Assignment: Post-Fact Checking. It’s fun!
The President has made it abundantly clear, that we live in a post-fact (aka post-truth, post-reality) age. Unfortunately, that does little for my sciatica.
On the other hand, it does create new lines of work for journullists:
Post-Fact Checker. Post-Fact Exchequer. Ex-post-facto Exchequer. And Ex-poster-poser Czech. For the question remains:
Q: Who’s going to check all those post-facts?
A: You are.
For this assignment, you will hone your post-fact checking skills by finding corroborating evidence that supports an existing fake news story out there in the world on the net or perhaps in one of our 3 course publications: CTRL-ALT-RIGHT, West of Knob Lick, or The Trumpet-Blow Institute. For a list of fake or mostly fake news sites, look here.
The corroborating source you locate should support not the true or truish parts of the story, but the truthless parts — the parts of the article that for the most part were “plum made up by some so-and-so.” What we used to call lies, but our lawyers suggest we just call “alternative facts,” “variations on the truth,” and “fudged facts.”
For example: If one fake news story reports that a campaign tampered with voting in Ohio, well, you just do a little searching to confirm that story, and voilà — or as they say in Siberia, Там! — another article corroborating the claim. (BTW, the NY Times profiled the journullist behind that story here.)
If another story suggests the President has banned the entry of muslims arriving from only from countries with whom he hasn’t done business:
Там! you find support for that — Or, wait, hold on, maybe that is an example of what we used to call an actual fact. But what’s impressive is that fudge facts can still cause real and meaningful change in the real world, such as this kind of incident.
See, for every “crazy” story— okay, no need for scare quotes — CRAZY story on the interwebs, there’s at least one other post — or often the exact same post, just with more spelling errors — somewhere else. Enough fake news sites have popped up around the Web — and we don’t mean the funny fake sites — that any fudge fact soon becomes reposted into Tweetable certainty!
So let’s demonstrate how the Web reinforces the Web like a great Trump tower made Spider-Man on speed with a little post-fact checking.
Bonus Challenge: What’s the fakest story you can find corroborated by the Interwebs?
See how easy it is to prop up a post-fact reality? Publish your findings in one of our class organs.
Due: Whenever. The hits keep on coming!
Related assignment: Growing the Weeds.
