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Fake News” in an Age of Digital Disorientation

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Fake News” in an Age of Digital Disorientation S. A. MURCHIE & J. A. NEYER ROB WILLIAMS Janet A. Neyer Cadillac High School Cadillac, Michigan 5. FIGHTING “FAKE NEWS” IN AN AGE OF DIGITAL DISORIENTATION Towards “Real News,” Critical Media Literacy Education, and Independent Journalism for 21st Century Citizens Journalism’s job is not impartial ‘balanced’ reporting. Journalism’s job is to tell the people what is really going on. – George Seldes INTRODUCTION “This is what makes covering Donald Trump so difficult,” explained baffled CNN reporter John Corker to a national viewing audience in February 2017, shortly after Inauguration Day. “What does he mean when he says words?” (Badash, 2017). This bewildering statement reflects our increasingly disorienting digital landscape of 21st century U.S. news and information, in which the meanings of words, images and news stories seem to have become completely unmoored from reality. Trump is just the tip of the iceberg. Decades ago, journalist and 1984 author George Orwell famously warned readers to be wary of “doublethink” and “Newspeak” (from which we derive the modern term “doublespeak”), in which governments deploy phrases designed to disguise, distort or even reverse reality—think “war is peace,” or “ignorance is strength.” Post-2016 election, the term “fake news” is the latest phrase to capture what is an age-old phenomenon—namely, how powerful state and corporate actors work together to deploy news and information designed to distract and disorient the rest of us. It is no exaggeration to say that we now live in what I call an “age of digital disorientation,” in which the very meaning of “reality” itself seems up for grabs in a “post-truth” digital media culture controlled by powerful corporate and state actors, and defined by speed, immediacy, and information oversaturation. Never before has independent critical media literacy education and the championing of independent journalism and “real news” been so vital. In this chapter, I will unpack our 21st century news and (dis)information culture by (1) defining “real news,” (2) classifying many varieties of 21st century “fake news,” (3) updating Chomsky and Hermann’s “propaganda model of news” for our 21st century digital age, and finally, (4) suggesting solutions for reviving “real news” in an “Age of Digital Disorientation.” My hope is that this analysis will be © KONINKLIJKE BRILL NV, LEIDEN, 2018 | DOI 10.1163/9789004365360_005 52 R. WILLIAMS FIGHTING “FAKE NEWS” IN AN AGE OF DIGITAL DISORIENTATION of use to two global communities: (1) teachers and students interested in practicing of representation of crucial dimensions of gender, race, class, and sexuality.” (see “critical media literacy education,” (CMLE); and (2) members of the world’s Chapter One). journalism community seeking practical understandings and hands-on approaches Let me be clear here about my own politics. As a teacher and journalist both, I to our contemporary culture of news and (dis)information. I also hope to challenge approach critical media literacy education and journalism, subjectively speaking, as some long-held assumptions about the role of critical media literacy education a decentralist and a communitarian. When left-leaning liberals like members of the and independent journalism within our educational and public spaces, offering a (post) #OccupyWallStreet movement complain about the influence of Big Business, radical starting place for critiquing our US culture of contemporary news and and right-leaning conservatives like the (still stirring) TEA Party movement grouse (dis)information. about Big Government, they are both half right. The problem, as I see it, is BIGness, First, a quick summary of my professional background and political leanings, and the unholy alliance between powerful trans-national corporations (TNCs— as these are germane to shaping my thinking about this chapter’s themes. I write as including US-based news and digital media conglomerates) and U.S. government both a long-time champion of CMLE (I co-founded ACME—the Action Coalition officials from both sides of the aisle (Democrats AND Republicans) who do TNCs’ for Media Education—in 2002) and a working journalist here in Vermont since bidding, often with strategic nudges from what has come to be called the “Deep 2005, when we founded Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence, the state’s first State” (more about this shortly). The United States is no longer a functioning and only statewide radical news journal (now online as The Vermont Independent). republic but a dysfunctional Empire, and the chief role of our so-called US based For 15 years, I have approached our culture of news and information through “news and information” sources is to champion the continued expansion of said both lenses, and I believe that critical media literacy education and independent Empire, whether it is through news and (dis)information distributed from so-called journalism complement and strengthen one another in numerous ways. “Teachers “liberal” left-wing news sources like CNN or the New York Times, or news and and journalists are always political agents; both professions must choose in whose (dis)information deployed from so-called “conservative” right wing news sources interest they are willing to work,” explains P.L. Thomas at our book’s beginning, like FOX or The Washington Post. In my twenty years of CMLE experience, referencing historian Howard Zinn’s famous challenge to those who would most media literacy educators tend to be well-meaning liberals and progressives embrace so-called Objectivity—one “can’t be neutral on a moving train.” “The who bring their own often-unexamined assumptions and biases to the table. As a neutral pose by either is to take a seat on the train, to keep eyes down, and to allow decentralist communitarian, I challenge us to look past media manufactured binary the train to rumble along as if the tracks are not leading to a cliff,” he concludes frames—progressive/liberal versus conservative, Red versus Blue, Democrat versus (see Chapter Two). Republican—and consider alternative and potentially more useful frames as we As a U.S. media historian, furthermore, I understand that the framers of the explore the relationship among our political views, our practice of CMLE, our U.S. republic (Thomas Jefferson chief among them) believed that the only way culture of news and (dis)information, and our promotion of “real news”—“news we the United States might survive as a democracy was if “virtuous” (meaning public can use”—in our age of digital disorientation. spirited and civic minded) citizens developed capacities to critically read, write, and think for themselves and in civic communities. As Italian semiotician Umberto DEFINING “REAL NEWS” Eco explained, channeling Jefferson on the eve of the digital age, “a democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus Before we explore so-called “fake news” and from whence it comes, let’s begin with for critical reflection—not an invitation for hypnosis” (Alvarado, 1993). Eco penned a definition of “real news.” Anyone who has explored the concept of “news” knows these words right at the moment in which images supplanted words as civilization’s that the term has a rich and storied definitional history. Here is a useful starting place, primary form of communication, and a rapidly expanding world wide web saw we Tony Harcup and Deidre O’Neill’s March 2016 article “What Is News? News Values media consumers ushering ubiquitous digital screens and corporately-coded social Revisited (Again),” in which they conclude that “although there are exceptions to media platforms into the most intimate nooks and crannies of our daily lives. Has this every rule, we have found that news stories must generally satisfy one or more of the new digital information age enhanced our capacity as “virtuous citizens”? This is a following requirements” if they are to be selected as “news”: question open for vigorous debate, and central to the discussion is the role of news 1. The power elite: Stories concerning powerful individuals, organisations or and (dis)information in both our public and private spaces. I imagine that Jefferson institutions. himself, were he alive today, would support this volume’s focus on “critical media 2. Celebrity: Stories concerning people who are already famous. literacy,” defined in these pages as “an educational response that expands the notion 3. Entertainment: Stories concerning sex, show business, human interest, of media literacy to include different forms of mass communication, popular culture, animals, an unfolding drama, or offering opportunities for humorous treatment, and new technologies,” focusing on “the ideology critique and analyzing the politics entertaining photographs or witty headlines. 54 55.
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