They took over a newsstand in Manhattan, replacing all the newspapers and magazines with fake ones, similar in design to their real-world counterparts but absurd in their content...
Hours passed. Hundreds of people walked by. A couple dozen stopped to gawk. The students did their best to engage them in conversation, asking for their opinions about what they saw.
SPOILER ALERT > We’re dangerously close to a situation in which facts no longer function as a journalistic response. Then what?
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Would people respond differently to falsehoods if they were taken off the internet and put in front of them, in print, on a newsstand in Manhattan? Would passersby notice, or even care?
Visitors’ answers largely fell into two categories:
> One group noticed the headlines, recognized they were odd, but had so little faith in journalism that they shrugged off the misinformation and moved on.
> The other group read the headlines but didn’t register them as unusual, so accustomed were they to specious stories as part of their regular news diets.
. . . the exercise was demoralizing: What did this say about news consumers? About news producers?
Only a handful of people were disturbed by the lies on display.
That was in 2018. If anything, the problem of disinformation has only grown worse since our sidewalk experiment. Falsehoods propagated on social media have become increasingly sophisticated, intentional deception from the White House and elsewhere is more widespread, and journalism’s ability to counter bad information with legitimate reporting seems to be getting more limited by the day. Those trends will accelerate as we head into the 2020 presidential election, a contest that will be about a lot of things, no doubt including how and whether the traditional arsenal of journalism—accuracy, fairness, dedicated observation—is a match for the army of nonsense assembled against it. . .
In the Fall of 2019, in the age of Trump and Facebook trolls and partisan propaganda, it looks like disinformation is winning.
Facts, they believed, could help journalists bring power to account, justice to the marginalized.
The truth carried weight; facts spoke for themselves and could not be dismissed.
But then came the internet and social media and a surge of information, factual and nonsensical
Whitney Phillips, a scholar of online communication at Syracuse University, has observed how true statements have been used to expand the reach of untruths . .
“Shining a light on what’s false can even, counterintuitively, make things worse by spreading falsehoods to more people,” she explains in her piece for the magazine, “making those falsehoods seem more plausible to certain audiences, and generally ensuring that the story is more potent after the debunk than before.”
The result, on our TV newscasts and daily papers and Twitter feeds, is a red-faced, vein-popping scream.
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What the press can learn from its war against disinformation
Beyond Facts
