In praise of fake news

Here is a post-election headline you may have missed: “New-Look Democrats Introduce Racist Platform.”

The story, as you have surely guessed, is false. If you read through it, though, it sounds true, or at least, “truthy,” because it is written in a style that abides by the conventions of news writing.

That style is so authoritative, even in these “post-truth” times, that it can make the unlikeliest of tales sound plausible. Consider the “lede,” or opening sentence, of the article:

Calling President Elect Donald Trump “a dangerous liberal,” Nancy Pelosi unleashed a barrage of invective against the GOP and minorities this morning as a tacking Democratic leadership attempt to reinvent themselves as the more racist of the two parties.

The instant recognizability of journalistic style, and the ease with which any competent writer can master it, invites parody. The Internet enables wide distribution. Thus, we are awash in fake news. The furor over the role fake news stories might have played in the election of Donald Trump has obscured the benign, even salutary effects of most news parodies.

Take an absurd real-world situation — say, the triumph of a message of exclusivity over a message of inclusivity in an age that has seen the election of a black president and the legalization of gay marriage, among other progressive milestones — and tweak it to an only slightly more absurd degree, and you get a story that sounds like news but is actually pointed political commentary on the news: The Democrats, having seen that “going high” when the opposition “goes low,” as Michelle Obama put it, was a losing strategy, now realize that they will remain a viable party only if they go lower.

{mosads}That’s the point the article on NewsMutiny.com (slogan: “Satire for the Wise. News for the Dumb.”) tries to make.

At its best — think The Onion or Andy Borowitz — fake news is funny in a way that makes us wince. Though literally false, it expresses a figurative truth.

There is nothing new about any of this. Benjamin Franklin was a notorious hoaxer during his tenure as publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette. On the broadcast journalism side, such TV classics as “That Was the Week That Was” and “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in” delivered incisive commentary via a seated “voice of God” anchorperson, with relevant graphic appearing over his or her shoulder, decades before “Weekend Update” on “Saturday Night Live.”

What has changed is that the Internet has made it possible to detach fake news from its point of origin on a site known for satire, such as The Onion or “The Borowitz Report” in The New Yorker, and paste it into an email or post it on a social media platform like Facebook, without any indication that the story in question is not only absurd, but untrue.

And we know that if the content accords with beliefs that the receiver already holds, that person is apt to believe it.

The most disturbing aspect of this state of affairs is that we can swallow tall tales of unknown provenance that we want to believe, while doubting stories on reputable news sites that we do not want to believe — or impugning the motives of those reputable news sites when they do not publish stories that we want to believe.

Consider the visual counterpart of the fake news story: the fake news photo. In September 2005, days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, a photo circulated of the two Presidents Bush on a sport-fishing excursion.

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The 41st president brandishes a fishing rod. The 43rd president shows the camera a striped bass. Both men are grinning. In the background we see nine or 10 people, most if not all of whom appear to be African-American, wading through waist-high water on a city street.

Were the Bushes so out of touch with the plight of flood-ravaged New Orleans that they saw the rising waters as nothing more than an opportunity to do a little fishing? Maybe. But the photo was a fake — a composite of photos of the Bushes fishing and New Orleans flooding.

Snopes.com, the website devoted to separating fact from rumor and legend, said it “received many ‘Is this real? inquiries” about the bass-fishing Bushes. Suggest that a reputable news outlet like The New York Times or the Washington Post would surely have published it if it were, and you would be told that those organizations were in on a conspiracy to suppress news that challenges the powers that be (even when, as in this case, those powers are on the Republican side).

This is the post-truth media environment in which malicious fake news — the kind designed to damage reputations and influence voters — flourishes.

By all means, let us be wary of such stories.

But while we’re draining that foul bathwater, let us save the baby — the satirical fake news through which The Onion staffers, Borowitz and countless anonymous wiseacres express their chagrin at the state of the world.

Now, more than ever, we need the small and temporary relief from anger and frustration that the exchange of such biting political commentary can provide.

Russell Frank, an associate professor of journalism at Penn State University, is a folklorist and author of “Newslore: Contemporary Folklore on the Internet.”

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.