For the past two days, we’ve walked you through the latest scholarship on fake news and how to fight it. But that was just the initial lay of the land. This is academia, and in the Ivory Tower everyone has their own opinion. (Let academia’s intense focus on responses be yet another reason why Pruitt’s red team/blue team attack isn’t a real debate. The real debate has been ongoing for decades in academic journals, and the “red team” already lost.)
Today, let’s take a look at just three of the nine paywalled responses to Lew. Ecker and Cook. They provide sharper distinction between what’s new and what’s traditional in terms of fake news, which then informs the author’s final wrap-up.
Sociologists Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap, climate denial researchers who study the politicization of the issue and the organizations responsible for propagating denial, argue that a more fundamental understanding of fake news than Lew et al. provide is required to combat it. Dunlap and McCright lay out four main types of fake news (easy-to-navigate graph here) that they argue all may need unique solutions to properly contain.
Two similar responses take issue with whether fake news is actually all that new, and as such, whether source literacy is a viable answer. University of Michigan’s Colleen Seifert argues in her response that there hasn’t necessarily been a big change in misinformation (propaganda has always existed). Meanwhile, Elizabeth Marsh and Brenda Yang argue that simple source evaluation is insufficient as an answer, since it has become effectively impossible to easily distinguish between real news and fake news websites.
The rise of the Internet has flattened the media landscape, both papers argue, as highly credible and highly laughable sources appear aside one another in social feeds. The only way to neutralize fake news is by giving students, and the public, the tools to evaluate arguments on their merits, regardless of source.
In the last part of the series, Lewandowsky, Cook and Ecker respond to the nine commentaries on their initial paper, and begin wrestling with “the gorilla in the room” how US policy making “is largely independent of the public’s wishes but serves the interests of economic elites.” Sadly, the authors decline to go so far as to name who exactly those elites are.
We’ve got an idea of who they might be talking about: the Kochs and other conservative “philanthropists.” These key architects of post-truth politics have spent millions of dollars and decades of time building this alternate reality. In her book Dark Money, journalist Jane Mayer detailed how the brothers have used their buying power to influence the GOP over decades--with a particular focus on media. The Kochs poured money into creating media outlets to run fake news that supported their initiatives, organizing fake grassroots groups to parrot the messages in those outlets, and funding universities (particularly economics departments, though they’re not alone in this pursuit, per Democracy in Chains) and think tanks to provide a pseudo-academic, media-friendly sheen to their otherwise brazenly pro-corporate, anti-public talking points.
We can see now that it’s much more than just fake news that’s brought us into a post-truth world. It’s fake scholarship at Koch Universities, pushed by fake charities funded by the Kochs to serve their economic interests, parroted by fake news pundits pushing a political narrative that’s championed by fake populist politicians taking Koch donations, putting policies in place that will be ruled on by judges steeped in fake legal teachings from those aforementioned Koch-funded schools.
The merger of economic, media and political control is not just fundamentally anti-democratic. It is the literal definition of fascism.
Now that is some news we wish was fake.