Fake News has
been in the news a lot lately…and it’s not just because the President and the
mainline news media are engaging in a war of words. The well-researched role of
Facebook’s Newsfeed in enabling “alternative news” to go viral resulted in that
organization being inundated with a storm of criticism in the month following
the presidential election. According to
Forbes Magazine, Facebook’s algorithm encourages “engagement,” which gives
priority ranking to sensational stories that attract more “clicks,” causing the
story to continue to rise in the rankings on Newsfeed. In a highly polarized
society such as the one we are now experiencing, it should come as no surprise
that biased, misleading and incorrect stories rise quickly to the top.
With
62% of adults reporting that social media is their primary source for news and
two-thirds of Facebook users relying on its site for news (Pew Research), is it
any wonder that a bitterly contested presidential election became even more
contorted by internet memes promoting false stories about the candidates (and
their supporters) that subsequently went viral? It is estimated that, in the
run-up to the November presidential election, 30% of all fake news traffic
could be linked back to Facebook. According to the same Study, 23% of those
polled admitted they had personally shared fake news, whether knowingly or not.
Candidly, I
hadn’t really considered the impact Fake News is having on how some segments of
the electorate perceive the veracity of information passed on to them via
social media sites until I came across these Fake Headlines:
"Pope backs Trump"
"Hillary sold weapons to ISIS"
"FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email
Leaks Found Dead"
I’d like to think that most
informed citizens would find the latter two Fake Headlines so absurd as to be
dismissed out-of-hand; but the first Fake Headline gave me pause. As a
practicing Catholic and an unabashed fan of Pope Francis, I couldn’t believe
that His Holiness would enter into the tempest of American politics; but the
American Church has more than a few Bishops who skirt that boundary from time
to time, so it piqued my curiosity. Not surprisingly, Factcheck.org, a project
of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, debunked the headline by tracing its origin
back to a Fake News TV station/web site WTOE5
News – which acknowledges its purpose is to create satirical news stories
around controversial issues (Think: The
Onion).
Here’s the
troubling part: all three Fake Headlines went viral on Facebook in the run up
to the election. How can two patently absurd statements and a claim written as
satire gain so much traction so quickly? I recognize this is a rhetorical
question, but I grew up in an era when a news anchor, Walter Cronkite, was
considered “the most trusted man in America.”
Since Cronkite’s
retirement, his replacement, Dan Rather, resigned in humiliation after he
broadcast an inaccurate story about George W. Bush’s war record. Fast forward,
ten years later, and NBC News Anchor, Brian Williams, is fired for
misrepresenting his experience as a reporter in the Iraq War. Meanwhile, Fox
News’ “fair and balanced” approach gains traction with America’s middle class just
as the Internet picks up steam as a source of “unmediated” news. In the 30+
years since “the most trusted man in America” retired, broadcast journalism has
not only become an increasingly unreliable source of information (Think: how
many pollsters and pundits got the Presidential Election of 2016 wrong), but is
steadily being replaced by an equally unreliable output of Internet “news.”
Readers of this
space know that my concern isn’t about who won or lost an election, but how
that tortured process impacts the ways in which the students entrusted to our
care make sense of the world around them. I worry about their ability to
distinguish fact from fiction – especially when terms like “alternative facts”
and “fake news” – bandied about on both sides of the political spectrum – inevitably
create doubt in their minds as to who they should believe. I worry about how
they process the deluge of opinion masquerading as news which confronts them
whenever they log-on to the Internet. I see this dynamic at play every time my
Mentor group discusses controversial political and social issues in which their
young perspective is so clearly being shaped by the latest unmediated newsfeed.
I am
particularly concerned about how our young people make sense of this barrage of
misinformation because, as a Lasallian school, we expect our students to
acquire habits of:
§
Faith in the presence of God
§
Concern for the poor and social justice
§
Respect for all persons
These core
values are under assault in the current toxic political and social climate. Our
students are too young to intuitively know how to balance fundamental human
values with what they see on the daily newscast and the latest Internet meme. They
do not experience a framework of trust whenever they turn on the television or
log on to the Internet. And, because they are young and impressionable, they
are inclined to accept at face value what they encounter in these arenas where,
frequently, shouting and name-calling dominate the message. How can they
acquire a “respect for all persons” when they encounter disrespect for those
who hold a different opinion from commentators who claim to speak for the
majority encountering television and the Internet? How can they appreciate the
importance of creating an “inclusive community” when they are exposed to
political strategies which emphasize exclusion rather than inclusion? And, most
importantly for a Lasallian school, how can they nurture a “concern for the
poor and social justice” when they are barraged by messages which claim that
they should take care of themselves first?
I’m not sure how to respond to
these rhetorical questions, but I do know that, as educators and
parents who are committed to Lasallian values, we cannot rest until the young
people entrusted to our care are able to distinguish “fake” news from its real
counterpart.
