For all of the hand-wringing over “fake news” and which publications consist of same — the mainstream media narrative, CNN, Slate, Vox, Axios or even smaller online publications in Virginia such as Blue Virginia or TRS — there’s a reasonable question to ask.
Did it even work?
A new study published by political scientists from Princeton, Dartmouth, and UK Exeter suggests that while “fake news” tended to solidify already cemented opinions, it’s size and scope was limited indeed. From the Wall Street Journal:
The researchers extrapolated that roughly 1 in 4 American adults visited a fake-news site around the time of the election. But stories on these sites accounted for only about 2.6% of all the news they consumed.
Trump supporters were likelier than Clinton backers to visit fake-news sites, and the most ardent conservatives were the most voracious consumers. The 10% of Americans with the most conservative online information diets accounted for 60% of visits to fake news websites. That would seem to support the theory that Trump partisans consumed fake news to reinforce their political attitudes.
But the study also finds that “fake news consumption seems to be a complement to, rather than a substitute for, hard news—visits to fake news websites are highest among people who consume the most hard news.” The more time you spend perusing news online or using social media, the more likely you’ll stumble upon and click on provocative, misleading headlines. But reading information from a variety of sources ought to provide some inoculation against fabricated stories.
More interesting according to the report? The more intelligent you were — i.e. the more knowledgeable one was regarding U.S. civics — the more apt one was to read “fake news” websites.
This isn’t to suggest that the proliferation of “fake news” designed solely to drag people in on headlines isn’t a problem. Unfortunately, this represents a threefold issue: (1) the reliance on the legacy media on headlines to distill narratives, (2) the method by which people consume information on Facebook, and (3) the failure of the legacy media — print and television — to incorporate both sides of a story without narration… in effect, the reverberation of the Vietnam era where “just the facts” was replaced with viewpoints.
What this unfortunately creates is a bubble that Cass Sunstein — formerly of the Obama Administration and one hell of a political scientist — dubbed the “daily me” as early as the late 1990s in a book Sunstein has updated no less than twice to keep pace with the postmodern era of information consumption.
This is the issue that legacy media projects simply refuse to admit, either by lack of staff to consume the viewpoints of the other half of America, or institutional bias itself. It immediately treats all non-legacy media as “fake news” or “blogger” while being utterly blind to the concept that we aren’t living in 1998 anymore.
Thus the pincer movement that information and news finds itself in today.
On one hand, citizen journalism and digital media are producing excellent, groundbreaking analysis and coverage in a way that legacy media simply cannot — VICE, Slate, Vox, and Axios all come to mind. On the other, the proliferation of “fake news” that imitates the very worst of the legacy media — alarmist headlines, pushing a narrative, and a disregard for the other side of an argument while offering a pretense for objectivity (i.e. writing the story first, then getting comment from the other side in a practice known as “fair comment” that is neither commentary nor fair in today’s media).
Legacy media will blame “clickbait” — yet the media has been doing this for as long as yellow journalism. Legacy media will blame “fake news” — but all they have done is imitate the legacy media. Legacy media will blame online publications for stealing their thunder — yet online publications and digital media are filling in a viewpoint gap that larger legacy media publications — and in Virginia, there are precisely five who fit this bill — simply refuse to engage in any meaningful way.
When the lone conservative voice at the Washington Post is Jennifer Rubin? When the 20 year decline of legacy media finds the institution in a bunker mentality? Is there any small wonder why the political right forms their own media (WSJ, FOX), turns to conservative digital publications both nationally (Daily Caller, Washington Examiner) and statewide (TRS, Bearing Drift, Jeffersoniad), and even begins mimicking the ecosystem of “fake news” on the left where TPM, Daily Kos, and Vox are treated as legitimate news sources with viewpoint-driven media of their own (Breitbart, The Bull Elephant)?
Liberals who predominate institutions such as the media tend to air for certain virtues: objectivity, neutrality, anything that preserves the moral rectitude of their own ideological assumptions. Yet in order for institutions to remain as such, there is a specific virtue that must be upheld at all costs — pluralism. Conservatives have long complained about a lack of access to the media’s public square; liberals have long excluded them as an equal voice. Whenever conservatives formed alternative spaces — talk radio in the 1990s — liberals demanded “equal time” in order to negate the advantage in medium created solely by the lack of inclusion within existing institutions.
This isn’t to say that the Russians deserve a seat at the table. There’s a clear distinction between news individuals might disagree with — all news as “fake news” — and openly practiced active measures and disinformation campaigns. Yet as information warfare is developed and practiced by institutions supposedly resistant to such methods, is there any small wonder why media and information consumption has balkanized?
Don’t blame the Russians for fake news. They merely exploited an existing pathway well tread by the legacy media. Instead, blame the institution that failed (and continues to fail) in its primary objective of delivering trustworthy news and information to the public.
That’s the entire reason why we have a freedom of the press in the United States, and it should be honored in precisely such a way. To fail in this moral imperative only creates pathways for a more honorable alternative — or worse, a repetition of the vices of the legacy media.
