Fake News? It’s All Fake!

Barbarous Huns

Life is one long struggle in the dark.

– Lucretius

BALTIMORE – In January of this year, the Empire Herald reported that a “meth-addled couple” had eaten a homeless man in New York City’s Central Park. Later, Now8News reported that a can of cookie dough had “exploded in a woman’s vagina”; the woman was alleged to be shoplifting.

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The fellows depicted above certainly mesh perfectly with the image of meth-addled cannibals conjured by our imagination… A few interesting questions regarding this event remain unanswered to this day. Did they marinate their meal? Fill it with stuffing? What were their wine and salad choices? Was their dinner roasted on a spit, cooked in a jungle wok the traditional way, or were these pale gourmets connoisseurs of wino tartare?

We are writing a series on things that people think they know, but which ain’t so…  popular ideas that are wrong, dumb, or misconstrued, which is practically all of them. In the press lately, for example, is the idea of “fake news.”

Supposedly, there is true news, filtered, approved, and administered by the elite media establishment. And there is “fake news”, such as the deliberately faked stories about cookie dough and meth-addled couples at the beginning of this Diary.

And there is also news provided by Russian manipulators that supposedly cost Hillary Clinton the White House. Separating fake from authentic is what we try to do here at the Diary. But we are overwhelmed.

Half the news is fake, including many of the biggest stories you get from the major media outlets – and reports of fake news! The other half is just mistaken and/or misleading.

In the run-up to America’s entry into World War I, for example, the English cut the cable that gave the U.S. direct access to news from Germany. Henceforth, most of the “news” read by Americans about the war came via England, where it was heavily redacted.

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The assassin and his victim, Andrei Karlov, Russia’s ambassador to Turkey. While making the Travolta-like dance move caught in the photograph above, the assassin shouted “Allahu-akbar! Don’t forget Syria! Don’t forget Aleppo!”. Not a “moderate” rebel we would guess, but rather a sympathizer of assorted head-choppers. The assassination was photographed by several people and most of the pictures look like stills from a Hollywood movie. This gives the incident quite a surreal quality. It is as if it was staged specifically for the the evening news. No unfocused shaky-cam stuff forcing you to squint if you want to see something – these days, we get our daily snuff in high definition! Obviously, modern audiences demand and deserve certain quality standards. There have been rumors that there was more to the assassination than a lone nut going postal;  supposedly it was an attempt to drive a wedge between the governments of Turkey and Russia. If there really was such an objective, it has utterly failed, since they appeared to draw even closer after the incident.

Photo credit: Burhan Ozbilici / AP

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How to persuade a population not interested in war-making to become all gung-ho and start baying for blood? Painting the enemy as a heartless child-killer is a good start…   putting civilians on ships carrying war materiel also works quite well if the bait is taken, but is a tad more cynical. Obviously, the truth is always the first casualty of war and all sides will spread plenty of lies and propaganda (usually it tends to be remarkably similar in terms of content).

Illustration by M. B. Walker

Different Shelves

News is rarely what it pretends to be. It is not a bloodless recitation of indisputable facts, like a list of the temperatures recorded at the North Pole. Instead, every bit of it is informed and persuaded by a web of ideas, myths, and misconceptions. Otherwise, the news would be meaningless.

Every day, millions… no, billions and zillions of things happen. The Roman poet Lucretius, way ahead of his time, described life as particles in random collision. Mr. Jones says something to Mr. Smith… a cold breeze blows across the public parks of Duluth… a bird flies into a window pane in Georgia.

If you really wanted to report what happened, you’d have an infinite amount of material. Obviously, you couldn’t do that. Even if you knew what had happened. So, you apply some artificial standards,  some “categorical imperatives,” as Kant called them. You try to make sense of the world and its goings on by labeling things and putting them on shelves.

It is one thing for a man on the streets of Lagos, Nigeria, to kill another man in the heat of passion. It is quite another for a man in Ankara to gun down the Russian ambassador. Both involve passions. Both involve men. Both stories end with a corpse. But the former is not newsworthy. Different shelf.

The media decides. It tells us that whatever Mr. Jones said to Mr. Smith, it is not worth reporting. It leaves the cold breeze story to The Weather Channel. As for the poor little bird, who gives a damn?

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Titus Lucretius Carus (99 BC – 55 BC), author of “de rerum natura” introduced Rome to Epicurean philosophy, which inter alia applied the atomism of Democritus in its own peculiar way.

Purveyors of Puffery

Your editor has been the subject of news stories from time to time. Unless the article was pure puffery, intended merely to flatter or entertain, the reporters missed the point or misconstrued the facts in such a way that the reader knew less after he had read the article than before.

In one sad instance, an ex-employee committed suicide, distraught over a personal problem. It happened at a time when one of our groups was being investigated by the SEC. (The case ended up as a legal fascination – complicated, but inconsequential – and later largely repudiated by the courts).

The ex-employee was in no way associated with the alleged wrongdoing. And the infraction had nothing to do with the SEC’s usual beat – front-running or market manipulation. But the reporter couldn’t resist: “Suicide at Troubled Baltimore Publisher,” read the headline.

The reader was left to conclude that the poor fellow offed himself because he was implicated in a trading scam that had never happened or even been alleged. In another article in the 1980s, your editor was named as part of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy.” He had been the director of the National Taxpayers Union, earnestly trying to fight waste in government.

Later, he had hired a private investigator to look into the curious death of Hillary Clinton’s law partner, Vince Foster. And now he was criticizing the Clinton administration! The reporter linked us together with other Clinton critics and provided a common cause that never existed.

And now, The Washington Post, owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, has accused a number of websites and opinion blogs of purveying fake news, some of it fed to them by Russian agents!

Yes, Naked Capitalism, Truthdig, Contra Corner, CounterPunch – websites run by former Wall Street Journal editors, former congressmen, former Reagan-era officials, left, right, libertarian – and dozens of others were named. Several of them republish our comments.

We’re proud to be among them…

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WWN’s valiant efforts to counter the fake news epidemic by spreading real news for many years clearly deserves belated recognition. As to the Washington Post: what makes its clumsy propaganda piece extra funny is that it actually used a fake news story to decry alleged purveyors of fake news. This has helped the post-electoral whining in the US reach fresh heights of absurdity. We have to admit we stand in awe of this spectacle. It testifies to a surfeit of unbridled chutzpa and stubborn information-resistance we simply never suspected to exist. Unfortunately there is a dark side to all the fun. In the US the first amendment has proven quite resilient over time, in spite of being frequently attacked. The same cannot be said of Europe, where politicians are already using the completely made up fake news hysteria to push for new restrictions on speech (more on this soon).