A quote often attributed to Edgar Allen Poe goes something like, “Believe nothing of what you hear, and only half of what you see.”
Essentially, the saying boils down to not falling for something unless you actually have proof.
It’s particularly apropos advice these days considering how prevalent “fake news” is on the Internet and how dangerous it has become.
I’ll give you an example. I was chatting with one of my friends in Squamish about the U.S. election results, and Donald Trump.
My friend began telling me all about a “big” story about the Clintons and the Democratic party having been found to be running a child sex ring out of a pizza joint in Washington. My eyes glazed over in disbelief as my usually logical friend went into great detail about Democratic party emails that were hacked and posted on WikiLeaks and how “corporate media” was ignoring the story.
Earlier in the week, a colleague had also told me the grand tale of Hilary Clinton’s chief of staff, John Podesta, and the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria. But, being a journalist and trained researcher, I couldn’t help but notice the story was nowhere to be found on “legitimate” news sites… or I guess “corporate” media, as my friend would say.
So I began researching the supposed emails and pedophile ring. It actually didn’t take me too long at all to discover it was a complete hoax, fabricated originally on a forum and propagated to alt-right and conservative “news” (read: propaganda) sites, and then it went viral on Facebook and Twitter. At no time did a CNN, CBC, BBC or MSNBC site have coverage on the story (later dubbed Pizzagate) because it was a complete fabrication.
However, to my friend, the fact that legitimate news organizations were not covering it was proof it was actually true. I know, it boggled my mind, too.
Somehow, we are in a strange time when people think the media is bought and sold by politicians and the entire field of journalism is one big conspiracy theory.
I asked my friend, “Do you really think every single reporter, producer, editor and anchor in the world is part of this conspiracy? That everyone at BBC, CBC and CNN is in on it and keeping the secret for a pedophile ring?”
He conceded that, when said out loud, it did seem far-fetched. I told him, as a journalist myself, I found it really insulting when people say stupid things about my profession.
But, more and more, people are believing everything they read on the internet and taking it for truth. Nobody seems to want to look more deeply. It’s usually because the fake news story says something they want to believe (for example, vaccines cause autism) so its contents are accepted as fact regardless of actual veracity.
U.S. President-elect Trump utilized fake news to great advantage during the election, regurgitating lies to his supporters, who ate it up like so much slop.
It’s the reason “Post-Truth” was the word of the year. It means “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
It means many people today would rather believe what they believe (no matter what that may be) and ignore the actual facts or reality. Whoa, did anyone else just get that big shiver up their spine?
Of course, some will say, “Who cares? Let people believe what they want. What harm can come?”
Well, this past week, some yahoo in the U.S. who hadn’t gotten the word that the Comet Ping Pong Pizza thing was untrue and a hoax, went into that pizza restaurant with a gun looking to “self-investigate” the story. He apparently fired off a shot, too, before being apprehended.
It is a sad commentary on how everyone’s mistrust of the legitimate news sources (started by right-wing conservatives using the “corporate media” slur to undermine that legitimacy in people’s minds) has led them to trust the actual lies and misinformation instead. And it is just getting worse.
Right after the Pizzagate gunman was apprehended, the fake news sites and alt-right forums lit up with the conspiracy theory believers saying the real-life crime was “fake news” and a cover-up for the pedophile ring. Edgar Allen Poe would probably be very disappointed in us all.
