Fake news & post-truth

First of all, I think this discussion about fake news is largely a bunch of bullshit. It’s become this category, nobody knows exactly what it means, and it’s become applied to everything from stuff that’s intentionally deceptive to stuff where people are trying to get the answer right but they get something wrong. Despite the fact that we put out that one Boston Review mailing that said “An Antidote to Fake News,” I never use the term “fake news.” 
Second, a concern about fact is different from a preoccupation with fact-checking. You can legitimately get things right and you can get things wrong. The New York Times published a bunch of stuff that was false in the run-up to the Iraq War. Judith Miller was writing for them and publishing stuff that was crap. It was wrong. I don’t think fact-checking is the answer to everything, but I think skepticism about facts is intellectually and politically dangerous. 
I think there are real concerns about responding to falsehoods, but it’s not some new category in the way that it’s being discussed. But I don’t have much patience for skepticism around facts. I completely agree with you that trying to figure out how to explain a phenomenon, like why Trump won—you don’t get a good answer to that question just by knowing a bunch of facts. Nietzsche's slogan, “there are no facts, only interpretations”—I think that’s a dangerous idea. At the same time, when it comes to understanding political world, the idea that it’s all a matter of getting the facts straight is ridiculous. That’s why while we fact-check our own articles, we don’t publish fact-checking of stuff that other people write. There’s a kind of laziness that sets in: “If you only had the facts right, you would agree with me.” Well, there’s no serious area of intellectual inquiry in which that’s true. No physicist thinks that you just need to get the facts right.

паће wrote: Свака реченица контрира претходној

The big threat facing western societies today is not so much the emergence of illiberal democracy abroad as the persistence of immature democracy at home. This immaturity, exhibited almost daily by the elites, manifests itself in two types of denial: the denial of the economic origins of most of today’s problems; and the denial of the profound corruption of professional expertise.

The first type manifests itself whenever phenomena like Brexit or Donald Trump’s electoral success are ascribed primarily to cultural factors such as racism or voter ignorance. The second type denies that the immense frustration many people feel towards existing institutions stems not from their not knowing the whole truth about how they operate but, rather, from knowing it all too well.

Blinded by these two denials, policymakers prescribe more of what alienates voters in the first place: more expertise, more centralisation, more regulation. But, since they can’t think in terms of political economy, they inevitably end up regulating the wrong things.


The moral panic around fake news illustrates how these two denials condemn democracy to perpetual immaturity. The refusal to acknowledge that the crisis of fake news has economic origins makes the Kremlin – rather than the unsustainable business model of digital capitalism – everyone’s favourite scapegoat.

If they can get you to believe that all the news is propaganda, then all of a sudden propaganda from foreign-controlled state media or sourceless loony toon rants from domestic kooks, are all on an equal playing field with real investigative journalism. If everything is fake, your news consumption is just a dietary choice. And it's different messages for different audiences - carefully tailored. To one audience they say all news is fake, to those who are on their way to conversion they say "Trust only these sources." To those who might be open to skepticism, they just say "Hey isn't it troubling that the media is a business?"