The Onion probably was not the first, but it sticks in my mind as a website that posted comic prices of news that were pretty obviously fake, if you had a working brain. Like the bird whose mating call was "Fuck-You" and it liked to mate with camera lenses. They also post stuff about what people are thinking and events that involve ordinary non-news worthy people. It is obvious that it is fake to most people. There is the program on the CBC, "This is That" that talks about five news items in a half hour. Five preposterous stories, like a closing Calgary Aquarium decides to have a barbecue to get rid of its animals. The story is preposterous, but people heard it on the CBC and thought it was real. It is because it was modeled like it was a news program.
There are three problems that have created the state we are in right now and they are as follows. 1) Poor Critical Thinking skills, 2) Partisan Politics and 3) lazy journalism.
Lazy journalism. What does it take to verify a store that comes off a website? Not much usually a judicial application of common sense and critical thinking and maybe a phone call to an expert. Maybe all it takes is to read beyond the headline. If you don't have e expertise on a subject ask someone who does. Back when the Particle Accelerator first started up, it was mentioned that it might be possible to create tiny black holes. And people thought that the world would becoming to an end. Tiny black holes last less than a second and can't hurt a fly, but people did not know that, so they were scared. Journalists don't know that and so they just repeat what they hear and they did not fact check. Journalists are taught to present a balanced view of a subject, but not a weighted view. They will report both sides of an issue as if each side is equally worthy. So they will put a crank beside an expert, never mind that in reality there is no equality. Climate Change, Flouride in water, vaccines and Autism, and many others. Journalists will often simplify something to get the point across and lose the entire point. They are the deliverers of news to people and they need to be aware of these things.
Critical thinking. It is a very hard thing to teach. The method of teaching this is difficult and it is done through math and science, but also by being critical of your betters. Ask for clarification, ask for the proof. Ask questions. Do not except 'because', the words 'I don't know' are not the end of learning, but the beginning. Ask yourself when you read something in the news, hear something, if it makes sense. If it does make sense, then ask yourself why it makes sense. If I'd doesn't, then ask what does not make sense. You can research the topic and you educate yourself on the matter. After a while you can trust some sources of news, but don't accept blindly, check up on them and verify what you are reading to make sure it is still correct. Recognise that you have a bias and your bias will lead you to accept something that might not be true, so be critical of yourself too. Sometimes things are unclear in your mind sat if something is correct, replace nouns with other nouns if you are unsure about a moral argument. Test and reevaluate. Critical thinking is an active listening skill. Journalists need to do it, but you do too.
Partisan Politics. People fall into echo chambers where they believe that their own viewpoints are correct because that is the only thing they hear. Constant reinforcement makes you think that when someone is telling you something different, that they are lying. Or foolish. It is hard to think of yourself as being somehow corrupted by bias, but everyone is. If you think that you are not, you are wrong. Yes you. Me, I am biased and therefore I am blinded by that bias. Sometimes because I believe in what I know, I present my truth with a force of will and I can be wrong and I bring others down with me. But, I also try to include people with different views in my social networks, and I mean strong differences backed by strong will as well, ones that you can't swat away easily. And if you don't have a strong opposition in your circle, recognize that and understand it. As a secular humanist, I know that there are no strong god believers in my network and I rely on others to tell me their point of view. I listen to a couple podcasts that do this.
So know where you are weak, know your strengths, know your biases. Know your news sources biases too. Be critical about your surroundings and yourself.
Part of this critcalness is looking at when someone makes a claim of falsehood. As a friend once said to me, when you point with a finger at something or someone, you are pointing three fingers right back at you. When someone says someone is lying, pay attention; someone is lying and it may be the person who is informing you of this fact. If someone tells you that they are telling you the truth in a news story, listen carefully; all news stories are presented as the truth automatically, if someone is drawing attention of this to you, they might be the liars, so pay attention.
Someone told me once that fluoride was bad and should not be in the drinking water. I asked if they had a source and they gave me three websites as proof. I looked at them and I followed up on their sources. All three websites were self referencing, which means they relied on their own articles to prove their point of view. If I said that there is a teapot inbetween the orbits of Neptune and Uranus and showed you three websites that made the same claim, but each one referred to each other as proof of their veracity it is a weak proof. If there are a hundred articles that refer to each other it is also weak proof. If it is two websites that refer to two Independant sources, that is stronger proof.
If someone tells you that he heard there is a teapot in space, near Neptune, does not mean it is truth either, even if they say that astronomers know there is a teapot out there. You need to ask which Astronomers? If they can't tell you then they are not reliable.
Fake news sites tend to be of two sorts, they are easy to verify that they are fake, it will say so at the bottom or they are partisan misinformation sites and they will tell people that other sites are wrong or biased; the information they present usually flies in the face of the majority. And they are preaching to the converted. Be critical.
Then there is Trump. He is mystifying. He says things and does things that are perpendicular to reality and you have to accept things that don't make sense just to keep up and he has a lot of flashy news sites that back up his views. He is creating his own common sense and at its underlying basis is that the world is not complicated, people who say it is are lying. Believe the simple truth.
Nothing is simple.
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