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As “Fake News” 46.01 CREDIT: Ben Jennings 52 INDEXONCENSORSHIP.ORG 00_index_46-01.indb 52 28/03/2017 21:31:24 IN FOCUS Reel-time news DECODING THE NEWS 46(01): 52/65 | DOI: 10.1177/0306422017703615 Manipulating news and discrediting the media are techniques that have been used for more than a century. In this special section, Index’s global reporting team brief the public on how to watch out for tricks and spot inaccurate coverage. Below, Index on Censorship editor Rachael Jolley introduces the special feature ICTIONAL ANGLES, SPIN, propaganda that are spun, include lies or only half the Fand attempts to discredit the media, story. there’s nothing new there. Scroll back to But sadly while the internet has brought World War I and you’ll find propaganda us easy access to multitudes of sources, and cartoons satirising both sides who were fac- the ability to watch news globally, it also ap- ing each other in the trenches, and trying to pears to make us lazier as we glide past hun- pump up public support for the war effort. If dreds of stories on Twitter, Facebook and the US President Donald Trump is worried about digital world. We rarely stop to analyse why the “unbalanced” satirical approach he is one might be better researched than another, receiving from the comedy show Saturday whose journalism might stand up or has the Night Live, he should know he is following whiff of reality about it. in the footsteps of Napoleon who worried As hungry consumers of the news we need about James Gillray’s caricatures of him as to dial up our scepticism. Disappointingly, very short, while the vertically challenged research from Stanford University across 12 French President Nicolas Sarkozy feared the US states found millennials were not scepti- pen of Le Monde’s cartoonist Plantu. cal about news, and less likely to be able to When Trump cries “fake news” at cover- differentiate between a strong news source age he doesn’t like, he is adopting the tactics and a weak one. The report’s authors were of Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa. Cor- shocked at how unprepared students were in rea repeatedly called the media “his greatest questioning an article’s “facts” or the likely enemy” and attacked journalists personally, bias of a website. to secure the media coverage he wanted. And, according to Pew Research, 66% of As Piers Robinson, professor of politi- US Facebook users say they use it as a news cal journalism at Sheffield University, said: source, with only around a quarter clicking “What we have with fake news, distorted through on a link to read the whole story. information, manipulation communication Hardly a basis for making any decision. or propaganda, whatever you want to call it, At the same time, we are seeing the rise of is nothing new.” techniques to target particular demographics Our approach to it, and the online tools with political advertising that looks like jour- we now have, are newer however, meaning nalism. We need to arm ourselves with tools we now have new ways to dig out angles to unpick this new world of information. 53 INDEXONCENSORSHIP.ORG 00_index_46-01.indb 53 28/03/2017 21:31:25 46.01 TURKEY DECODING THE NEWS A PICTURE SPARKS A about the event. In fact, the piece was writ- THOUSAND STORIES ten anonymously. These signs suggested to the sceptical reader that the news probably came from KAYA GENÇ dissects the use of shocking someone who did not leave their desk to images and asks why the Turkish media write the story, choosing instead to dissemi- didn’t check them nate images they came across on social media and to not do their due diligence in Two days after last year’s failed coup at- terms of verifying the facts. tempt in Turkey, one of the leading news- On 17 July, Istanbul’s medical jurispru- papers in the country, Sozcu, published an dence announced that, among the 99 dead article with two shocking images purport- bodies delivered to the morgue in Istanbul, edly showing anti-coup protesters cutting there was no beheaded person. The office the throat of a soldier involved in the coup. of Istanbul’s chief prosecutor also denied “In the early hours of this morning the situ- the news, and it was declared that the news ation at the Bosphorus Bridge, which had was fake. been at the hands of coup plotters until last A day later, Sozcu ran a lengthy com- night, came to an end,” the piece read. “The mentary about how it prepared the article. soldiers handed over their guns and sur- Editors accepted that their article was based rendered. Meanwhile, images of one of the on rumours and images spread on social soldiers whose throat was cut spread over media. Numerous other websites had run social media like an avalanche, and those the same news, their defence ran, so the who saw the image of the dead soldier suf- responsibility for the fake news rested with fered shock,” it said. all Turkish media. This made sense. Most of These powerful images of a murdered the pictures purportedly showing lynched uniformed youth proved influential for both soldiers were said to come from the Syr- sides of the political divide in Turkey: the ian civil war, though this too is unverifiable. ultra-conservative Akit newspaper was Major newspapers used them, for different positive in its reporting of the lynching, cel- political purposes, to celebrate or condemn ebrating the killing. The secularist OdaTV, the treatment of putschist soldiers. meanwhile, made it clear that it was an ap- More worryingly, the story showed how palling event and it was publishing the pic- false images can be used by both sides of tures as a means of protest. Turkey’s political divide to manipulate public Neither publication credited the images opinion: sometimes lies can serve both pro- they had published in their extremely popu- gressives and conservatives. lar articles, which is unusual for a respecta- ble publication. A careful reader could easily spot the lack of sources in the pieces too; there was no eyewitness account of the pur- Kaya Genç is a contributing editor for Index on ported killing, nor was anyone interviewed Censorship magazine based in Istanbul, Turkey 54 INDEXONCENSORSHIP.ORG 00_index_46-01.indb 54 28/03/2017 21:31:25 IN FOCUS No author is attributed to this article or any news agency There’s no image credit, nor are there eyewitnesses in the story itself 55 INDEXONCENSORSHIP.ORG 00_index_46-01.indb 55 28/03/2017 21:31:25 46.01 CHINA DECODING THE NEWS There’s no direct quote in which Ma pledges to specifically support Fan, nor a quote from Fan or his family The rest of the article uses rehashed infor- mation and images 56 INDEXONCENSORSHIP.ORG 00_index_46-01.indb 56 28/03/2017 21:31:25 IN FOCUS A CASE OF MISTAKEN any quote from Ma or from Alibaba Group. PHILANTHROPY Most publications that ran the story listed no quotes at all. One of the few that did was news website New China – sponsored by JEMIMAH STEINFELD writes on the story of state-run news agency Xinhua. Even then Jack Ma’s doppelganger that went too far the quotes did not directly pertain to Ma funding Fan. New China also provided no Jack Ma is China’s version of Mark Zucker- link to where the comments came from. berg. The founder and executive chairman Copying the comments into a search en- of successful e-commerce sites under the gine takes you to the source though – an Alibaba Group, he’s one of the wealthi- article on major Chinese news site Sina, est men in China. Articles about him and which contains a statement from Alibaba. In Alibaba are frequent. It’s within this context this statement, Alibaba remark on the poor that an incorrect story on Ma was taken as condition of Fan and say they intend to ad- verbatim and spread widely. dress education amongst China’s poor. But The story, published in November 2016 nowhere do they pledge to directly fund across multiple sites at the same time, al- Fan. In fact, the very thing Ma was criticised leged that Ma would fund the education for – only funding one child instead of many of eight-year-old Fan Xiaoquin, nicknamed – is what this article pledges not to do. “mini Ma” because of an uncanny resem- It was not just the absence of any com- blance to Ma when he was of a similar ments from Ma or his team that was sus- age. Fan gained notoriety earlier that year picious; it was also the absence of any because of this. Then, as people remarked comments from Fan and his family. Media on the resemblance, they also remarked on that ran the story had not confirmed its ve- the boy’s unfavourable circumstances – he racity with Ma or with Fan. Given that few was incredibly poor and had ill parents. The linked to the original statement, it appeared story took a twist in November, when media, that not many had looked at that either. including mainstream media, reported that In fact, once past the initial claims about Ma had pledged to fund Fan’s education. Ma funding Fan, most articles on it either Hints that the story was untrue were ob- end there or rehash information that was vious from the outset. While superficially published from the initial story about Ma’s supporting his lookalike sounds like a nice doppelganger. As for the images, no new gesture, it’s a small one for such a wealthy ones were used.
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