THE NAKED CITY – FAKE NEWS VERSUS THE UGLY TRUTH

‘Fake News’ – it’s a phrase that has become firmly entrenched in the modern lexicon, but one that evokes different strokes for different folks. For Donald Trump it’s a convenient way of dismissing anything negative that is reported about him – witness his angry branding of CNN as “fake news” at a recent media scrum. For others it’s a devious way of spreading rumour and innuendo, of creating political advantage and disseminating a thinly veiled agenda.

The phenomenon of course is nothing new except for today’s technology that enables the fakers to spread their message almost instantaneously. For hundreds of years less than ethical newspapers have printed dubious stories, dubbed ‘yellow journalism’, simply designed to increase circulation. In the late 1800’s media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst went to head to head in a circulation battle fuelled by numerous slabs of mischievous misinformation.

More recently the US based Weekly World News, which once sold on newsstands in Sydney, took the concept of fake news to an extreme with a newspaper almost entirely full of absurd made-up news. Headlines such as HILLARY CLINTON ADOPTS ALIEN BABY, ANCIENT PHOTO OF JESUS FOUND and ADOLF HITLER WAS A WOMAN were commonplace and it’s clear the journalists involved were having a laugh – no doubt racking their brains to come up with even more ridiculous stories.

The Weekly World News was a big seller at supermarket checkouts in the US, prior to the cessation of its print version in 2007. A university based study of its readers in the early 2000’s found that whilst the majority bought the newspaper for its entertainment value (i.e. a good chuckle), around one in 10 gave some credence to the authenticity of stories such as RUSSIANS SHOOT DOWN UFO, I WAS CHUCK NORRIS’S CHINESE TWIN and NORTH KOREA PLAN TO INVADE AMERICA. The WWN lives on today in a limp online version, but (sadly) seems totally lost in a cyber world riddled with tabloid style trash.

Whilst more and more people rely entirely on the internet to get their daily news feed, traditional print newspapers, in particular the so called ‘quality press’ are seen as the last bastion of truth in journalism. Even then there are cases where so called ‘fake news’ has escaped the scrutiny of editors and tainted the reputation of some of the most respected members of the Fifth Estate.

Paul Sheehan’s story, “The horrifying untold story of Louise”, about a woman brutally raped and beaten by a Middle Eastern gang, and published in the Sydney Morning Herald in early 2016, was quickly exposed as a total fabrication. Whilst it led to his suspension from the newspaper and the end of his career with the SMH, it also revealed a failure on the part of his editors to question the reliability of his source and his basic fact checking.

There’s little doubt that once Trump and his extended family are firmly planted in the White House, that the degree of media inspection will increase to a level not witnessed since the scandal-ridden days of the Clinton and Nixon administrations. Trump’s previous indiscretions, such as his alleged “pee-party” at the Moscow Ritz Carlton, are bound to rear their ugly heads. He’s likely to be the most scrutinised President in American history, not to mention the collection of cronies and family members he’s assembled as part of his team.

Whether the ‘fake news’ dismissal will work for him in the future remains to be seen. One can only hope that a World Weekly News story that appeared some time ago turns out to be validated:

 “Donald Trump’s birth certificate is a fake. He was actually born in Kenya!”

“It’s amazing, but after researching his birth, we learned he was born in Nairobi, Kenya,” said New York’s famous detective, Bo Dietl.  “Donald’s father,  Donald John Trump, was in Nairobi making real estate deals, when his wife, Mary Anne, gave birth to Donald, Jr. on June 14, 1946.”