Fake News

The term “Fake News” has been thrown about of late and I have often wondered what it meant. Coming off writing a book about the 14^th century and the post-Scholastics I had a somewhat reasonable understanding of the Trivium and of the folks from Plato through Ockham. Back then words meant something. So let me give this a try, not that I am anywhere near an Ockham.

First, the issue is one of definitions. You see in law, philosophy, mathematics, and engineering definitions are critical. I have even found in my botanical studies that a definition is a critical element. Namely when describing a flower and one says it is blue; what do you mean by blue? But let us put that discussion to the side for a moment.

Let us start with the term, “news”. Just what is news? I think it is fair to say that news is the presentation of information of current interest which is the result of collecting various facts and presenting them in a coherent manner. Thus if a dog bites a man, we would say what type of dog, who owns the dog, the condition under which the dog managed to get to the man, the man, the name, the location, the time, and the condition of the man and the dog. This would be a minimum. Namely we present the; who, what, when, where, why, and how.

Not having spent a femtosecond on a communications course nor working for a newspaper this I fell would be a good first guess. Namely I am collecting facts, those indisputable things related to this incident, and then presenting them in a coherent manner that constitutes news.

In contrast if I am arguing about say Ireland, and the English occupation for the past almost 900 years I have a different set of facts, historical facts, from a variety of records, and many of these facts may have been slanted for purposes other than portraying what may have actually occurred. As we all know, history is all too often written by the victors, and thus what is handed down may very lack the authenticity one would expect in a “dog bites man” story.

Thus overall then news is the presentation of readily verifiable facts in some coherent manner. Also any third party could readily go out and validate these facts. One could examine the dog, talk to the man, see the bite, talk with the owner and so forth. But we also know that certain events all too often get clouded by reshaping of facts. Take the case of an auto collision. Consider the case of two lanes of traffic merging. One vehicle, say an auto, has commence the merge and is nearly fully in the lane, then behind it is say an eighteen wheeler, which continues unabated towards the merged vehicle, and then collides with the smaller vehicle.

Now along comes a State Police Officer, say one from New York, who appears annoyed at having his coffee break interrupted. He then decides based upon what he thinks the truth to be and creates another “reality” based upon which driver he is most annoyed with. How does truth and news get produced from this process? Poorly, one would say, but all too often the arbiter of the events, in this case the State Trooper, becomes the teller of “fact” based not upon reality but upon a personal bias. Take this simple example, a true one, and put a minority in the middle and we can see why all too often we have what has been called “police violence”.

But back to the news. The vehicle incident above cannot be cleanly reconstructed since it lacks independent verification. It is a he said and she said type of presentation. The case of the dog is man’s leg and dog’s teeth marks and the dog does not get the chance to comment!

Thus when we speak of news we are speaking of a truly limited set of truth statements. Typically we report what someone said. To get close to the truth we must note who that someone was and good news reporting then also demands a corroboration by some independent third party. Note this does not exist with our dog nor with our two party incident. In fact the two party incident can be further clouded by the introduction of an erstwhile law enforcement entity.

Thus when we examine the news, or alleged news, we see every day, very little is truly news. Anonymous sources do not count. We could never verify them. We have no idea whether they are trustworthy, have some axe to grind or whatever. Thus any reporting with some anonymous source must be rejected out of hand. Second is corroboration by a third part is also demanded. This we nearly never see in any presentation.

This leaves us with a good definition of news but a paucity of it available.

Now to Fake News. Consider its opposite, Un-Fake News or if you will True News. Now based upon our argument above, if it is news, perforce of what news must be to be news, it must be true. It thus means that there can be no such entity as Fake News, other than as an entity which is non-news. Sorry for the logic, but humans spent two millennia developing it to have it lost by our recent generation. Thus we say Fake News is a term defined as not-news or non-news. Namely it does not meet one or more elements of what we would demand for news per se.

Now on to the more difficult question. We stipulate that news to be news must report on facts, namely the truth, what really happened. “A dog named Spot bit a man named John Jones on the left leg at 12 Main Street at 3 PM on March 28. The dog was owned by Joe Smith.” Now is there more to say, yes if and only if it is both true and proximately relevant. But we can validate each element in the presented reporting. I can speak with each person and most likely I can see the dog somewhere, if it is still alive.

Back to Fake News. If one asserts that a person collaborated with some foreign entity, then we must establish; who, the when, the where, the why, and be able to demonstrate with some trustworthy collaboration of a reliable third party or parties that such has occurred.  Otherwise it is speculation. One needs specifics to be news, otherwise it is at best gossip and worst defamation. The Inquisitional methods of seeing if a witch floats or not no longer apply. We are not dealing with demonic acts, or hopefully not, and as such we must utilize the rules of acceptable logic.

Thus we come down to two elements; truth and trust. News must be truthful and the presenter of the new then must be trustworthy. Trust takes time to earn it is lost in an instant. The presentation of what one would expect from the news is then from a trustworthy agent. If at any time that trust is in question then the existence of the transmittal of news disappears. Trust entails the ability to divest oneself somewhat from the facts being transmitted. If perhaps one is a part of the news, more than just an observer, then one may have been invested in the telling of the news in a less than unbiased manner, it then become less news and more just opinion. The mixing of news with opinion has been the downfall of many erstwhile news organizations, they become opinion generators at best.

Thus it is incumbent upon those who see themselves purveyors of news to deal in truth and to be trustworthy. Mixing of opinion, agenda, and the like distorts from this goal. When as a youth and I listened to Radio Moscow, I knew it to be propaganda, even without Joe McCarthy. Yet today many of our youth have no way to ascertain fact from opinion, opinion from fiction, fiction from defamation.