Check out this nice article in the Atlantic, written by Adrienne LaFrance, that shows that fake news is not just a new thing.

Quote from the article:

“It could not be foreseen that a time would come when a partisan press would seek to mislead the people,” a columnist lamented for The Davenport Daily Republican in 1896. “It could not be foreseen that a time would come when whole columns of fake news would be published, that whole columns of sensational stuff would be printed and read.”

Great story by Scott Shane of the New York Times on Cameron Harris and his fake-news concoctions.

“Asked whether he felt any guilt at having spread lies about a presidential candidate, Mr. Harris grew thoughtful. But he took refuge in the notion that politics is by its nature replete with exaggerations, half-truths and outright whoppers, so he was hardly adding much to the sum total.”

The good news is that his most important motivation, being able to earn money, was wiped away by Google and Facebook… so hopefully, there will be fewer independents out there spreading lies.

Sally Hubbard, writing on Forbes, says that Facebook and Google’s designs are intentionally stealing user’s attention, keeping it away from it’s competition, legitimate media companies. A very provocative read!

This website is being built to fund a nonprofit organization — Truth For Democracy — that will (hopefully if funded) provide a nonpartisan effort to “make truth a virtue again in our American political conversations.” Of course, nonpartisan does not mean BLIND! So we must report when our most powerful politicians continue to push falsehoods.

In today’s New York Times, an editorial excoriated Donald Trump for responding to Meryl Streep’s Golden Globe speech. Streep said she was heartbroken seeing Trump insult a physically-challenged New York Times reporter. In responding to Streep’s speech, Trump Tweeted that it never happened. Of course, as you probably know, it did happen and it has been caught on video.

The Times editorial said this:

He hasn’t taken office yet, but Donald Trump is lost, wandering in a labyrinth of lies and trying to drag the country in with him.

The implication from the editorial is that Donald Trump and his administration are in danger of creating a dystopian Dishonest-World where it will become virtually impossible to know when Trump or his administration or his advocates are telling the truth. This is terrifying!

Of course, lying about one’s own behavior is a character issue.

Lying in relation to issues is even more dangerous! When Trump tells Americans that the murder rate has gone up, when in fact it is way down from five years ago, and ten years ago, and 20 years ago; he is hurting democracy much more than when he lies about his own boorish behavior. Same with Bill Clinton’s angry retort, “I did not have sex with that woman!” These lies are wrong, they show a character flaw, and they are stupid to say because they usually backfire — BUT, they are not as dangerous as lies about facts that relate to issues that politicians and the body electorate of us citizens have to think about and make decisions on.

Perhaps we need not a rating system based NOT on an undifferentiated continuum ending with “pants on fire,” but a continuum from white lies to treason. Wikipedia has a great collection of the many types of lies there are, but it is too many for a rating system and many are not relevant for rating political commerce.

Here is my first draft:

In a deeply intriguing and rather depressing article, Bharat Anand describes how fundamental forces are working together to encourage a dysfunctional political process. And he doesn’t see any way out.

Anand ends with this:

Three forces combine to create the media coverage of political campaigns we observe today: connected media, which spreads messages faster than traditional media; fixed costs and advertising-reliant business models in traditional media, which amplify sensational messages; and viewers’ news consumption patterns, which leads to people sorting across media outlets based on their beliefs and makes messages they already agree with far more effective. Each reinforces the others. Without these enabling factors, even the best marketing campaign would go nowhere, and fake news or leaked information from cyberattacks would have little effect.

Fair questions have been raised about the lack of investigative journalism early in the campaign, false equivalencies in reporting, and the use of paid campaign operatives as experts on television news. But digital technology and business incentives exerted more influence over the media coverage than editorial decisions and missing voices did. The ratings bubble had as much impact as filter bubbles did. The forces at work here — the search for profitability, competition, and self-interest — are things we embrace as profoundly American.

Competition in the media leads to efficiency as well as to checks and balances — all good things. But it fails to internalize the externalities from profitable but sensational coverage. It leads to differentiation and more voices (also good, and what’s been the focus of regulatory efforts) but also to fragmentation, polarization, and less-penetrable filter bubbles (dangerous).

I’m not as pessimistic as Anand is. First of all, people can change their minds — so they can correct their falsely held beliefs. Second, there have been cycles of media truthiness in the past, for example in the early 1900’s American newspaper readers got fed up with “tabloid” misinformation and some newspapers used truth-telling to begin out-competing the dirty rags. Third, science has not yet begun to unwind the debunking backfire effect. Science and experience have taught us that trying to persuade a try believer can make them even more of a true believer — but too few alternative debunking strategies have been tested.