In a letter to a colleague in 1787, Thomas Jefferson famously said that “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Not that Jefferson liked newspapers; in 1787, they could be just as scurrilous and filled with lies as some of today’s worst websites. He regularly decried such abuses, saying that they were “rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food.”
Nonetheless, Jefferson recognized that an unfettered press, one that can investigate and criticize government, is fundamental to liberty. He trusted that the good sense of the people would rise above the hurly burly of political debate, keeping government on the right course.
In this context, demands for a crackdown on “fake news” — a phenomenon that has flourished in our divided political landscape — should be taken with a grain of salt.
Hillary Clinton called fake news “a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly.”
Donald Trump promised to “open up those libel laws” to make it easier to sue media that “write purposely negative and horrible and false articles.”
Executives at Facebook, a conduit for many false stories circulating online, promise to take action to reduce fake news posts. How Facebook will distinguish between fake news, misleading information or actual high-quality news and opinion, remains to be seen.
Even Pope Francis, the victim of a story that falsely claimed he endorsed Trump, said that peddling disinformation was “a sin.”
There should be little doubt the purveyors of fake news, who create credible-looking websites with the intent to deceive, can do real harm to public discourse.
An 18-month study by the Stanford History Education Group found that students, from middle school to college age, from the poor to the privileged, were “easily duped” by information they received on social media.
It’s both predictable and scary. The study noted that before the explosive growth of unregulated online content, “ordinary people once relied on publishers, editors, and subject matter experts to vet the information they consumed.”
Those old-school news providers followed, however imperfectly, basic sets of rules for news gathering and reporting that gave the news a foundation of credibility — principles taught in journalism schools and still practiced by so-called mainstream news media (see spj.org/ethicscode.asp Opens in a new tab).
Now, today’s “digital natives” get their news from vast social media networks not bound by any code of ethics, and many apparently lack the ability to vet sources of information — making it easier for those without scruples to spread disinformation at the speed of a click.
And indeed they do. The New York Times, Washington Post and National Public Radio interviewed purveyors of fake news who found it a profitable business built on gullible readers. They predicted that fake news sites will only grow more sophisticated and become more difficult to distinguish from the real thing.
And fake news can have real consequences. Clinton’s call for action apparently was in response to a man investigating a fake news story that claimed she and her campaign manager, John Podesta, were running a child sex slave ring out of a pizzeria in Washington D.C. He took a rifle with him and fired a shot inside.
What to do? Trust the people to figure it out. Consumers of news have access to a growing number of credible fact-checking websites. And yes, the much-maligned mainstream media — those that cite reliable sources, provide both sides of stories, and have transparent procedures for correcting errors — on the whole are more dependable than websites of dubious pedigree. The careful reader will not let his biases override sober judgment.
Yes, fake news should be challenged, but not by censorship. The best way to put fake news peddlers out of business is for the public to ferret them out, and then to ignore them.
