The Atlantic was recently forced to retract a story about adolescent athletics after it was found aspects of it were fiction and there was a deliberate attempt to deceive readers. The 6,000-word article, originally published under the byline of Ruth S. Barrett, claimed wealthy Connecticut parents were spending lavish sums and constructing “batting cages, pitching tunnels, fencing pistes, (and) Olympic-size hockey rinks” in their backyards to push their children into “niche sports”—all in order to better their kids’ chances at getting accepted into an Ivy League school. Not long after the article’s publication, questions about details within the article were raised by The Washington Post’s media critic, Erik Wemple. It was ultimately determined one of the parents in the article, a mother identified as “Sloane,” had created a son she didn’t have for the story. Furthermore, there was evidence author Barrett either at worst facilitated the deception and instructed Sloane about how to lie to fact checkers, or at the very least was aware of the lie and did nothing to correct it. When the subterfuge was discovered, it precipitated a lengthy editor’s note from The Atlantic attempting to correct the record and apologizing for a “serious error and misjudgment” in putting their trust in Barrett. For her part, Barrett denied the invention of Sloane’s son was her idea, and instead was inserted into the story in order to preserve the anonymity of her source.
However, the issues surrounding the article became further compounded once The Atlantic changed the byline to indicate Ruth S. Barrett was actually Ruth Shalit Barrett, whose career took a hit in the 1990s after it was determined that, during her time with The New Republic, she had plagiarized elements within one article and made up quotes and events that never happened for another piece, which accused The Washington Post and its adherence to diversity initiatives of softening coverage of African American politicians and hiring standards for Black people. The Atlantic claimed, even with this history, that Barrett’s work since those incidents indicated she was deserving of a second chance. But soon after the editor’s note and byline change became fodder for media critics (and the Twitterverse), The Atlantic retracted the article entirely, stating the “trustworthiness and credibility of the author” could no longer be attested to.
Some conservatives pointed to Barrett and this entire mess as another example of “fake news” and proof that readers can’t trust The Atlantic, which came under intense attack from Donald Trump and his supporters after reporting Trump had disparaged the U.S. military. These same people are in large part the same ones who’ve spent the weeks since Election Day living in a fantasyland with krakens, elite strike force teams, and zombie Hugo Chavez’s grand communist conspiracy. While the fake news peddled by Barrett is destructive, it doesn’t represent the values of most journalists or the industry as a whole. But what her behavior does point to is how fake news is driven by a form of selfishness, and that selfishness can be found everywhere, from the top rungs of mainstream media to someone passing along a bunch of crap in a tweet. While there may be all sorts of nefarious forces attempting to spread lies and mistruths for ideological benefit, when one boils it all down to its depths, fake news is a rewriting of reality to make sexier fiction in order to better one’s ego and hopefully, one’s bank account.
One America News Network (OANN) has been hyped, in recent months, as the successor to Fox News for right-wing fanatics who lament that Fox News just isn’t MAGA enough anymore. According to Ashley Gold at Axios, OANN is already living down to the reputation.
YouTube has barred One America News Network from posting new videos for a week and stripped it of its ability to make money off existing content after the Trump-friendly channel uploaded a video promoting a phony cure for COVID-19, YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi tells Axios.
Using hyperbolic headlines and false claims in order to grow an audience is a tried and true tactic. In the summer of 1835, a series of six articles were published in the New York Sun detailing a fantastic discovery: The stories claimed a powerful new telescope in Capetown, South Africa, had discovered life on the moon; observations indicated the presence of “unicorns, two-legged beavers and furry, winged humanoids resembling bats.” The author behind the articles, Richard Locke, asserted the entire thing was a satire, but the public didn’t take it that way. The rival New York Herald ran stories debunking the articles, and author Edgar Allen Poe believed the entire series was a plagiarism of his work.
In the 185 years since giant bat people were said to roam the lunar surface, there have of course been other notable (and more believable) instances of fabrication in journalism. Jayson Blair’s fabrications and plagiarism in articles—mostly about the military and the Washington, D.C., sniper attack—were a major scandal for The New York Times during the early 2000s. In 1980, Janet Cooke made up a Pulitzer-Prize winning story about a child heroin addict on the streets of Washington, D.C., only for it all to crumble after discrepancies in her résumé led The Washington Post brass to demand she reveal her sources for the story. Not even two decades later, Stephen Glass’ career imploded at The New Republic after he invented an entire story about a nonexistent child hacker getting a big payday from a software company Glass made up, with commentary in the article coming from quotes of government officials who didn’t exist. When other journalists attempted to follow Glass’ story to verify the details, Glass even created a fake website and sham phone numbers in an attempt to cover his tracks.
Common to all of these incidents, as well as the history of someone like Ruth S. Barrett, was a self-aggrandizement based on creating a more exciting fiction that benefited the storyteller. Instead of mainstream media’s deficiencies being attributed to systemic bias or a vast left-wing conspiracy to screw over conservatives, the explanation for reporters going to the dark side is usually more venal. In the same way a screenwriter adds in fictional love stories and car chases into a tale “based on a true story” to get butts to the theater, fake news propagates because it allows the people involved to either get attention, make money, or further their careers.
And this dynamic for fake news holds true at almost all levels. Look no further than the current president to see it in action. But the appeal of attention, the comfort to ego granted by information in agreement with one’s own point of view, and how the validation of one’s ideology and interests spreads among communities can be seen in the behavior of various people online.
So let’s explore some of the common aspects of fake news at different levels of media, the nature of the people behind it, and how it spreads to have an impact.
Some rando on the internet
It starts when some stranger who no one knows from Adam says they heard something, or shares an entertaining story about some issue or incident. Maybe it was heard from a friend of a friend, or maybe they claim to work somewhere where the event is supposedly taking place. People who want the information to be true buy into the fantasy first. The person who put it out there gets attention, likes, and re-shares as their story goes viral, but more importantly, they get to be part of something bigger than themselves. When other information contradicts the tale, maybe they dig deeper in order to explain the inconsistencies, maybe they claim there’s new information, or maybe they slink away and don’t say anything else.
Far-right activist and accused criminal Jacob Wohl has been part of multiple attempts to smear political figures including Anthony Fauci, Robert Mueller, and Kamala Harris. Wohl became an internet meme in 2018 when he claimed to have been in a “hipster coffee shop” packed with liberals who were praising the job Donald Trump was doing during a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland. Trump came under intense criticism for his behavior during that summit, where he contradicted U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI while defending Putin and Russian motives. When people questioned Wohl’s story, Wohl claimed it happened at a Verve Coffee Roasters in downtown Los Angeles. The idea of hipster liberal Trump supporters hanging around Los Angeles coffee shops was hard to believe to begin with, but the tweet became the jumping-off point for mockery once an examination of Wohl’s timeline showed things overheard at a “hipster coffee shop” was a recurrent phrasing Wohl used as a crutch—all in service of his claim that even people on the left supported Trump and his policies.
Wohl has been shown to be a liar on multiple occasions. But Wohl, and people like him, just want to stir up enough mess to cause confusion and questions. Because confusion contributes to the feeling among some that nothing can be trusted, or that lies are true because “you can find it on Facebook.”
Websites no one has ever heard of, or fake ones hiding behind recognizable names
A smear circulates on the internet about an event that no reputable news agency has mentioned. It appears on a website with a bunch of ads and an official- and legitimate-sounding name. Among people who want the story to be true, that questionable link is taken as gospel and passed around Facebook and Twitter. Believers dismiss any criticism of the source as proving why one “can’t trust the corporate mainstream media.” Grandma and grandpa—who may barely know how to use their computer and get on Facebook to see pictures of their family—may not know the difference between The New York Times and Breitbart, so they see an official-sounding publication name and headline preview in their feed and believe it.
After the 2016 presidential election, The Washington Post interviewed Paul Horner, who made a small fortune creating fake news sites masquerading as the real thing. These knockoffs would seem to come from CNN or ABC News, and claim such things as protesters against Donald Trump were paid $3,500 to be there.
PAUL HORNER: Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it … My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist … This whole Google AdSense thing is pretty scary. And all this Facebook stuff. I make most of my money from AdSense — like, you wouldn’t believe how much money I make from it. Right now I make like $10,000 a month from AdSense.
Stories from fake sites enter the social media ecosystem, get shared around, and become fact among people who want to believe it, and sometimes slide past those smart enough to doubt them.
An appeal to authority from someone with clout
A famous person peddles a story on social media, or in an interview. They offer no proof for their assertions, but the charge itself creates headlines and requires a response from the target of the accusations. As denials and fact checks come flying in, a segment of the public still refuses to believe the person is wrong. That prominent person must be right: Maybe they have sources the news media doesn’t. Maybe they have secret info no one else does. For the people who want to believe a given lie is true, it’s real to them once they’ve decided it’s real.
Mainstream publications ask questions even when they have no evidence to back up the assertion
Two weeks before the election, Rudy Giuliani and the New York Post put out the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” story in order to smear Donald Trump all the way to a second term. The calculus was clear: If hyperventilating about Hillary Clinton’s emails had blunted her momentum in the closing days of the 2016 campaign, a smear that allowed the media to ask questions about drug abuse, Chinese business connections, and allegations of nepotism and influence trading would surely upend the campaign in the final days, moving attention away from the pandemic and Trump’s poor performance. There is no evidence any of it was true, but the Post, Fox News, and right-wing outlets reported it anyway; they justified it as raising pertinent questions while condemning mainstream media for not diving into the scrum. The overall dynamic allows media publications to put out an unproven charge and then speculate endlessly as to what it might mean in order to elicit a denial that will justify further questions and fuel a frenzy on social media.
Arguably, this is a form of the loaded question fallacy. Because they’re not stating that Black people aren’t as smart as white people, or that the president was born in Kenya—the people pushing all of these types of controversies can claim they’re merely asking questions … questions that, just by being asked, insinuate they’re true.
When reporters decide to make things up
Five years ago, Brian Williams lost his job as anchor of NBC Nightly News after it was discovered he had told a false story—multiple times—of being involved in an attack against an American helicopter he was riding in while reporting from Iraq in 2003. Williams had both claimed and implied, in different retellings of the story, that his helicopter had been downed by an enemy RPG. That never happened. After the deception was discovered, Williams’ position as anchor became untenable. But like Ruth Shalit Barrett, Williams was given another chance and has slowly rebuilt his reputation; he’s currently enjoying praise for his coverage of Donald Trump.
Also like Williams and Barrett, when reporters and columnists of a certain notoriety have these sorts of problems, they tend to get second chances. Case in point: Judith Miller—who after her cheerleading coverage of the Iraq War for The New York Times was revealed to be no better than spoonfed propaganda from the Bush administration—still gets to contribute to Fox News.
Again, Williams didn’t play into the helicopter story for an agenda. He wasn’t telling a falsehood to either support or rail against the Iraq War, or to make a president look bad. He told the story because it fed his own ego and boosted his career. Barrett, Glass, Blair, and Cooke started writing fiction in order to build up their reputations as journalists and further their names in the industry. And when the small number of the mainstream media figures get caught doing it, they make all the other instances where a politician or activist screams “fake news!” to discredit accurate reporting that much more believable. Every time a minority recounts unfair treatment for a reporter, or a news anchor tells their audience about government wrongdoing, there will be some jerk out there who will point to Williams, Barrett, and others as proof that it may not be true—and dismiss it.
But the politicians, celebrities, fans, and supporters who spread fake news on the internet are just another aspect of that greed and ego. Whether it be attention, money, or a validation of one’s views, the underlying narrative plays on the biases of the public to facilitate it. The reporters engulfed by the journalism scandals mentioned above—and even the hucksters who passed off some knockoff website of ABC News to make some cash—at some point along the line decided the truth wasn’t good enough. To stand out, to get a leg up, and to pay the bills, they crossed the line to juke the stats in order to make the story more interesting and fit inside a certain groove. Those grooves may not follow facts, but hey, maybe they’re more exciting, maybe they’re more interesting, and most importantly maybe they correspond to the stories and narratives people want to hear, read, and tell themselves.
There may be Russians and other dark forces trying to deceive us, but that can only happen because we allow it to. The created fiction of fake news presents the reality some want to believe. It becomes a mental comfort food that soothes a person’s doubts when the really real information doesn’t provide solace.
And what does an average person capable of being seduced by this siren song do when they see something that’s comforting to their worldview? They hit the Like and Share buttons and pass it on to others, reinforcing their own ego while getting clicks and ad revenue for someone else, and spreading misinformation like a virus.
In a society where scripted reality television has become a significant part of the culture and Donald Trump rode a manufactured TV persona all the way to the White House, every “villain” peddling fake news eventually becomes the hero in someone’s story.