Today’s talk, the title is Fake News, Fake Money and Living in a World Without Authority. So fake news has been in the news a lot lately and you have all of these accusations swirling around, right? The established media, The New York Times, The Washington Post, they’re pointing fingers and going “These purveyors of fake news,” primarily at internet-based sites, and internet-based sites are pointing right back and going, “Do you remember Judith Miller? Anybody? What about this Judith Miller? Yeah, there WMDs with aluminum tubes in Iraq. Bullshit. So fake news happens on both sides, right? And that’s really the perplexing thing. How did we arrive in a world where we can’t even tell what’s true and what isn’t?
You see well-established backbones of authority and truth like The Washington Post and The New York Times or even CNN and Fox News and other TV, CBS and ABC, and what are they doing? They’re cheerleading for a war based on false premises and that was just last week. Again, not Iraq, Syria this time, right? And you’re like, “Did we learn nothing? Did we learn nothing?” We didn’t learn anything.
How did we arrive at this world?
Why do we have this debates over fake news? And part of it has to do with the rise of the internet in the early ’90s. So work with me here, let’s walk through the steps. The internet didn’t disrupt newspapers and TV companies by stealing their audience for news. That came much, much later. First, the internet disrupted their sources of most profitable revenue. And for newspapers, that was the classified advertising section. That was where they made most of their money, small business advertising in the classified section. And the internet came along and Craig listed that shit, right? And just completely undermined it. Oh, you can do all of that free and it’s instantaneous and boom. And suddenly, all of the most profitable revenue disappears and the newspapers have to [inaudible 00:02:46].
And then it happened again with TV. They started losing advertising revenue to the new popular websites that were getting more eyeballs. So they started losing, first, the local and small advertisers who were able to position as targeted to specific demographics and audiences because they could get much more fine grained information. TV is a one way thing. You have no idea who’s watching, right? And with the internet, they could really target advertising. So TV starts losing advertising revenue, too.
So what did they do? Trim the fat, right? Trim the fat. So in newspapers, that’s oh, journalists, we don’t really need them. So no foreign desk, cut that. Investigative journalism, cut that. What’s selling more papers? Ask Judy and the astrology section and infotainment and cartoons and sensationalist news, and if it bleeds it leads. And inexorably, the long downtrend of the news industry started. They gutted their foreign desks. They gutted their investigative journalism. They gutted their fact checking. They gutted their copy editor desks.
Until what was the left was a bunch of interns running around copying the press releases of powerful corporations and presenting them as fact, and were taking notes when someone who seemingly was important said something, not questioning any of it, and just writing it down, publishing it as truth. Fake news happened because the very basis for producing truth was removed from the very institutions whose job it was to produce truth. And this caused a very weird situation because until that time, how do you know if something’s true? Well, The New York Times said it. The Washington Post said it. It was on CBS. Surely, they have fact checked it. Therefore, it’s the truth. The fundamental basis for discovery of truth was to examine the source.
You go to college. You’re writing an essay. They say, “What are you basing this argument for? Give me citations. Source your arguments. Where are the facts?” And if you took a headline from The New York Times and sourced it, they go, “Okay, great. That’s a citation that’s valid. It’s a valid source.” We used the issuer to determine the quality of what they issued. We looked at the authority of the news based on the authority of the institution that said it because that was a good model. That was a good heuristic. That gave us a good false positive, false negative ratio. It was a bet. It was a way to say, “I can’t fact check all of that, but these people have, so if I read, I will become not only educated, but also informed.”
And now, we’re in a situation where the people who watch the most TV and read the most newspapers are the least informed part of the electorate.
How did that happen? Because the institutions are still standing. Their authority is still standing in some ways. The basis of credibility is still there. They still have the big buildings and lots of circulation and big name, but the mechanism that delivered truth is no longer there. The mechanisms that ensured quality is no longer there or is significantly eroded. And what’s their response to that? We’ll try harder? No. They turn, they look at the internet and they go, “You’re fake news.”