The Dangers of Unqualified Nonfiction
Does this look familiar?
“5 million uncounted Sanders votes found on Clinton’s server”
“FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide”
“Trump says, “If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.’”
The first headline is fake news, as though from the left, the less common of the two basic skews. The second example, about the FBI agent, is attributed to a Denver Guardian that does not exist. The third, the quote from Trump, was not spoken, or even Tweeted by Trump, though it is arguably true.
This year, a determining minority of U.S. voters elected Donald Trump as president, though he lied constantly as he campaigned. He “lied his ass off” at the podium, on the talk shows, and on Twitter. [Chuck Jones, United Steelworkers Local 1999, per Matthew Rozsa, “Carrier Union leader on Trump,” Dec. 7, 2016, Salon] The facts seemed irrelevant; he made up his own, with a self-licensed authority. But the coinage of the “Post-Truth” era does not just derive from the false or unverifiable claims of candidates for public office. In the new era, “fake news” is anywhere and everywhere. Throughout the Fall semester of 2016, in our class on Creative Nonfiction, we considered the problems of Truth and Falsehood, Reality and Surreality, Narrative and Representation. We dissected the mass-mediated news as a series of re-presentations of things that really happened, involving real people, even though we took as an article of faith that no representation would give us a clear window on the reality in question, or a complete account of it. So fake news posed a special challenge to our genre study.
Fake news consists of untrue stories posted on the internet by people who profit from clickbait. Some of the people who post such stories are Russian. More about them in a moment. Some fake news distributors are teenagers in a small town in Macedonia. Wikipedia’s entry on “Fake News” – an entry given visual irony by the fact that so many of its citations are from unverified or unverifiable sources – indicates that teenagers in Veles created over 200 sites spreading fraudulent news, at great profit to themselves, and with the explicit approval of the adults, and even the mayor of their town. Meanwhile, these teens skewed the presidential election in the United States.
One of the teens explained that he starts by plagiarizing a news story and then spins it any which way. Over the course of 2016, the spin was increasingly consistently rightward: “The teens experimented with a left slant toward Bernie Sanders, and found fictions about Trump more popular.” [Wiki] The recipe calls for some amount of truth – that portion which is plagiarized – mixed with something false. The presence of truth makes the half- and non-truths more believable. It is a cocktail with a history:
In the counter-intelligence world, this is what is known as a “wilderness of mirrors” – creating a chaotic information environment that so perfectly blends truth, half-truth and fiction that even the best can no longer tell what’s real and what’s not. [“The Daily Mail Snopes Story and Fact Checking the Fact Checkers,” Dec. 22, 2016, Forbes.com]
By contrast, the Forbes story I just quoted was not fake news, it was NO news – a whole story about how Snopes.com wouldn’t answer questions about its fact checking process or its fact checkers, citing privacy. If Snopes does not respond, there is no story, and there does seem to be a story – two sentences about how Snopes had not responded and scroll after scroll about what it might mean that they had not. What might be happening at Snopes that was neither confirmed nor denied by the person who declined to do more than cite privacy as a warrant for not saying anything. But NO news is not the same as FAKE news.
Snopes is now partnering with Facebook to address the problem of fake news, which it, Facebook, refused to acknowledge until well after the election. Facebook and Twitter are some of the most trafficked channels for the distribution of fake news. Twitter broke the Pizzagate scandal that had Hillary Clinton at the center of a child pornography ring, in tweets that are generated, or recirculated disproportionately from bots in Czech Republic, Cyprus, and Vietnam [Jonathan Elon, Albright University]. Now taking the problem more seriously, Facebook is improving its algorithms, since robots are the first responders to the falsehoods of Macedonian teenagers. The Russian distributors of fake news may have had more in mind than mere profit. Though the evidence remains classified, U.S. citizens and media consumers are given to understand that Russian hackers acted as saboteurs of U.S. democratic process, trying to swing the election toward Trump, and more broadly undermining confidence in the integrity of the election itself. This material is now designated as “propaganda,” another genre that stands for fake news in the political arena.
Taking steps to counter disinformation, the Senate passed a bill in December 2016 – between the election and the moment that Trump takes office – positing a “whole-of-government” strategy that involves multiple departments: State, Defense, USAID, among other agencies. At the same time, the mainstream media has been discouraging alarmist responses to fake interventions in the political process and in U.S. media reports. So much is not yet known. At least publicly. But alarm remains, and is compounded, in fact, by the specter of increased government oversight. Writing for Forbes.com Jordan Shapiro wrote,
While well-meaning people run around trying to protect children (and gullible adults) from so-called “fake news,” anyone in the United States who actually leans totalitarian must be ecstatic. They know that a “fake news” MacGuffin is an ideal first step toward squashing the First Amendment. Once the citizenry accepts the conceit that some news is “real” (and therefore, good) while other news is “fake” (and therefore, bad) they’ll voluntarily submit to censorship. Freedom of the press can easily be replaced by sanctioned propaganda.
Where to turn if we are sitting ducks, victimized by disinformation coming from Trump lovers and profit seekers around the globe, and our best recourse is the protection of an imperfect state, a state with a historical taste for secret service and a “whole-of-government” approach to counter-disinformation efforts? Consider the alternatives to the new genre that has confounded campaigns, voters, social media users, and news consumers. Creative Nonfiction could be the diametric opposite of fake news, an antidote. Both “fake” and “creative” suggest artifice. True News and unqualified Nonfiction are also artifacts, but they don’t advertise that fact. “Fake” means there is a “real” which is being faked, a “true” being falsified, a referent in the world that could somehow be observed and described in some pure and impartial way, some way that doesn’t reflect the bias of the observer and doesn’t affect the course of the thing observed. But there is no such thing.
“Creative” is not necessarily the best word for the job of qualifying stories about the world, for building credibility in those reports. The very word implies that something new is being made, wrought from some material not already of this world, introduced by the muses, and manipulated by prose crafters. “Creative” also implies that craft trumps truth in the process of creation. But it is crucial to qualify “nonfiction” – one way or another – in an era where unqualified fictions pass as news stories. There is no story without a slant; the only choices are avowing or not avowing that slant. Let’s admit of the qualification of nonfiction, and let that not disqualify the genre as veracious. The qualification of Trump is real as per Twitter: @RealDonaldTrump is his handle. I can’t get a handle on him, but I can qualify my own work more real-ly by calling it “creative.” Until I can get the name of the genre changed to “partial” nonfiction, I will happily call it “creative,” choosing, allowing, avowing my slant, and doing my partial part.