The reach and power of fake news, already a force during the presidential campaign, took on life-threatening proportions on Dec. 4, 2016 when it led to rifle fire inside a pizzeria in Washington, D.C.
No one at Comet Ping Pong was injured by the North Carolina gunman, who said he was investigating what is a false but persistent conspiracy theory
— that the business was a front for a child sex ring run by Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager. The theory, according to PolitiFact, had been spread through viral e-mails, discussion threads and social media in the weeks leading up to Election Day (including by a Donald Trump adviser, who was then fired).
Other fake news –– Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump or Drag queen
RuPaul claims Trump groped him –– may not have produced physical danger, but nonetheless these false stories were read and shared by at least hundreds ol thousands of people.
So, what to make of this phenomenon? And what, if anything, to do about it?
We asked five experienced journalists who graduated from Baylor for their perspective:
Claire St. Amant ’08, a Texas field producer for CBS News’ 48 Hours; Judy Cartwright ’71, a retired editor at Newsday in New York; Michael Coleman ’93, Washington bureau chief for the Albuquerque Journal; Beth Haller ’83, professor of journalism and new media at Towson University in Maryland; Tony Pederson ’73, Belo Distinguished Chair in Journalism at Southern Methodist University and former executive editor of the Houston Chronicle.
Why do people believe fake news stories?
PEDERSON: The strength of the Internet is also its greatest weakness.
It empowers people to communicate and gives them a voice never available in traditional publishing. It also enables them to use communications for personal gain. It is, as [communications scholar] Henry Jenkins has pointed out, the first fundamental change between mass media and people since Gutenberg invented movable type in the middle of the 15th Century.
COLEMAN: People tend to latch onto narratives that fit, or perpetuate, their
pre-existing worldviews. A fake story such as Pope Francis endorsing Trump is also exciting, or “newsy,” and people are often eager to be the first to disseminate news on social media.
HALLER: Actually, there is a lot of psychological research about why humans believe lies. First, humans tend more toward belief, rather than disbelief. There is also something called the
Dunning-Kruger effect, which basically says if someone lacks knowledge about something, they usually don’t perceive their own ignorance. It’s called “being ignorant of one’s own ignorance.” Few people have media literacy or understand the process of actual journalism, but they don’t know they are media illiterate so they believe fake news.
ST. AMANT: Wild statements are attractive. We’re naturally intrigued by them, and thus the click. This attention encourages all kinds of irresponsible headlines and stories, and so it feeds the beast. And the more often we see the same headline, the more likely we are to believe it.
CARTWRIGHT: I can speculate that when a fake story is in sync with something you would like to believe,the immediate reaction is to embrace something without examining it. What is much harder to understand is why people refuse to examine something long-term, after evidence is presented that a story is false.
Is the 2016 presidential campaign partly responsible for the rise in popularity of fake news?
PEDERSON: The campaign exposed the raw nerve endings of virtually everyone. Any political discussion seems to need a proper level of hysteria, and the fake news discussion seems to have reached that level very quickly.
Coleman: The election was so polarizing and people had such a voracious appetite for news about the candidates that, in retrospect, it was easy for shady “news” purveyors to exploit this
demand. Many people certainly shared fake news that fit their worldview without giving it much thought or scrutiny.
St. Amant: As much as it pains meto say it, the media flat out got it wrong
on Trump from Day 1. His candidacy was treated as an entertainment story and routinely mocked by established media outlets. This drove his followers, which we now know represent a large section of Americans, to other sources. Some of those were reliable; many were just out to get clicks and page views.
Cartwright: What distinguished the 2016 election season was howsophisticated people had become at disseminating information online, be it fact or fiction. That sophistication was in part due to the development of social networking, which made it possible for readers/users to talk back to the institutions and people who provided their information. A short time later, users were able not only to talk back but to ignore institutions and mainstream media and instead generate stories of their own, disseminate them and watch as they were shared widely.
Fake news led to gunfire on Dec. 4, 2016 inside the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria (left) in Washington, D.C. their own, disseminate them and watch as they were shared widely.
HALLER: What happened in this election cycle is more about the ease of sharing any information and people’s lack of interest in whether what they are posting or tweeting has any basis in fact. That to me is what is devastating about fake news – so many people and politicians not caring about facts, which can objectively be shown to be true or false. That those people think opinion and facts are the same – that’s scary.
What, if anything, should the media do, and what should readers do, to combat fake news?
COLEMAN: If you think a news story seems dubious – and especially if you’ve never heard of the source – Google it to see if any other reputable news sources that you have heard of are also reporting it. If it’s sensational news and none of the mainstream media is reporting it, chances are the story is dubious.
ST. AMANT: I like PolitiFact.com and snopes.com because they do their best to track down the origin of the statement and how it became misconstrued. There’s usually a kernel of truth in there somewhere, and that’s what makes the lie so insidious.
HALLER: We all have to recognize our own ignorance and question everything. What sources are being used in a story? What are the affiliations of those sources, and do they have the
knowledge to discuss the topic in the news? Basically, if we care about finding accurate content rather than fake news, we all have to learn how to be savvy fact checkers from here on.
