Part 2 ~ The Loss of Truth in an Overflowing Digital Soup of Fact and Fiction
“First simplify, then exaggerate”(David, 2018, p.192) is an old journalistic proverb; a “secret formula for writing a good news story”(Dutton, 2017). But does this not contradict the original purpose of journalism; the very reason people read the news?
It is widely understood that the original objective of journalism is to “keep us informed of the changing events, issues, and characters in the world outside”(American Press Institute, n.d.) so that we can “make the best possible decisions” as individuals and as a society. After all, making informed decisions is fundamental to democracy. So why would journalists want to “simplify” and then “exaggerate” their stories?
The answer to that is to capture our attention. The more that people engage with their articles, and watch their news channels, the more valuable they are to advertisers. And typically, it is advertisers who predominantly fund this media. Therefore, it is the financial interest of the journalist to sensationalise their story; to twist the facts into something less complicated and more exciting, provocative and controversial. This way their story captures as much attention as possible, meaning that people will engage with their story instead of turning to a competing news media outlet. Ironically, this leads us to being less informed… or at least less informed with information that we can be sure is truthful.
Before the Internet, smartphones and social media as we know it, people received their news from traditional media; from newspapers, radio shows and television news channels. This top-down flow of information meant that a news story was censored, sensationalised and filtered through an agenda-driven news company before it reached the eyes and ears of the public. But in the flat digital landscape that we know today, we do not rely so much on big media companies to keep us informed. In fact, “a recent Pew Research Center study found that 55% of U.S adults now get their news from social media either ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’”(Suciu, 2019). This is an eight percent increase from the previous year, 2018 (Suciu, 2019).
This is concerning when the “mixture of dramatically different forms of media content found in the [social media] timeline”(Gilroy-Ware, 2017 p.168) is considered. The horizontal communication facilitated by the Internet is something to be celebrated; everyone has a platform on which to be heard. Just as Guy Debord describes the spectacle itself, the internet “presents itself as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification”(Debord, 2014, p.2). At the same time, however, anyone can claim that anything is true, even when it is not, and rarely do people in our time-poor society fact check the claims that they read.
Meanwhile, “many companies or trade associations lobby the government”(Union of Concerned Scientists, 2017) and media companies, with bribes and other incentives, to “manufacture uncertainty” in the minds of the public about topics that conflict with their interests. These media companies agree to distribute misinformation to keep their allied company’s (or industry’s) reputation agreeable. This “working to manufacture doubt and create the appearance of uncertainty”(Union of Concerned Scientists, 2017) amongst the public further muddies the line between truth and falsehood.
As a result, the internet becomes a digital soup of fact and fiction in which “it has become impossible for most people to be sure of what is fact and what is not” (Gilroy-Ware, 2017, p. 169).
In his book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Gustave Le Bon expressed that “it is the most improbable things that are the most striking”(Bon, 1896, p. 40). In other words, the “things” which seem unlikely (perhaps because they may not be real at all) are the things that capture attention most effectively. This is because the “improbable” stands out from the ‘probable' reality of everyday life. Subsequently, in an attempt to compete with the masses of “improbable” and provocative media, news becomes “improbable” and provocative. As journalist Janet Street Porter pointed out, “news is edited down into short statements and[…] people write and speak in kind of headlines”(Loose Women, 2019). As a result, the process of “commodification[…] [has] driven out journalism of social value and replaced it with editorial content of primarily economic value”(Ward, 2016, p. 81). Through the process of sensationalism (including the “first simplify, then exaggerate” algorithm), news is transformed into a hybrid of information and entertainment; Infotainment. In this way, as Debord explains, “a tendency towards banalisation dominates the world over”(Debord, 2014, p.23).
