Outlawing fake news will chill the real news
As trust in the media falls to an all-time low, some have argued that stronger laws need to be put into place. However, as countries like Malaysia have shown, ‘fake news’ is too slippery a concept to enshrine in law, argues Deakin University’s Sandeep Gopalan in this crossposting from The Conversation.
The term “fake news” has gained prominence in recent years thanks to US President Donald Trump’s attacks against the media during the 2016 US election. In 2017, it was one of Collins Dictionary’s 2017 words of the year.
Unsurprisingly, politicians use the fake news label to discredit media stories that portray them in a negative light. And it’s back in the headlines after the largest television company in the US – Sinclair Broadcasting Group – issued a coordinated campaign of scripted warnings about fake news in terms that echo Trump’s sentiments:
The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media … Some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias … This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
… and how do you define “fake news”? Where do you draw the line?
Is the city-based reporter who drops in for five minutes to do a stand-up at a fatal car crash in a country town and uses the cliché “The whole town is in mourning for this much-loved husband and father” when, for all s/he knows only twenty people in a town of twenty-thousand actually knew the guy and he used to beat his wife and kids after spending his evenings getting drunk at the club (which is how he came to wrap his car around a tree in the first place).
Or how about the (concocted) pool/stringer story about a dying country town possibly bidding for a low-level nuclear waste facility? Channel 7 used four of the supplied vox-pops giving a range of views, while ABC News – devoting the same screen-time to vox pops – only used the two that were most vehemently opposed to suit the ABC news department’s anti-nuclear agenda.
Are they “fake news”?
This article is about protecting something – integrity – which frankly no longer exists. I am not happy about the idea of legislating to curb a journalists ability to do their job, but considering almost nobody is doing any journalism any more and the vast majority of people with that job title are writing unethical click-bait – this seems like an attempt to preserve something that’s already gone.
Not to mention the censored news. Senator Teddy Kennedy wrote a letter to the Kremlin in 1983, asking for their help in toppling Ronald Reagan’s bid for Presidency, by threatening nuclear war.
The letter surfaced in 1991 when Boris Yeltsin opened up the Russian archives.
Not one news outlet reported it. All refused to run it. That’s despite it being treason, and would have sent Kennedy to jail for life. The #fakenews media are nothing new. They’ve been at it for decades.