Why Fake News?

How did we arrive at this world? Why do we have this debate over fake news?

Part of it has to do with the rise of the internet in the early '90s. The internet didn’t disrupt newspapers and television companies by "stealing" their audience for news. That came much, much later.

First, the internet disrupted their sources of most profitable revenue. For newspapers, that was the classified advertising section, where they made most of their money. Small businesses advertising in the classified section.

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WorldWideWeb -first web browser 1993

The internet came along and Craigslist-ed that, just completely undermined it.

Now you can do all of that online, almost free and instantaneous.

Suddenly, all of their most profitable revenue disappears and the newspapers have to adapt. Then it happened again with television. They started losing advertising revenue to new popular websites that were attracting more eyeballs.

First they lost the local and small advertisers, who were able to position ads to target specific demographics... and audiences, because they could gather much more fine-grained information. Television is a one-way thing. You have little to no idea who is watching. So what do they do?

"We don't really need them. No foreign desk, cut that."
"Investigative journalism, cut that."
"What is selling more papers?"
"If it bleeds, it leads."

And the long downtrend of the news industry started.

They gutted their foreign desks, gutted their investigative journalism, gutted their fact-checking, gutted their copy editor desks. What was left? A bunch of interns, running around copying press releases from powerful corporations... and presenting them as fact; taking notes when someone seemingly important said something. Not questioning any of it, just writing it down and publishing it as "the truth."

"Fake news" happened because the very basis for producing truth was removed from the institutions...whose job it was to produce truth.

This caused a very weird situation. Until that time, how do you know if something is true? Well, the New York Times said it. The Washington Post said it. It was on CBS. Surely, they have fact-checked it? Therefore, it is the truth.

The fundamental basis for discovery of truth was to examine the source. When you go to college and write essays, they ask, "What are you basing this argument on?" "Give me citations." "Source your argument." "Where are the facts?"

If you took a headline from the New York Times and sourced it, they would say, “Okay, great."
"That is a citation from a valid source.” We used the issuer to determine the quality of what they issued. We looked at the authority of the news based on the authority of the institution that said it.

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Now we are in the situation where the people who watch the most television and read the most newspapers... are [often] the least informed

How did that happen? The institutions are still standing. Their authority is still standing in some eyes. The basis of credibility is still there. They still have the big buildings, circulation, and big names.

But the mechanism that delivered truth, that ensured quality, is no longer there or significantly eroded. What is their response to that? "We will try harder"? No. They turn to the internet and shout, “You’re fake news!”

Arguably, a lot of the stuff on the internet is fake news, because it never had any of these mechanisms. But the internet that had none of the mechanisms, and newspapers that no longer have the mechanisms, are now producing truth on a relatively equal basis. Every now and then, some blogger uncovers some incredible story that nobody’s noticed; it is the truth and the news networks pick it up.

Every now and then, the traditional institutions fall flat on their faces and deliver bullshit to us, packaged in a fancy name.

People start questioning whether they should believe anything. What is the other option? Where do you go from here? Must you evaluate every fact for yourself? Do you have to build into your critical thinking the fact-checking department that they fired? How do you go about evaluating every piece of knowledge as fact or fake news?

Now we outsource fact-finding to the tribe that we belong to. If the tribal leader says those guys are lying, we just go along with it. Tribalism is part of the human nature.What has just happened in news, leaving an entire generation unable to discern truth from fiction... and easily manipulated by propaganda. I'm about to suggest today that this will also happen to money.

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