How Reality Out-fictioned My Fiction With 'Fake News'
Once upon a time, I began writing a little American tale-- taking a wild reality and mixing it with my own somewhat exotic imagination.
For my fictional tale, I imagined that there would come a time when the stories being pushed by mass-media were revealed as being false, fabricated, and agenda-driven fictions of their own. Having few examples of such a thing as fake news being discussed on the news in 2014, I did my best with it. I had to ask myself; how would the news handle such a story about themselves?
A couple of years ago, I had no idea how the news would become the news. I wanted the curious event to happen in my story because of it's inevitability.
In my fiction story, a city police officer had been arrested for leaking official police documents to the public, with one of the document's alleged secrets being that police worked with the news outlets in creating false stories on the news; 'fake news'.
First, here's a excerpt from the chapter-- my version of fake news from a few years ago, how I wrote the news being on the news for my fictional tale, how the story's TV news quickly dealt with it then:
The TV news was still covering the news leak story, and a guest pundit was now on the screen discussing Karen White's arrest and her wild allegations: "...now, do you think that if the news was creating fake news stories, that you would ever hear about it on the news?" The news team laughed as he continued "And if you did hear it on the news, then according to Officer White, it's probably a fake story anyway, right?"
--from 'Fictionarium chapter 4'
That was the best I could do. I thought I'd covered it, and I moved on. I had supposed that in a small town with it's own news station, the local media would be able to get away with that little bit of verbal prestidigitation and that the story about "fake stories" would be done. The people of Hill Valley could laugh it off easier than they would embrace it, since the notion had been coupled with 'conspiracy theories' which poisoned the well of information enough to numb society's mind. (See link below for full chapter from that story and the description of the 3 types of foil hats)
The whole chapter is about different types of tinfoil hats, and now, seeing in the real world the foil hat being firmly placed on media's desperate head, it's fascinating to watch-- I never could have imagined how 'fake news' would play out in real life-- so many variables I'd left out.
I knew it would happen, but I had no idea…
Watching the current reality now in January of 2017, I'm quite impressed with how reality has handled the fake news. It is a masterpiece of complexity, so many layers and side-stories, so many fake stories, so many lies!
My story of such fake news can't compete-- what's happening now in the news is what my tale only hinted at, and reality's version just went above and beyond all of my expectations. Exciting, fast paced action and drama is what reality offers lately-- and the comedy! Reality has it's humor, and even while it's looking like this ongoing theater is all designed to dismantle the United States from the inside by dividing and sub-dividing the population into fighting factions, I can't help but applaud the idea of people in the USA becoming aware that their news is only the mouthpiece of the war machine that is Washington DC, and then to stop fighting with everybody and each other about things that aren't even real.
Reality Getting Unreal
How can I write anything that's as fascinating as what's going on right now in reality? I thought I'd write some fiction, maybe some mind-blowing craziness-- but I can't compete with modern reality. If I get busy typing something that I think is good, I'm missing something that is happening live, real events that are far more sensational than any of my little imaginings.
What I Got Wrong
A big problem in my fictional story was that nobody died. The 'fake news' didn't directly cost anyone their lives-- death was never even mentioned as an option in that story.
In reality's version of fake news, many thousands of people have died because of fabricated "NEWS" stories, pushed onto the population until eventually the loudest believers in the society practically demand that someone be punished and killed for what is presented on the news.
What I got Right
It's a fact that many people would rather laugh off anything that has been drizzled with the word "CONSPIRACY" instead of engaging in the slightest hint of critical thinking about why they are hearing the stories in the first place, or simply asking themselves "why do they want me to believe that this story is fake?" I had plenty of examples of that sort of cognitive dissonance to work with, and it was fairly easy to imagine new examples of it for my storyline.
What I Could Not Imagine
"Truth is stranger than fiction." There's the real news. The beginning of 2017 has been a surreal journey into the world of disinformation, media-manipulation of itself, political upheaval like never before seen in the USA, and with mass-media now fighting for it's life on TV-- the best mind-control device ever invented, I can't keep up. Try reporting what's going on right now? Nobody can type that fast. Make a video? By the time it uploads, something more unbelievable happens in real-time.
As events pile on top of each other more rapidly than ever in this apocalypse of information, modern reporters will only be able to stare, reporting to themselves in garbled internal dialogue in a swirling stream of consciousness as the world unfolds in fast-forward lotus blooming intensity. That's all I had. The best I could do. That's the news. That's the way it is.
-----------
heres the link to the chapter about tinfoil hats:
The News- Three Primary Types of Tin-foil Hats Discussed
if you like, up-vote and comment below, and thanks for reading
follow for more
Nice hat.
Thanks for the post.
Just before the "fake news" term hit the mainstream, I wrote a story about an attempt by the establishment to control the narrative, gone horribly awry. It is a story about an AI, and the fake news angle was more or less incidental, but given the way things are playing out, I'm happy it was used as part of the context. Take a look, if you like. It's a very short story. I'm working on a format for short steemit attention spans that I'm referring to as "blurb fiction". Please let me know what you think. It's an old post, so comments are disabled.
https://steemit.com/ai/@lifeworship/the-truth-will-set-you-free-if-it-doesn-t-kill-you-first-original-fiction-short-story
Thanks for sharing your story, it reminded me of a term that I heard many years back, 'electronic ink' which was a theory that someday the news and information would be changeable according to agendas. Then, the internet happened!
The "electronic ink" idea, and it's relation to the "memory hole" is what makes me exceedingly skeptical about Google's "Project Gutenberg" and the push I see now to de-fund paper libraries.
Skepticism in google at all is probably a good plan, it looks like it hopes to control that memory hole and then all information. There's just too many of us now though, people are still uncomfortable talking about reality, but many know what's going on now.