough to not be fake.”

Here’s the problem. When Donald Trump says CNN is ‘fake news’, it is a subjective claim, and not a falsifiable statement. As CNN has to only be untruthful enough, any evidence of bias is sufficient for the claim to be subjectively true. Similarly, when Helsingin Sanomat labels MV-lehti as “fake media”, it is similarly only subjectively true as MV-lehti certainly reports facts when they can be used to support their message. On the other hand, as the claim is truthful only subjectively, it can also be dismissed subjectively as false.

To reiterate, the problem is in the implicit metaphorical nature of the phrase ‘fake news’ when applied to media outlets. As any single media outlet is unlikely to be across the board untruthful, the phrase connotes a subjective standard.

Following the media discussion of fake news, it seems that phrase also carries a negative stigma with it. Publishing–even accidentally–a piece of disinformation, presents a risk that the media outlet will be branded as ‘fake news’. Perhaps, that is why The New York Times has began advertising themselves with this:

Notice, that The New York Times does not strive for the truth, they are the voice of truth. In essence, they’re claiming infallibility. And in theory, if you want to elude the charge of ‘fake news’, you have to be infallible, because even the tiniest amount of disinformation can make you fake.

Another question is, is the claim of infallibility itself… fake?