The Making Sense
Faking News
All news is fake news. By this I mean that all reports of current events are to some extent “made up” by the time they are received by a mediated consumer distanced from the original source. Recall that “fake”, from the Latin facere (to make; to do), is a member of the family of making words that includes fact, factory, fashion, artificial, and face. Also in that family is the name of one of the main players in the realm of fake news – “Facebook”. One study found that in the final three months of the 2016 US presidential campaign, “the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets” (Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed, 16 November 2016). With all these facere words in mind, it is ironic that the standard test for whether news is “fake” is to subject it to “fact-checking”. Facts themselves are things – artefacts – that we make through artificial processes of Creation and Production. Any “fact” deserving of the name is something established by some process involving human skill and judgment. What matters is not whether news or facts are made up – they always are – but how they are made up and what relation there is between the thing at source and the thing as made up for public reception. Public reception also plays its part in the broadcast of fake news. We therefore need to think in terms of what I call “Receiver Responsibility”, from the case of the journalist who receives the factual grain of a promising story to the editor who publishes journalists’ copy to the online user who re-tweets a tweet.
Anthony M. Nadler, Making the News Popular: Mobilizing U.S. News Audiences, University of Illinois Press (Read)
Andy Grundberg, “Eddie Adams, Journalist Who Showed Violence of Vietnam, Dies at 71” 20 Sept 2004 (Read) (subscription to external site required)
Michael Safi, ‘Ganges and Yamuna rivers granted same legal rights as human beings’, The Guardian (21 March 2017) (Read)
The Duke of Edinburgh, Telegraph Obituaries(Read)
James Pearce, “Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has no sympathy for departing Manchester United boss Jose Mourinho” Liverpool Echo 18 December 2018 (Read)
BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed Post-truth Presented by Laurie Taylor 19 Sep 2018(Read) at 20’40
Written evidence submitted have One submission made by computer scientists researchers to the UK’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee rightly by By Dr Carlo Kopp, Dr Kevin B. Korb, Dr Bruce I. Mills (Read)
Karen Ryan, Medicare fake news (YouTube) (Watch)
Robert Pear, “U.S. Videos, for TV News, Come Under Scrutiny” (New York Times, 15 March 2004) (Read)
Gunther, Richard, Erik C. Nisbet, and Paul Beck. 2018. “Trump May Owe His 2016 Victory to “Fake News,” New Study Suggests.” The Conversation, February 15 (Read)
House of Commons Library, “Who regulates political advertising?” 4 November 2019(Read)
BBC News “Dawn Butler thrown out of Commons for PM lie accusation” 23 July 2021 (Read)
Hugh Schofield, “Coronavirus: What’s behind France’s AstraZeneca turnaround?” BBC News, 2 March 2021 (Read)
The Development of Brecht’s Theory of the Epic Theatre, 1918-1933 Author(s): Werner Hecht Source: The Tulane Drama Review , Sep., 1961, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Sep., 1961), pp. 40-97 Published by: The MIT Press (Read)
Karen Ryan, Medicare fake news (YouTube) (Watch)
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