M Ziauddin
For some people, legitimate news from traditional media has become unreliable, no longer to be trusted. Is this at all fair? Fake news is sometimes hard to recognize for what it is, constantly evolving to fit seamlessly into the community spaces many of us feel safe and comfortable in, those social places and platforms where we share stories and connect with people we’re inclined to trust: our friends, families and colleagues (rather than the once widely respected gatekeepers of reliable information, the traditional press). Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow’s recent study “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 (US Presindial) Election” noted three things:
“62 per cent of US adults get news on social media,” “the most popular fake news stories were more widely shared on Facebook than the most popular mainstream news stories,” and “many people who see fake news stories report that they believe them.” In fact, the World Economic Forum in 2016 considered digital misinformation one of the biggest threats to global society. Researcher Vivian Roese furthermore points out that while traditional media has lost credibility with readers, for some reason internet sources of news have actually gained in credibility. This may do lasting damage to public trust of the news, as well as public understanding of important issues, such as when scientific or political information is being repackaged and retold by the media, especially when coupled with our collectively deteriorating ability to interpret information critically and see propaganda for what it is.
According to Chi Luu (The Incredibly True Story of Fake Headlines); Are you still reading? Published by JSTOR on November 20, 2019) editors frequently use the headline to include important contextual information about a news story. (JSTOR is a highly selective digital library of academic content in many formats and disciplines. The collections include top peer-reviewed scholarly journals as well as respected literary journals, academic monographs, research reports from trusted institutes, and primary sources). In fact, for the modern newspaper reader, reading the headline of a news item replaces the reading of the whole story. This means that the headline, not the story, has become the single most important element of the news.
“The headline is not merely a summary, picking out the most relevant aspect of the story, the way we tend to think of it. Headlines are also actively designed to be attention-grabbing, persuading readers to read the story. It’s astonishingly creative, a kind of succinct poetry that deftly draws on just the right amount of unspoken shared cultural knowledge between the headline writer and their readers, which is a relationship of trust. By telling its own micro story, quite apart from the news it accompanies and supports, it’s supposed to tell you just what you need to know, but it quite often tells you things you don’t. It’s a linguistic trap that we don’t often notice, that can be easily exploited, and that makes the problem of “fake news” even more dangerous than we realize.
“What we think of as the “prestige” media, publishers with established reputation for careful journalism, are now often copying, intentionally or not, whatever happens to go viral on social media. “There isn’t anything particularly wrong with using the language of headlines that everyone else uses. But it is a signal that there may be something wrong with the news today, when the institution of the Press is following the fashions of fake news found on social media—and that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the quality of their journalism. “This August, the New York Times published the strangely out of step headline “TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM” to accompany a well-rounded, nuanced report on the aftermath of two mass shootings. The story within appropriately drew attention to Trump’s failure to take responsibility for his past embrace of racist tropes and inaction on gun control, but scores of incensed readers reputedly cancelled their subscriptions, not because the coverage was wrong, but because the headline was so egregiously bad. The headline wasn’t exactly clickbait, nor was it sensationalist. And yet, empty of context, it seemed designed to push a certain flattering, subjective narrative to get readers’ attention. It was, incredibly, literally true, yet because it didn’t accurately describe the context, wasn’t it also a kind of fake news?
“In identifying misinformation, we often focus too closely on the superficial and obvious aspects of this shiny new concept of fake news—a fake clickbait headline accompanying a fake news article of actual falsehoods. But there’s a far more frightening and dangerous power that publishers and platforms of all kinds have always wielded—unwittingly or intentionally—in their reporting of the news: the truth.
“Or rather, a kind of tangential truth, which, used irresponsibly or thoughtlessly, might end up doing more harm than a lie, because it can always be truthfully denied that it’s false. In other words, the actual news doesn’t have to be fake, just the headlines. More and more, we see a dysfunctional disconnect between soberly written stories and breezy, social-media-friendly headlines that seem to have gone rogue. Yet point to where the lie is, and many may be hard pressed to see it, because, often, these headlines are literally true. “The public’s attention, after all, is a delicate beast, easily distracted. Rather than newsworthiness being decided by a media gatekeeper, users actively have become their own gatekeepers, deciding whether content is “shareworthy” instead. Readers are “in it for the LOLs, the awe factor, the weird-but-true and freaky curiosities of life.” Stories go viral because of this “shareability” factor, but there may be no rhyme or reason as to why. Roese notes how one of the earlier instances of social media hype in Germany was the ‘Blumenkübel-Hype’ meme—all about a flower bucket that had fallen over outside a retirement home, which was neither newsworthy, in the public interest, nor provocative of any outrage. Yet it was widely shared.
“News publications might kill to have such viral reader engagement. The traditional news can no longer just passively rely on their reputations to get their stories read. To survive, media publications have had to adapt their way of telling stories to social media standards, beating them for the scoop, in a competitive struggle for limited reader attention. In doing so, they partially give up their role as gatekeeper to what is newsworthy, and the relationship of trust between the publication and the reader can start to erode, especially if expectations are not met. This doesn’t mean a change in the accuracy or neutrality of their core coverage. But it results in a blithely provocative framing for their headlines, tenuously true, that can leave a disastrously false impression. “There are many examples where literally true headlines are creating very false impressions, such as “How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong” in the New York Times. And who can forget the massive outcry and vitriol over Jonathan Franzen’s doom-laden op-ed “What If We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stopped?” As a cultural comment, Franzen’s essay was really not that bad. Apart from some minor errors, it fell in line with what a lot of his detractors largely believe themselves. It was the New Yorker‘s framing choice of sensationalized, apocalyptic language that had an outsized effect on how readers ended up engaging with it, even if they agreed with the content.”
— The writer is veteran journalist and a former editor based in Islamabad.
