I came upon an interesting expose piece about dubious fake news checkers on a site that is itself dubious. But since there are plenty of quotes and details that can be researched and it’s heavily hyperlinked, I thought I’d go ahead and use it as a springboard for some crucial thoughts about the fake-news war.
If news weren’t so vital, the circus of nine individuals described in the article would be almost hilarious. If a composite of their profiles were made into a movie, I can totally see Zach Galifianakis getting the lead role!
The scale of their misjudgment does verge on comical. How many hits does Drudge Report get? That’s the compilation site once called “the assignment desk for the rest of the media”, daily linking to sites like the New York Times or USA Today. It’s dismissed as ‘fake news’ by one genius examined in the story. It’s hardly worth berating these guys. If it were not for the censorship trend brewing in big media, we could just laugh them off and yet these people appear to be getting tapped to be the fake news police for the likes of outfits such as Facebook!
There’s a conceptual problem here. Every major news outlet has run with totally illegitimate news stories from time to time. Some have even made it a habit – hello CNN! Aside from the underlying assumption that big media is too big to suffer for any consequences to it’s journalistic mistakes, I don’t think we really want a media environment where one or even several bad stories gets you automatically blacklisted and yet that’s the prize in the unilateral effort by left-of-center media towards predominantly conservative media. Well its actually worse than that because the left would love to have a pretense to close up shop on any and all successful conservative media without any cause whatsoever.
Here’s a more balanced approach: don’t profile news outlets, profile bad news. If Breitbart publishes a bad news piece, come up with system to scientifically rate it and put that out there for the public to see. If the New York Times does the same thing, their news story should be subjected to the same impartial public flogging as any conservative outlet. It’s possible. We live in an age of big data. Anything that involves numbers is pretty much verifiable. We now have robots that can do it. Stories of all stripes that hinge on he-said-she-said content can and should be flagged right out of the gate, but even here, this is increasingly easier to track since very little in life now escapes the smart phone camera. Anything short of this impartial approach is censorship in a free society and can ultimately result in fascism – and I use that term to include the left.
So if anyone is so inclined, they can put this principle to test on the news source that I linked. I wouldn’t try to claim that they got every fact correct and frankly, it isn’t necessary to point out the aberrant trend in media right now. Nevertheless, knock yourself out. If they screwed up a detail, they’re in highly esteemed company.
