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Solving the Problem of Fake News
By Nicholas Lemann
The New Yorker
November 30, 2016
Highlighting = Words I want to look up and Bold = important ideas
What we are now calling fake news—misinformation that people fall for—is nothing new.
Thousands of years ago, in the Republic, Plato offered up a hellish vision of people who mistake
shadows cast on a wall for reality. In the Iliad, the Trojans fell for a fake horse. Shakespeare
loved misinformation: in “Twelfth Night,” Viola disguises herself as a man and wins the love of
another woman; in “The Tempest,” Caliban mistakes Stephano for a god. And, in recent years,
the Nobel committee has awarded several economics prizes to work on “information asymmetry,”
“cognitive bias,” and other ways in which the human propensity toward misperception distorts the
workings of the world.
What is new is the premise of the conversation about fake news that has blossomed since Election
Day: that it’s realistic to expect our country to be a genuine mass democracy, in which people
vote on the basis of facts and truth, as provided to them by the press. Plato believed in truth but
didn’t believe in democracy. The framers of the American Constitution devised a democratic
system shot through with restrictions: only a limited portion of the citizenry could vote, and even
that subset was permitted to elect only state and local politicians and members of the House of
Representatives, not senators or Presidents. In guaranteeing freedom of the press, the framers
gave a pass to fake news, since back then the press was mainly devoted to hot-blooded opinion.
They felt protected against a government that came to power through misinformation, because the
country wasn’t very democratic, and because they assumed most people would simply vote their
economic interests.
Only in the twentieth century, as the United States became a complex modern society with mass
media and professional journalism, did people begin to worry about the fake-news problem, and
when they did they usually came down either on the side of restricting democracy or restricting
the media. (As American democracy came to include a greater number of people—former slaves,
immigrants, and women—élites, including liberal élites, began to find it more worrisome.) Walter
Lippmann began “Public Opinion,” published in 1922, with a long quotation from Plato’s cave
parable, and wound up abandoning the idea that the press or the public could discern and then pay
attention to the truth. Instead, he wanted to create “political observatories”—what we’d now call
think tanks—that would feed expert advice to grateful, overwhelmed politicians, relegating both
the press and the public to secondary roles in government policymaking.
In the nineteen-twenties, when radio was as new and vastly influential as the Internet is today, the
United States decided not to create a government-funded news network like the British
Broadcasting Corporation, but instead to turn broadcasting over to private industry and to regulate
it heavily. The American news world that many people are nostalgic for had only three networks,
which were required to speak in a nonpartisan voice and to do money-losing public-service
journalism in return for the renewal of their valuable government licenses. That world
disappeared when Ronald Reagan deregulated broadcasting, in the nineteen-eighties. When cable
television and the Internet came along, they were structured on the more libertarian idea that
everybody should have a voice and everybody should have free access to all forms of
information, including misinformation. It shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of people, both
creators and consumers of journalism, prefer fake news to real news.
So what should we do about journalism’s role in non-reality-based politics? The easy part—
which won’t be all that easy, because of the current economic troubles of journalism—is to
expand the real-news ecosystem as much as possible, by training people in how to do that work
and by strengthening the institutions that will publish and broadcast it. (Along with this goes
enhancing the smaller ecosystem for correcting fake news: snopes.com, PolitiFact, factcheck.org,
and so on.) The hard part is figuring out what to do about the proliferation and influence of fake
news. It’s a sign of our anti-government times that the solution proposed most often is that
Facebook should regulate it. Think about what that means: one relatively new private company,
which isn’t in journalism, has become the dominant provider of journalism to the public, and the
only way people can think of to address what they see as a terrifying crisis in politics and public
life is to ask the company’s billionaire C.E.O. to fix it.
Our government has many ways of dealing with the natural tension between public opinion and
reliable information: think of the Federal Reserve Board, the National Science Foundation, the
National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the federal judiciary. People
grouse about these institutions—one can caricature them, and people do, as élitist or as
inexcusably political—but, on the whole, they work. Most countries, including the United States
in the past, have found their way to some parallel structure for real news. Many countries are
stricter about enforcing diversity of private media ownership than we are, and they find ways to
give an economic advantage to the better news organizations while still maintaining publicservice requirements to shape the behavior of private companies that use public airwaves.
It’s facile and unhelpful to assume that government’s role in journalism can be either nothing or
absolute control for propaganda purposes. There is a big difference between state media (like the
odious Russia Today) and public media (like the BBC). Most developed countries with press
freedom have far more public media, including multiple government-funded broadcast-news
channels, than we do. National Public Radio is one of the very best American news organizations,
but it has minimal government funding; the Public Broadcasting System is also mainly privately
funded, and it doesn’t maintain a large network of national and international correspondents the
way NPR does.
It’s sad that, in the wake of the election of a President who doesn’t hesitate to tell his followers
things that simply aren’t true, we are not even talking about any of this. If people really think that
something should be done about the fake-news problem, they should be thinking about
government as the institution to do it.
Notes
Fake news can be described in various ways by different people and different authors. The most common manner in
which it is described is, various kinds of misinformation that people fall for. In the literature field, a number of
authors has used different characters who mistake their roles to elaborate more about fake news. In the real life
situation, there are also various instances where people are fed with fake news. An example is the American
Constitution that deceives people about democracy yet the citizens do fully practice democracy. This is fake news!
As a matter of fact, the government comes to power through misinformation as common citizens are only given the
authority to vote state and local politicians and the House of Representatives. They vote senators or presidents.
The idea of fake news can as well be traced back to the 19 th century when radio was very influential the manner internet is
today. The government had their own plans and did not create a government funded news network. Instead, it was turned
to the private sector and thereafter, regulated it heavily. For example, they had to do as the government required so that
they could receive their licenses for operation. Ronald Reagan deregulated the broadcasting field when cable and
television came but still people had access to all kinds of information including misinformation. It is very evident even in
the 21st century that creators and consumers of journalism prefer fake news to real news. The suggestion on what can be
done against journalism and non-reality-based politics is to expand the real-news ecosystem and training people how to
report real news by strengthening the institutions that will publish and broadcast news. The social media such as
Facebook is also highly used to give fake news and this can be solved by asking the regulators to correct the fake news.
Nicholas Lemann joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1999, and has written the
Letter from Washington and the Wayward Press columns for the magazine.
The Remedy for the Spread of Fake News? History Teachers
By Kevin Levin
The Smithsonian
December 6, 2016
Few people would approach a complete stranger on the street for information about the pressing
issues of the day, and yet that is just how many behave on the internet. In the wake of the 2016
election, reporting from Buzzfeed and other outlets has made it increasingly clear that the
American voter is woefully lacking in the skills needed to judge the veracity of a news website.
Among the many headlines from fake news websites were reports that Pope Francis endorsed
President-elect Trump, that Hillary Clinton used a body double throughout the campaign and sold
weapons to ISIS.
The founders and authors of these fake news promulgators craft their stories for the sole purpose
of maximizing visitor hits to in turn generate massive revenue. Their deceptions play to
readers’ worst fears regardless of whether the writers themselves subscribe to the political
leanings of the article's content. "It is not intended to pose an alternative truth," writes author Neal
Gabler, "as if there could be such a thing, but to destroy truth altogether, to set us adrift in a world
of belief without facts, a world where there is no defense against lies." In comparison with news
outlets (and other sites) that offer ideologically biased takes on the most pressing issues of the
day, fake news operations occupy a unique place on the web and constitute an obvious and
menacing threat to unsuspecting visitors. The inability of so many readers to distinguish between
the two, and knowing when to steer clear of a website altogether, is undoubtedly concerning.
For those of us on the frontlines of education, especially for history teachers, this problem is
nothing new, given the ways in which the rise of the internet has transformed the teaching of the
subject over the past 15 years. Students and teachers now have access to a vast amount of
information about the past, but few know how to discern what is reliable and what is not.
The problem surfaced for me in 2001 when a student handed in a research paper on the early
history of the Ku Klux Klan that minimized the level of racial violence during Reconstruction and
characterized their relationship with black Southerners as overall positive. The sources were
drawn almost entirely from websites published by individual Klan chapters. The student had not
thought about the obvious bias of the website or whether it constituted a legitimate historical
source. The experience served as an important learning experience for the students, but even more
so for me.
Even as late as 2001, my students still relied primarily on printed materials compared to Internet
sources. Librarians maintained control over new additions to the stacks, allowing for a certain
level of quality control, but with each passing year the availability of faster personal computers,
handheld devices and increased access to the web provided students with easier access to
information about an ever-expanding number of historical subjects. Students and teachers
benefited immensely from this increased access. Teachers could now introduce their students to a
deep well of primary sources and historical figures that never made it into textbooks.
Opportunities for students to conduct their own research through primary and secondary sources
was soon limitless, defined only by the time they are willing to spend researching.
On the other hand, the technology quickly outpaced educators’ ability to police or even guide
students as to how best to search and assess online information. An unsubstantiated narrative,
perpetuated by the media, that children are digital natives, naturally hardwired to understand how
to use computers, helped to exacerbate the problem even further. Students were left to figure it
out on their own as schools gradually cut back on the purchase of additional printed sources or
purged their collections entirely. Where once librarians taught students how to research, few
schools appreciated the important role they could play in educating students how to search and
assess information on the Web. A recent study of Internet literacy among students by the Stanford
History Education Group shows that they are incapable of "distinguishing advertisements from
news articles or identifying where information came from."
There is no denying that access to primary sources from the Library of Congress and other
research institutions, along with secondary sources from the scholarly community, has enriched
the teaching of history, but their availability means little if they cannot be accessed or
distinguished from the vast amount of misinformation that awaits the uneducated user online.
In 2008, George Mason University professor T. Mills Kelly created a course called "Lying About
the Past" in which students were encouraged to create fake websites about a historical subject.
Students worked on creating a fake Wikipedia page, blog, and videos about Edward Owens, a
fictitious Virginia oyster...