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> unprecedented in modern Western democracies - we've reached "peak fake news" in the USA. Citation needed? The founding fathers owned newspapers & regularly

by wdr1 6y ago

> unprecedented in modern Western democracies - we've reached "peak fake news" in the USA. Citation needed? The founding fathers owned newspapers & regularly fabricated stories about opponents. Ben Franklin openly wrote about it and he was far from alone. William Randolph Hearst controlled a significant portion of newspapers & blatantly used used that power to manipulate public opinion, frequently with suspect information. We went through a whole era of questionable news -- referred to as "yellow journalism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism The fake news around the Gulf of Tonkin escalated the conflict into a relatively minor to what the US would call the Vietnam War. The fake news about Iraq WMDs led to the disastrous second golf war. Bill Clinton stood before the camera & said "I did not have sex with that woman" and his wife, HRC, said it was all "a ring wing conspiracy." Obama said "if you like your health plan, you can keep it", which several newspapers defended & fact-checked as true, as until much later rating it as lie of the year. Don't get me wrong. I despise Trump, I despise what's he's doing, and I want to see him removed. But if we're too be critical of him playing loose with facts, we can't be ourselves. And saying this is "peak" when it's likely only a local maxima seems dubious at best.

some-guy 6y ago
It's a matter of degree. The _degree_ of constant lying the current president does is absolutely insane. I don't like what YouTube is doing either, but it's really hard to say what any other alternative is at this point.
GordonS 6y ago
You point out some good examples, though I'd argue some of those were politicians/governments lying and those lies simple being reported (admittedly, often with an editorial bias). I think what we are seeing now is different. People like Trump don't need doctored satellite photographs and elaborately constructed propaganda that the press will fall for - they can use social media platforms as a very public podium from which to spew lies. And, perhaps because of the viral nature of social media, and perhaps because of the inherent terseness of Twitter, people are bombarded by these tiny nuggests of "truth" from "trusted" people who "obviously" wouldn't lie, and the become "truth" for those people. I think the key difference now is that it's never been so easy to put out "news", and it's never been so easy to consume so very many sources of "news", or so frequently.

by wdr1 6y ago

some-guy 6y ago

It's a matter of degree. The _degree_ of constant lying the current president does is absolutely insane. I don't like what YouTube is doing either, but it's really hard to say what any other alternative is at this point.

GordonS 6y ago

You point out some good examples, though I'd argue some of those were politicians/governments lying and those lies simple being reported (admittedly, often with an editorial bias). I think what we are seeing now is different. People like Trump don't need doctored satellite photographs and elaborately constructed propaganda that the press will fall for - they can use social media platforms as a very public podium from which to spew lies. And, perhaps because of the viral nature of social media, and perhaps because of the inherent terseness of Twitter, people are bombarded by these tiny nuggests of "truth" from "trusted" people who "obviously" wouldn't lie, and the become "truth" for those people. I think the key difference now is that it's never been so easy to put out "news", and it's never been so easy to consume so very many sources of "news", or so frequently.