What even is Fake News?
Fake news is one of those terms that has grown beyond itself like a linguistic tumor. The President of the United States uses it as a derogatory term for anything he doesn’t like, and any number of public figures have adopted that language, either wholeheartedly or in part.
I’d like to explore that more in a future article, but before I do, let’s think about the term fake news and what we could conclude that it means if we didn’t already have an idea.
News is Real and Easy to Define, And I’m Pretending to Be It
By definition, fake news purports to be news but isn’t. So one kind of fake news is something of fraudulent origin. In this sense fake news is an appeal to authority, based on a common and undisputed sense of what the authority is. If we assume that everyone knows what “News” is, and that “News” is a matter of credentials and authority then fake news is fake because it claims credentials and authority it doesn’t have. If I claimed that Clockworks Academy was a division of CNN or the BBC or CBC, any subsequent claims would be fake news.
In another article I will explain how to recognize this kind of fake news, as well as other ways of recognizing and identifying appeals to authority and how to gauge your skepticism in that respect.
News Is Real and Easy to Define, And I’m Imitating It
In a related category we would have anything that isn’t actually from a news organization of any kind, but imitates the recognizable style of news organizations. This is also a kind of appeal to authority, but instead of a fraudulent appeal to a real authority, it is an appeal to a fraudulent authority. There are so many minor news organizations and most people have so much exposure to the style and voice of news organizations that a careful imitation of style can be surprisingly persuasive.
In another article I will explain how to recognize this kind of fake news, and how to see through stylistic appeals to authority.
“News” Is Always Already a Slippery Category
But wait. Not everything that is real news comes from an established news organization, and not everything an established news organization says is news, or even purports to be. CBC is a Canadian news organization, but it also publishes opinion, commentary, and even fiction. Nobody is likely to think that Schitt’s Creek is news, but if the criteria for recognizing real news is the authority of the source then we would have to conclude that it is, because CBC, an established and recognized news outlet, publishes it.
If news means true or factually accurate information about current events of general interest or public concern then we might consider something to be real news even if the publisher is an unverified unknown anonymous blog as long as what that blog reports corresponds to reality, is current, and is of general interest. Conversely, if an established, credentialed, publicly recognized news outlet publishes something that does not sufficiently correspond to reality or is not sufficiently current, or is not of general interest it would not be news. So by this understanding of fake news, a “news” item could be “fake” even if it is true, because in one way or another it is not actually news.
In another article I will explain how to recognize and assess the accuracy or timeliness of a news item.
“Fake” Is Always Already a Slippery Category
Finally, accusations of “fake news” may trade on the various and ambiguous meanings of the word fake. Contrary to what you might assume, fake does not necessarily imply the existence of real. So “fake news” is not necessarily an imitation of something real. It doesn’t necessarily imply that there is a kind of news that doesn’t qualify as fake. In fact, as the term is used by its most vigorous proponent, President Donald Trump, the implication is not that one particular example of news fails to live up to the platonic ideal of real news, but that news as a category is fake, by which what is meant is not just lack of correspondence to an abstract ideal of reality, but lack of usefulness. Remember that one of the definitions of “news” is something in the public interest. From that perspective news in general can be fake if news in general is deemed to never be in the public interest, or if the public interest is conflated with a person’s personal interest or personal perspective.
Even more profoundly, this idea of fake news depends on a radical skepticism coupled with philosophical solipsism. Now, radical skepticism is not, in the abstract, an irrational perspective, although it is often held irrationally by people who do not examine their own belief systems. My purely rational options are either to trust the testimony of other or to only trust my own testimony. But I know that my own testimony is not always reliable. I know for an unwavering certainty that not everything I have ever said has been true. So it follows logically that not everything other people say is true either. And we know that’s correct. So if I rely on the testimony of others I am guaranteed to be deceived and incorrect sometimes. But I just said that my own testimony is also unreliable. That applies even to the testimony of my senses. I am absolutely certain that my senses are not absolutely reliable. So the logical options are to trust my senses anyway, in the knowledge that I am being fooled, or to accept that the reality exists but that I have no reliable access to it, or to posit that the reality does not exist.
The conclusion is that the world really is what I make of it. Truth really is dependent on what people agree to or accept. This perspective is rarely a rational, logical, philosophically examined series of ideas and is more likely to be a vague drift, but the result is the same. Things that I disagree with really are fake.
In another article I’ll write about some of the antidotes for solipsistic radical skepticism.
I hope you’ve found this article interesting! I’m looking forward to writing more!
Be sure to check out the courses I offer here at Clockworks Academy!