So We Shouldn't Allow Fake News. OK. Who Decides What's Fake, Jake

[7wo7rees]

Jim Schutze, one of Dallas last, best and greatest journalist.


http://www.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/archives/2016/11/23/so-we-shouldnt-allow-fake-news-ok-who-decides-whats-fake-jake

I just read that President Obama, who has the worst record in White House history for criminalizing and prosecuting investigative reporting, wants Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose early success was based on knifing his partners in the back, to become the czar and supreme regulator of “Fake News.”



What a truly horrible and utterly frightening idea.



Better idea: How about relying on the Constitution to tell us what we can read? Why don’t we remain faithful to the document that has seen us this far, instead of turning our reading liberties over to Mack the Knife Zuckerberg and Lock 'Em Up Obama?

Fake news is a term of art to describe stuff on the internet that is wildly and deliberately untrue, off the charts crazy, and yet somehow people believe it anyway. Obama’s idea is that Zuckerberg’s company, Facebook, is the channel by which a lot of fake news gets dispersed, therefore he should be the one to find a way to make fake news go away.



How? Oh, well, with an algorithm, of course. You know about algorithms, I assume. Didn’t you study them once? I did. Algorithms fall into a portion of my general education that I categorize under “real hard math.

Go to link to read it all.

Impressive, a few responses and not on single rec...

[RandySF]

1. When someone says the Pope endorsed Trump and it's not true

That's fake news.

[rzemanfl]

2. Or, as the Republicans said about the Pope re: abortion-

"Who the hell does he think he is?"

[pinboy3niner]

6. Or as Lincoln tweeted about the Pope...

"Nice hat, dude!"

[msongs]

3. trump's every twit is not news yet DU is swamped with them nt

[Oneironaut]

4. I find it a little scary that people "want to do something" about fake news.

What about those of us who would never take Facebook seriously as a news source? I can't blame Facebook for wanting to get legitimacy, but it's never going to happen. I would no sooner believe Glenn Beck's drug-induced ranting.

I guess the real problem is that the MSM gets their news from Facebook, but that's just embarrassing. Journalism is a crackpot profession these days, no offense to REAL journalists.

[bhikkhu]

5. For the generation raised on the internet, after the end of the fairness doctrine...

it seems that they don't even understand the question. For some people I've talked to, its not about whether something is true ("whatever that means&quot its about how it makes you feel.

Good luck to Zuckerberg turning things around, what is really needed is education, for a great many who have no interest in being educated.

[Oneironaut]

7. The fairness doctrine was for the radio / b/c those were public airwaves

It would have never touched TV media, and especially not the internet.

I object to the idea that people need their news filtered for them. The real problem is, this isn't a critical thinking nation anymore. We believe everything we see, no matter how ridiculous, and no matter if it's from a legitimate source or not.

Decisions based on feeling are almost unwaveringly awful. Trump's election is case-in-point. How sad it'll be when people will begin to comprehend what they've done.

[bhikkhu]

10. I think the fact of its existence led to some general influence in media

...though even on radio it was never forcibly implemented - in practice, more like a guideline of expectations; continually challenged as problematic under the first ammendment, and eliminated eventually.

I'm not sure the problem with news is that we believe everything we see, but that people crave meaning, and find meaning in how a thing makes them feel. In effect, news told from a neutral perspective attracts no audience - people don't want to know facts, they want to be told how to feel about things. A puppeteer who makes you feel how you would like to feel, using bits of news as tools - that's what we have on the air, on the screen, on the internet.

[Turbineguy]

8. There's plenty we can do about fake news.

As long as it does not involve education. The repubs would never stand for that.

[NCTraveler]

9. I think they should work to stop fake news on Facebook.

[PoorMonger]

11. Agree with Op

But I also really do feel like the fake news phenomenon is an epidemic that has ruined a lot of things; really social media in general has given people such a short cut to 'feeling' informed. It's part of why I think Trump brought out a whole new group of first time voters. Not necessarily that they've all been waiting for the toxic soup that is trump's appeal. But so many people who would have previously abstained from voting and admitted they don't know enough now 'Think' they know a lot.

Traditional news sources only feed into the problem now too because the 24 hour news cycle only actually gets shorter and shorter with every opinion writer and journalist now watching their twitter feed for the trending topic rather than going after the stories they would have in the past.

Now we only get a few select investigative reporters who look for the big smoking guns that are no longer even recognize as such because we've been desesitized to the appalling level of crazy that it feels normal.