Fake News

What, exactly, is "fake news"? Jon Stewart says that his program, The Daily Show, is fake, but it covers some real stories better than real news shows do. Fox would call what it does real news, but a lot of what they broadcast is opinion masquerading as fact. In some cases, bias produces bad journalism, but in other cases, bias improves the story by cutting to the heart of the issue.

If the line between the real and the fake is really so hard to discern, then what can we say about Armstrong Williams and James Guckert? Williams got paid,but I have no doubt he truly believed in what he was paid to promote. Guckert was not a reporter in any conventional sense, but is being a paid employee of a traditional media outlet a necessary and sufficient condition of being a journalist?

Today in the New York Times, Frank Rich notes that the confusion on this issue is just what the White House wants.

The inability of real journalists to penetrate this White House is not all the White House's fault. The errors of real news organizations have played perfectly into the administration's insidious efforts to blur the boundaries between the fake and the real and thereby demolish the whole notion that there could possibly be an objective and accurate free press. Conservatives, who supposedly deplore post-modernism, are now welcoming in a brave new world in which it's a given that there can be no empirical reality in news, only the reality you want to hear (or they want you to hear). The frequent fecklessness of the Beltway gang does little to penetrate this Washington smokescreen.

I'm not a believer in the existence of a unified, universal "objective truth", and I don't believe that postmodernism, even in it's bastardized pop form, is necessarily a bad thing. And while I deplore the White House for the propagandistic line-blurring, I can't really say that the line between the real and the fake, or the objective and the subjective, is (or can be) bright. What we really need here is another way to look at the issue, but one which preserves the common-sense notion that the White House is doing something wrong.

This is a really big job, but I think that a start can be made by focusing on the concept of transparency rather than objectivity. Transparency should be understood in at least two ways. First, there is a transparency of roles. Williams, Guckert, and the other cast of characters Rich identifies were not honest about the real role they were playing. The actors portraying television reporters in the video "news" releases are the clearest example, but Guckert playing a reporter while doing no actual reporting finishes close behind. Even Armstrong Williams, who I don't believe said anything about NCLB that he didn't believe, doesn't meet this standard of transparency.

Second is a transparency of facts and criteria. In some ways this boils down to consistency. For example, ignoring the bad things your allies do while screaming bloody murder when your opponents do the same thing doesn't meet this standard. In other cases, what is important is that your "facts" match up in some way with the "facts" of others and the "facts" you have used before. In other words, you don't get to simply make stuff up. Finally, there is a need for the facts you use in private to be the same facts you use in public. Rumsfeld strikes me as the person in the administration who fails this test most consistently — while he is obviously making decisions based on a certain conception of the size of the Iraqi insurgency, for example, he refuses to even hint at a number in public.

By the standards of transparency, the White House's approach to the media clearly deserves condemnation. The issue isn't just blurring the lines between real and fake, or biased and objective, but between the visible and hidden as well. And the mainstream media does itself no favors when it holds on to the idea that its value lies in its dispassionate detachment. Good journalism doesn't have to be gutless and afraid to take sides, it just has to be upfront about what it does. Just ask Jon Stewart.