STROINSKI: Reining in fake news, one headline at a time

Fake news was referred to by former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and even President Barack Obama as a grave threat not only to journalistic integrity but to our democracy and maybe even truth itself. Part of the concern with fake news is very, very valid. President-elect Donald Trump spent half of his presidential campaign drawing on lies and still won the presidency. A woman, acting on Alex Jones-authored conspiracies, just recently threatened the parents of a slain Sandy Hook child with death and violence. A man, because of an article he saw on Facebook, opened fire in a pizza shop because he thought it was someone connected to John Podesta, human-trafficking and Hillary Clinton’s emails.

It often seems as though we live in a post-truth society where facts, data and even now events have unfolded in the past no longer matter. We’re living and formulating opinions based on anger, on sadness and on how we feel. People like Trump and Tomi Lahren, though grossly uninformed on all accounts, are considered legitimate and credible based solely on how emotional and loud they are. Countering them with carefully considered facts, of truths, of historical evidence, doesn’t work like it used to. All the fact checking in the world didn’t stop Trump or help Hillary. Trevor Noah, though obviously more eloquent and more informed, lost to Lahren due to the fact that she relies not upon reason, but emotion.

However, even in the face of all of this, we need to be vigilant in how we handle the circulation and consumption of information. Though I don’t agree with Lahren and I value, as should you, the pursuit of the truth, we do not want to give Silicon Valley regulatory power over what we can and cannot see on our newsfeed. In that fake news is largely a social media and internet phenomenon, it is up to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and others to address and filter it.

That means Zuckerberg, that means Jack Dorsey, that means private, mega-conglomerate tech companies would actively engage with and sort through information. Are we ready to give them that power? Will such censorship — because it is, to a degree, censorship — lead to the eventual censoring of opinion pieces? Will it lead to the stifling of unconventional views on both the left and the right? Will such companies not be susceptible to outside influence, to special interests, in pushing and limiting certain things? These are very valid concerns, and we have to ask ourselves if the crackdown on fake news is worth a potential handing over of keys to all news, to all opinion and to all nonobjective sources on the internet.

If we’re not ready to do that, then where does the solution lie? Because we obviously can’t become comfortable with the perpetual pushing of bold, grossly incorrect, often dangerous lies. I’d love it if our society was composed of learned philosopher kings, but it is not. People just aren’t conscious enough to check every source they see, to contest every fact, to do their homework.

What is perhaps most interesting is that, to many, media conglomerates like CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and others are the real perpetuators of fake news. The amount of times I’ve turned on CNN and seen a Trump pundit attack the media for bias, for nonobjective fact, for blatantly false information — I can’t fit on both hands. And, I hate to say this, but they’re not completely wrong. The insane levels of money and of influential hands mixed up in media leans them collectively toward one direction. Desperation for ratings, to keep alive a 24-hour news cycle, leads to a love affair of sensationalism rather than truth. Media shapes consciousness, or ought to, and they haven’t been doing a very good job in that regard.

The next four years are going to exist in a sphere of lies, of conspiracy, of blatant gas lighting. How we handle this is going to dictate the very future of American and of truth. Do we hand it over to Facebook? No. Do we trust, or even hope blindly, that the media will eventually return to what it was in the early 20th century, a beacon of fact and of objectiveness? Or do we develop a new strategy, comb emotion and reason together, sit one another down and try to make headway? I’m a fan of the last. Maybe it is time to somehow combine the enlightenment and romanticism. Maybe, truth can be nonobjective, can be emotional, can be unapologetically passionate and angry.