Fake news and Trump aren’t the end of democracy

The house is burning. The house is burning.

Not.

Before we drive ourselves into total hyperventilating panic, can we all just take a breath.

Fake news. The end of days for news and information.  Please. 

{mosads}First can we please stop calling it fake news. It suggests that it is related to something called real news, which I assume means something approximating traditional reporting of verified facts of recent events. Let’s avoid a definition digression that would last too long. But it is not related. It is not fake news, It is simply “fiction.” As in made up. 

Nobody ever called the Weekly World News fake news. And nobody every believed it either.

So that gets to the real problem.

The problem is not that it exists, but that people are gullible enough to believe it. Like some believed the radio broadcast of War of the World’s by Orson Welles.

A few people did stupid things then, like they do today, as in the guy who recently took a rifle to “self-investigate” the “fake news” that Hilary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of a popular family pizza spot in residential DC.

Welcome to the anarchy of information that is the internet.

But, I hear the cries; ‘it swung the election.”

No a lousy candidate beat an apparently even lousier candidate (this is not a comment on their politics or person, but just their existence in the election).

The Russians did it. Perhaps. 

But the answer is not to panic, nor to demand Facebook to police its feeds or hire journalists to be their conscience. It is not to try to silence the voices – because this is fiction and even if it were not it is First amendment until someone wants to file for libel, and then it gets interesting quickly.

Instead it was summed up best by Chris Wallace recently at a Kalb Report panel discussion. Essentially he said it will all wash out in the end, so we shouldn’t panic.

Just think how far the news and information has come. Five years ago we would have laughed at the idea that Facebook would be where many people get their news. We would also have dismissed that fact that Jeff Bezos would by the Washington Post and reinvigorate that ailing publication. Five years ago Buzzfeed was hardly a defining name in news.

So this media self-flagellation makes for impassioned copy just as it will make for a footnote in the fascinating and turbulent history that is the media right now. And in four years we will be remembering these very strange “fake news” feeds. 

Gelb is a an Emmy Award winning television producer who spent more than a decade with CNN. He is currently the director of the Washington Media Institute and a co-founder of DCWitness.org, a homicide tracking news site. Follow DCWitness on Twitter @dcwitness.

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