FAKE NEWS

One of the problems this writer identified early in this blog is the lack of political knowledge among the citizenry.  At the time, he offered some studies that supported this general observation.  This most recent election cycle provides further evidence; no, not by who won, but by the role fake news played in the results.

          As the legitimate news services have pointed out, on-line “news” stories started out giving false information about outlandish events that never took place.  Apparently, there is an art involved.  The stories, to be effective, must pick up on certain commonly held beliefs and then be written in a certain style.  In short, they should mimic legitimate news offerings such as in Time or Newsweek magazines.  But their similarity is limited to style, not content.

          This whole business was being given secondary attention among the legitimate press, but this all changed recently.  When a man showed up at a Washington eatery and fired an assault weapon (not hurting anyone) because he wanted to find evidence of a child abduction ring that Hilary Clinton and John Podesta were operating out of the establishment, the existence of fake news took a serious turn.  Of course, no such evidence of abducted children was to be found since the entire story was false.

          The question of why such misinformation spreads – especially when such information leads to such incidents as this shooting or adds to the factors that determine elections – becomes important.  The most obvious reason is that social media provides the technological capacity to spread the misinformation, but why do people believe it, particularly in the case of more outlandish stories?

          This writer wants to suggest a factor, and this factor falls in line with one of this blog’s central claims.  When a nation, as this one has done, adopts a natural rights view of governance and politics, when it sees a citizen as autonomous to define its basic political and other values with little sense of what is legitimate or not, then one can expect a certain segment of the population to drift toward the bizarre and extreme.  This works on more than one front.

          A belief in one’s own autonomy does not necessarily equate such liberty to others.  Part of the credo of natural rights is to extend such rights to others, but this can be lost as it becomes a way of thinking among a general population in which varying levels of sophistication exist.  It is a short jump from “me” having a right to believe what I want to believe, to I want everyone believing the same thing.  And once this jump occurs, then it can manifest itself in many ways.

          For example, such a person is apt to believe conspiracies when he or she confronts a person who disagrees with his/her beliefs.  This, in turn, makes such a person predisposed to believe the most outrageous of stories as the abduction story described above.  There is a lack of fundamental beliefs in such a society – beliefs that place parameters on what one accepts as true or desirable in public policy.  Everyone is left to his/her own devices when formulating political beliefs.

          Not only is the problem that people believe such outlandish stories, but that they, in turn, have chosen to disbelieve legitimate sources of news, since such outlets provide a steady stream of information that counters their beliefs.  Now, one should not accept what one hears via legitimate sources without question; every source of information can get things wrong to varying degrees.  But there is, of course, a big difference between a source that honestly gets something wrong and one that is aiming to disseminate outrageous information.

It is also information that is bolstering a political position.  What has not been clear in the reporting of such fake news is how much of it bolsters conservative positions as opposed to liberal positions.  Is one side of our political spectrum more susceptible to fake news?  Also, to what degree did fake news affect how people voted? 

One can be sure that political scientists will consider these and other questions.  Whatever they find, one can see that what is taught in our civics classrooms and how successful such teaching is are important elements of maintaining our democracy.  Such concerns deserve our attention even when it comes to what is taught in the nation’s schools, for it is civics classes that are primarily charged with preparing students to meet the challenges of their political world.