You are Fake News

"The deliberate spread of misinformation, with the intent to mislead in order to gain financially or politically."

You've heard it. I've heard it. Everybody's heard it. 

"Fake News"

Together, they sound like an oximoron. "Fake," meaning "not genuine, or counterfeit", and "news", being "information not previously known." How can something be informational, and fake? Well, it's a side effect of modern political journalism. A majority of mainstream news outlets, such as Fox, CNN, NBC, etc, are all severely politically biased. These major broadcasting corporations will use the dirtiest tactics to spread false rumors across the nation, in order to push their political agenda. Essentially, they're using their esteemed and trusted reputations, to take political advantage of the country. They pump out tens of clickbait headlines a day, reading absurd claims that make you think "did he really say that?!?!" or "did this really happen?!?!" The answer is probably no. Not as the headline reads it, at least. They take quotes out of context, they falsely inflate situations that are relatively minor, and they intentionally leave out important facts and explanations that do not prove their point. 


For example, in November 2016, a few days after the beginning of the end of the world, err, I mean, Donald Trump's successful run for president, Gabriel Sherman, a writer for New York Magazine published an article claiming that the election results in 3 states (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania) "may have been manipulated or hacked." Naturally, the internet nearly exploded over this. Thousands of people shared the article on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets. The only issue with the article, was that it was a completely conjectured claim. Clinton, in certain counties in that area, had received an average of 7% less votes in counties which use electronic voting booths than counties which use optical scanners and paper ballots (Payne). That was the reasoning in the original article to suspect hacking. As it turns out, the cause of this wasn't hacking by any means. It was simply demographics and coincidence. In this area, counties which use electronic voting booths also tend to be more republican counties, and have been that way for a while. No hacking was involved. But the writer of that article, and the other credulous people who also shared the article (Eric Geller from Politico, Dustin Volz from Reuters, Joy Reid from MSNBC, and Paul Krugman from The New York Times just to name a few) did not care about what the truth was behind this claim. This article was one of many that attempted to delegitimize the election of the president. That was the only goal of this article, and it most certainly worked. 


Over 145,000 people shared the link on just Facebook. The day after that article was published, a writer from FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver, wrote a response piece to this article making bold claims, in which he pointed out the demographics of those areas which received less votes for Clinton, explaining everything. But his response was shared only a measly 380 times on Facebook. This is just one example, of many instances of "Fake News," and how it could spread so quickly without any chance of truthful explanation. 


I'm very political, but I'm not a follower of either of the two main parties controlling America. I'm not trying to legitimize Trump's election, I'm simply pointing out the reality that we live in today, that not everything we are taught and told is the truth. The job of a journalist is to research the facts, and report on them. Unfortunately, in this day in age, we the people are forced to thoroughly fact check almost anything we read online if we desire to find the truth. This difficulty of finding truth is not a new struggle, but it has certainly been made much more difficult in recent times. Before the days of blazing fast internet speeds like we have today, when people would pay attention to the news on TV and radio on a regular basis, the truth was significantly easier to find. As long as two to three mainstream news networks published similarly stated articles and reports, then it was considered (and most likely was) the truth. But recently, because of a lack of morals in modern journalism, everybody seeking the truth must do the jobs of a journalist themselves. 


I'm a second semester freshman in college, and my literature class is reading the book "Feed", by MT Anderson. Basically, the book is based off of a future version of our civilization. We've colonized the moon, we have flying cars, and most significantly, about 70% of the population has a brain implant, giving them a live connection to the internet straight to their conscious minds. Scarily enough, todays society is not far from that. We already have constant access to the internet, the only difference is that it isn't streaming directly to our brain, instead our brain has to tell our fingers to type what we're thinking, just as I'm doing now, writing this out, trying to meet my word count *cough cough..... cough*. 


But there's also a much deeper connection to the book than we thought. In the book, the corporations own the feed. They're the ones controlling all the advertisements constantly playing on the feed, they're the ones who are trying to remind people listening to the feed to buy their products. The corporations have bought their way into political control, and now a majority of the population has the feed. But because the feed is corporate owned, what is broadcasts is not necessarily always the truth. For instance, in the beginning of the book, on page 14, Titus noticed a girl, and he couldn't figure out why he thought of her as so attractive. While thinking to himself, he thought maybe it was something about her spine, but he didn't know what. The feed then suggested the word "supple" to be used to describe her spine (Anderson). For those who aren't aware, "supple" means "easily bending." A spine that is easily bendable, is the wrong kind of spine for

When you realize the shit they've been pullin on us all along

me. The feed just supplied Titus with the wrong word to use to describe the girl's spine. Although just this one instance may seem like too small of an issue to deal with, similar events constantly happen throughout the time Titus and friends are connected to the feed. This is simply the corporations way of making minor manipulations, so as the people rely more and more on the feed for instant knowledge, before they knew it, their access to "knowledge" is being tainted by falsehoods and misinformation. And after a while, the people became so oblivious to these minor lies and falsehoods, that the corporations could tell them anything they wanted to, and the people would do it. Sounds scary, right? Must suck not realizing that that's the exact world we're already living in. 


We're told that without an education, we'd be dumb. And without a higher education, we'd be jobless. And so on, and so fourth. We're told things. We as individuals in this society, do not have a lot of room to be able to think for ourselves. We're educated on a universal platform, where companies like Pearson profit off of our common core education. They write and sell all the text books, they write common core standardized tests like ASK and PARCC, they are the ones who choose what we learn, and they
make billions off of our education. I don't mean to put on my tinfoil hat, but it's just how things are. Everybody in America receives a very similar education. People aren't learning entirely different things different ways, education is pretty flat out across the board nationally. It's because we let education become nationalized, where one company controls everything (using the government as puppets, buying them out), which restricts unique thinking, and opens the door for fake news and lies to spread rampantly across social media because we've been cultured to not think things through. If Pearson started publishing in their books that Axel Rose was actually a Chinese emperor before his rock 'n' roll career, people would start believing it. That's because they're an esteemed and accredited company that we've entrusted our education to, just as the people in "Feed" have done as far as relying on the internet for everything, and at this point, what they say, goes.


 We are taught to trust everything we're told, without thinking twice about it. Now that doesn't mean to go around saying the earth is flat, that's a pretty big idea to take on at once (plus you're fucking dumb if you think that, sorry. It's ok to question things, but if you have NO other logical response, stop). But recently, my literature class decided to tackle rethinking something more our size, which we had been taught to believe as one thing our entire lives. We used our individual thinking powers, logic, common sense, and built this new idea of what a "utopia" meant to us. We read works from several different authors who wrote about a utopian society, which in every case, wasnt a textbook perfect utopia (keyword, textbook). In many of the stories, such as "Noah's Ark", and "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", somebody ends up suffering for some reason. In "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", there is a little boy locked up in a dark room in the city of Omelas, who represents all of the suffering and sins committed by the rest of the members of the community. One person has to endure severe suffering, to ensure that nobody else has to endure too much suffering. This ideal, textbook "utopia", would be a perfect

world, where nobody has to suffer, unlike in Omelas, so we originally classified a place like Omelas as not a utopia. As one of my classmates stole from me and put in his own blog (I wont mention names, I don't want Peter to feel offended that I called him out), the roots of the word "utopia" are greek, meaning "no/good" (eu) and "place" (topos). So the word literally means a place where all is good, but it also means a non existent place. The exact definition of Utopia as described by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is "an imaginary and indefinitely remote place," and "a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions." So by definition, a Utopia cannot exist. But in our class, we were able to break the socially constructed definition of the word, to create a new meaning for it. Not necessarily a perfect world, but one where things are better. Better than what they are now. Where nobody has to worry about feeding their family, the rules and laws are fair and just, and people work for their fair share of personal gain. A place where it may not be perfection, but it is an attainable and achievable goal in our current world.


That free thinking exercise in our class, is something that many millions of americans may never get to experience. Personally, for a while I know I have been able to think about things outside of the box. I'd like to think that I've got a pretty good grasp on an understanding on what is happening in our world, and I'm willing to accept change as I learn more and more about our changing world as it unfolds around us. I'm doing this similarly as Violet (Titus's Girlfriend) is doing in the novel "Feed". She is challenging the feed, and is trying to survive as a free thinking individual in a world of feed streaming robots, essentially. There are groups of protesters who are also against the feed and are trying to fight it, and as far as I am currently into the book, they are not winning. The corporations have become too powerful and influential to fail, unless maybe these few can honestly make a difference. This is already happening, in our world. Where we are being manipulated by corporations, being told whatever they want us to think, using sly, evil tactics to get us to buy whatever they want us to buy, and getting us to think whatever they want us to think. Some stupid "fake news" shit you hear floating around now may seem like something stupid and silly, when in reality its the work in progress towards something detrimental to the individual. Through decades of corruption in both business and politics, these corporate entities have become so much more powerful than any individual could ever hold up to.


It's just a matter of wondering, do the corporations today hold more power than every individual as a united force? Is it too late to try and win back our individuality?


It probably is too late. And you wont be hearing about that in the news, real or fake.


-Nick M
2,164 fire ass words. Take that, grade contract.


Works Cited:

"Fake news." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 02 Apr. 2017. Web. 03 Apr. 2017.

Payne, Daniel. "16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won." The Federalist. N.p., 09 Feb. 2017. Web. 03 Apr. 2017.

Anderson, M. T. Feed. London: Walker , 2002. Print.