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The Fake News Post

 Something which I've been struggling with for the past 5 years has been the proliferation of "fake news," in the forms of misleading headlines, on through repeated lies and untruths from people we should trust (including the elephant in the room of 'alternative facts'), and Macedonian fake news mills spreading lies on social media to tilt the zeitgeist one way or another.  It is my aim, in this blog, to be able to filter through the biases around local historical events and showcase them in a meaningful manner.  It's hard during these times of CoViD-19 to find those primary sources, since libraries and such are often closed down.  In-person interviews and meetings are nonexistent; the one I've done over the past 6 months has been over the phone.

As I found with my article on The Melon Heads, the amount of truthiness in any given situation can vary.  This doesn't mean that every viewpoint you don't like is a lie or otherwise "fake news."  It's the old adage "There are 3 sides of every story:  Your side, my side, and what actually happened."  That's why I strive to be an active consumer of newsmedia both for this blog, and in my personal life.  It's hard, and it feels like homework, but it's necessary these days with stories shooting around social media at a rapid pace.  I implore my readers to click on sources (that's why I do my very best to provide sources at each article), trace those back to primary source (in other words, click the links from your national news sources to get back to a hometown or local newspaper or news story), and then read from there.

Let's take a look at an example:
This headline reads "North Carolina Woman Sentenced to 7 Days in Jail for Baptizing Daughter".  That's the Point A and the Point Z, but the story (and the obviously biased headline) gloss over Points B through Y.  If we dig a little deeper and find the Charlotte Observer's take, we learn that the woman and her husband were embroiled in a custody battle, the husband was granted by the court the sole ability to make decisions with regards to his daughter's religious life, the woman went behind the husband's back in doing so (then posted on Facebook about the event), and that the woman "intentionally disobeyed [the order]."  Baptizing her daughter was the end event, but ultimately, she was arrested for flagrantly disobeying the custody agreement between her and her husband.  Baptism itself isn't important to the story.

This study theorizes that persons with lower cognitive ability are more prone to believing fake news.  The study linked above also explains the extreme reactions to things like the stainless steel pillars that are appearing in public spaces around the western United States, largely believed to be guerilla art installations.

The inspiration for this whole blog entry of mine comes from a Yahoo News article.  The headline reads "Most conservatives don't understand purpose of journalism, says founder of website on media bias."  The article outlines a few key points:

  • Most conservatives think the purpose of journalism is to wage partisan political warfare, not to showcase facts and truth
  • Conservative media enterprises (such as Fox News and Breitbart) were created to propagate and propagandize for a particular political viewpoint, literally without exception
  • Conservative media consumers in the U.S. do not understand that the purpose of journalism is supposed to portray reality
  • Truth for conservative journalists is anything that harms ‘the left.’
I implore my readers (as I strive to do myself) to research, research, research.  Filter through the narratives on the sites you read, pick out the boring facts and figures.  News and politics shouldn't be exciting (#makepoliticsboringagain), and news and politics shouldn't be telling you how to feel.

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