According to Kurt Andersen, any “unflattering or inconvenient journalism” in regards to President Trump is fake news. In line with the three readings, fake news is something that one (President) simply chooses not to believe in. In this age of “post-truth politics,” or “alternative facts” moment, whatever one (American in particular) chooses to believe in is their truth. One can even pass a lie detector test if that belief is held strongly enough; even if it is an objective falsehood. I do not believe the phrase “fake news” as employed by Trump is accurate because it is not used to call out information presented in the media that does not contain factual basis. Trump uses the phrase “fake news” to deny something that he chooses to believe can not be true; as simple as that. It could be a report of findings from an investigation by a respected newspaper or news channel with a reputation of ethical journalism to uphold; if Trump doesn’t like it—“fake news!” What would I call statistics or discoveries that are unfavorable to myself, my image and my reputation? I am not as media savvy (yet) as Trump is and can not come up with a blanket term to deny facts. I do not believe truth should be up for debate. I passed by Hunter College yesterday where on one building inscribed in massive letters was a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, reading, “We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.” This is how it is meant to be—everyone can have their own opinion, however, the truth is undeniable. In Greek the word Aletheia means “the state of not being hidden; the state of being evident.” In today’s media, there are countless people involved in publishing and presenting news and information that is accurate and reliable. It is ludicrous and shameful that the President would simply decry anything he does not appreciate as “fake.”
I read John Herrman’s article Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine last and was hit with a brick of irony at the very end. When he writes about Sean Hannity asking “So, does that mean anything?” in regards to a Facebook page reassuring supporters that Trump having a “strong foundation and a firm backing” due to his social-media statistics in opposition to poll numbers it put all of the pieces of the puzzle together for this blog post. The article was published before Election Day and it may or may not be causation, but Trump’s social media presence and “superior engagement numbers” definitely correlate with his winning the presidency.
I do not believe Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or other social networking and content websites could be held to a journalistic standard since they merely aggregate posts, videos, links to websites, content, etc. that their users choose to share. These web pages do not post their own content nor do they promote any agendas of their own. Their mission is to cater to their users in a personalized way in order to have them spend more time on the platform in order to collect advertisement revenue. It is harder to determine whether or not social media sites should prohibit certain content. There is always the issue of freedom of speech. As I have gathered from the articles, people have their beliefs and will search out like-minded individuals and groups. These people will share stories, ideas and content that will solely promote their ideologies and motives and will totally dismiss any information to the contrary. It can be difficult to discern what to censor and what to allow when the foundation of the country’s belief system is the ability to express oneself however one chooses. However, social media sites can establish their own sets of rules in regards to hate speech, pornography, and other dangerous content.
An outstanding theme throughout the articles that I picked up on was a connection that I made between Rodman’s Mass Media and Andersen’s How America Lost Its Mind. I am beginning to understand how Trump was able to become President with zero political experience—he knew how to work media. Andersen describes how after Bill Clinton’s fellatio mess, his popularity soared. He then goes on to compare American politics to a reality TV show; something that Donald Trump had a good deal of experience in. As Rodman explains, “all media products…survive by audience preference… many critics consider audience influence too great today. These critics say that the media are continually giving audiences what they want, rather than what they need, what is good for them, or what is of an inherently high quality.” Trump may reject what he does not like from the media, but he definitely knows how to give the audience what they want. I watched Trevor Noah’s segment “Obama vs. Trump” on Monday September 10th in which he quotes Trump saying that Obama’s speech made him fall asleep and goes on to say, “Obama is great for sleeping, because when he was president, we all slept so good.” In present times, we are all glued to our smartphones watching, reading, and discussing the Trump Administration Show. A great connection from Andersen’s article comes from the cultural critic Neil Postman “about how TV was replacing meaningful public discourse with entertainment, we were in the process of amusing ourselves to death.” A bit dark, I know.
The excerpt from Fantasyland was an eye-opening history of how “the American experiment…has metastasized out of control.” I thoroughly enjoyed Andersen’s language and metaphors such as “Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts—cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological—have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and truthiness and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the past several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks, which Donald Trump slid down right into the White House.”
What I found most surprising from the “America losing its mind” piece was how this “slippery slope” began with very liberal young adults and academics rejecting reason and rationalism leading towards conclusions such as “reality itself is a purely social construction.” They were doing this in part to reject the ruling class. Jean Baudrillard declared that “rationalism was a tool of oppressors that no longer worked as a way of understanding the world, pointless and doomed.” However, through the decades, with the advent of electronic mass media, it became the conservatives who eventually became those prone to irrational beliefs, partially because of their later ties to religion. I found the Public Policy Poll which asked ‘Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”’ quite amusing in that 34 percent of Republican voters said yes. Nowadays, in the worst case scenario, this could happen—it would also be a Republican making it come true.
One notion I take away from the article is that certain ideals and their applications can turn out to have positive or negative outcomes depending on the participants and practitioners. In a perfect world, intellectual freedom and individualism would have people work towards a world in which they could all co-exist and thrive as opposed to one where people begin creating their own realities based on whatever they choose to believe and thus creating disparity and conflict. The worst part about it is that there are majorities of people whose realities differ so drastically from others that sometimes it seems that they could not be from the same time, country, or even planet. However progressive I believe the United States to be, there are those that insist on resisting change because of their beliefs, whether they are based on superstition, religion, culture, or simply their insistence that their way is right and nobody can tell them otherwise. I can not agree or disagree with “America losing its mind,” because I feel like that’s a sentiment that could have been expressed at any moment in time throughout the history of the United States. The U.S. has always done things its own way and has always been seen as influential in either a positive or negative connotation. There are and have always been many factors in play that determine the beliefs and cultural values of Americans. Now is the time when a majority of the population with similar beliefs and interests (based in reality or not) have come together and follow a man whose statements as President have been found to be “almost 50 percent false and another 20 percent were mostly false.”
Media Sam 