“Fake news” had been in the news so much since the election last month that you’d think it was a new problem. Not true. Peddling that stuff has been part of government and corporate business models for years. Now relative amateurs have mimicked their dark art and spread it with the speed of light through supposedly trustworthy social media sites.
Let’s start with our government’s propaganda. “It’s regular intelligence procedure to try and influence a country’s policies through the press,” a U.S. intelligence officer told Tabassum Zakaria of Reuters in 2002. The CIA’s own documents describe such a practice. They planted fake stories in Iranian newspapers prior to helping overthrow its Prime Minister in 1953.
In a Washington Post story last week, Adam Taylor recounted a case where America was the victim of fake news. In 1983, a newspaper in India published a story claiming the Pentagon had developed the AIDS virus as a biological weapon. It was picked up by a Soviet Union weekly two years later and they helped spread it into 50 major newspapers around the world by 1987.
America’s so-called “newspaper of record” has been duped into reporting false stories. As America debated going to war with Iraq in 2002, Judith Miller wrote a series of influential articles about Saddam Hussein’s ability to produce weapons of mass destruction. Their legitimacy came from quotes she attributed to unnamed government officials within the Bush administration. We’d be laughing at how the Times was fooled if they hadn’t helped launch the Iraq War debacle and its tragic aftermath.
In 2006, the Center for Media and Democracy published a report about video news releases (VNRs) “designed to be seamlessly integrated into newscasts.” Aptly titled “Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed,” these were described as “pre-packaged ‘news’ segments and additional footage created by broadcast PR firms.” The government wasn’t the sole culprit though. “VNRs are overwhelmingly produced for corporations,” the Center wrote, “as part of larger public relations campaigns to sell products, burnish their image, or promote policies or actions beneficial to the corporation.”
What happens when corporations normally in competition with each other find a common cause? The public gets fake science news such as the Global Warming Petition Project. It challenged the science of global warming, now called climate change, in 1998 and in 2007. The document accompanying the petition was published in a scientifically professional style and format suspiciously designed to look identical to the annual Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Among the 30,000 scientists who supposedly signed the petition were the fictional TV attorney Perry Mason, three doctors from the TV series MASH, and the long since deceased Charles Darwin.
The American people have been guinea pigs for news reported by reputable media outlets packaged with the appearance of official sources. Now teenagers in Macedonia have copied those practices by creating intelligent looking websites such as WorldPoliticus.com and fed them to us through Facebook and Google News, two sources that many Americans have come to trust. Their motive is the same as Facebook, Google and the entire corporate world – to make money.
There’s no doubt social media needs to clean up its act. But the television and print news media have their own work to do to expose disinformation produced by our government and the titans of private industry. If they don’t, our nation will become a melting pot of confused citizens who trust only the news, real of fake, that matches their biases.
But does any producer of fake news really care if the public is confused? Not according to Michael P. Lynch. He compares fake news to the “oldest of cons, the shell game.” The goal, he writes in a New York Times opinion piece, is “to get you confused enough so that you don’t know what is true.”
Lynch has a more than a causal notion about truth. He’s a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut and the author of several books, including “Truth in Context”, “Truth as One and Many” and most recently, “Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data.”
That last title hints that the more information we have at our disposal, the more ignorant we can become. And since it’s easier to manipulate and control an ignorant populace, not everyone with wealth and power will be interested in giving us the truth and nothing but.
To fix this problem we can’t continue to imagine America as a government of the people, by the people and for the people. We not only have to be more vigilant on everything our government does, but we must become the check and balance for social media and every other product and service the private sector tries to sell us.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
