FAKE NEWS - WE LIVE IN AN ERA OF TRUE LIES

By Ruma Dubey

Two days ago, a fake news published by AWDNews led to threats of nuclear war between Pakistan and Israel.  Fake news has been blamed by the United States Democratic Party for helping President-elect Donald Trump win the 2016 United States election. And yesterday, there was a virtual scare in Bangkok after Facebook activated its Safety Check feature but falsely suggested that there was an explosion in Bangkok.

And these are just recent examples; there have been just too many instances of fake news and it has brought to fore the ease with which on can deceive the public. The hard truth today is – do not believe every news that you read online.

With the explosion of information, with too much news coming in from all corners of the world, through various vehicles of media, it has become virtually impossible to always go back and check for veracity of the source. In this fast moving world, the one with the first “breaking news” rules the rooster. Thus when there are so many sources and so much news, media has become a matter of choice – people choose what news they want and which source they trust. Trust has become a matter of choice.

Technology is a double-edged sword- a boon and a curse, both in itself.  While advancing digital technologies have changed the way we produce, process and deliver information- it has also led to something which was unfathomable even a decade ago - oversupply and overload of information.  There are just too many news channels and and we are not even considering online, social media news; despite this plethora of choices, consumers are helpless when it comes to getting news which is relevant to them.

The ideal role of the media is to provide an unbiased, objective and truth account of facts about things happening around us. And today, this “idealism” remains just that – a notion. Though we take the news which we receive as “truthful”, depending on the source, we do verify – maybe from BBC, CNN or their websites. But surely news published on Twitter or Facebook cannot be taken as the truth.

And that brings us to the question as to what exactly does the media do today? We have seen innumerable instances of inane celebrity news getting the lead story while a massacre or a Boko Haram killing would command a small one corner. It is not because the media does not know what is news – it produces news based on what the public wants, based on our perceptions. It is our perceptions, determined by our culture and not natural occurrence which constitute an event. Thus news is today selected and then “constructed”. It is journalists who decide what is newsworthy and how it needs to be presented – the audio, image, timing – everything is planned like a movie script. Journalists who were supposed to present news are ‘professional story tellers of our age’.

Is this where we are heading? Is media relaible, at all? And, if yes, which form of media is the most reliable?  The answers to most of the above questions are pretty straightforward: you cannot rely on a single form of media for news.

Each form of media has its own pros and cons and as a consumer, it is on us, to decide which form of media to trust. What we need to keep in mind today, while reading, seeing or listening to news is that at all points of time, we need to take the news given with complete objectivity – treat it just as what it is supposed to be – news. But even while we get any news, the one point which we should keep reminding ourselves time and again is that the news is “produced”; each and every news that we get today is manufactured and fitted into our life based on its relevance.

And while we look at the produced news, it could act as a very powerful mirror of the society that we live in. As news is selected by the news producers based on our perceptions, it is a reflection of our culture – the obsession with Brangelina or David Beckham or the naming of Saif-Kareena son is what puts them always on the front page. At the same time, hunger still stalks Bihar and many parts of UP but we do not want to see this; we know it exists but it does not affect us directly in any way. Thus the quality of news that we see on the front page of newspapers or look at the top trending news on the social media; it gives us a peek into the society that we live in. In fact this mad rush to “break news” and always stay ahead tells us the tale of our times we live in – a rat race that we call life!