News-Media and "Fake News": Wading Swift Waters
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The development of "fake news" is, to some extent, inextricable from the growing use of social media outlets, like Twitter and Facebook, as sources of news: “today we are confronted with a plethora of competing, often chaotic, voices online…One consequence of exposure to ideologically-slanted media is the formation of inaccurate beliefs even when relevant evidence is understood correctly” (Lewandowsky et al.). One of the term’s primary functions, especially when employed by Donald Trump, is to delegitimize critical journalistic outlets that are widely considered respectable, for example when Donald Trump called CNN fake news (Figure 4), in a manner that then delegitimizes some of the primary sources through which political opposition can ground their claims.
However, the existence of fake news is undeniable, and, as John Corner mentions in his “Fake News, Post-Truth and Media–Political Change,” referencing James Ball’s Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World, fake news is an incredibly profitable business: “It is, he argues, the sheer profitability of fake news which underlies its huge growth. Looking at the spaces for entrepreneurialism opened up internationally, he notes how one Macedonian town, with a population of 45,000 people, launched at least 140 different fake news websites” (1101). Nevertheless, fake news, which often already, generally speaking, supports Trump’s presidency—many of the fake news websites created in the previously mentioned Macedonian town were publishing pro-Trump stories (1101, Corner)—is used rhetorically, and effectively so, in tandem with post-truth rhetoric. For example, as Lewandowsky, Ullrich, and Cook state in their “Beyond misinformation: Understanding and coping with the ‘post-truth’ era,” “Although considerable choice of media content became available with the advent of cable TV in the 1980s, the proliferation of media online, combined with platforms such as Facebook that custom-deliver content consonant with a user’s likes and behaviors, has rapidly accelerated the creation of alternative epistemic realities” (22). Here they elucidate the way in which social media, in the catering of content that is suitable to the already held beliefs of their users, further polarizes and isolates the beliefs, and in some sense the worlds, of liberal and conservative users: fake news being a major kind of content that, through often inflammatory misinformation, the construction of these polarized and isolated “epistemic realities” can occur. This epistemic polarization is a great example of Berlin’s social-epistemic rhetoric in action. Because these two discourse communities—for the sake of simplicity we’ll generalize the left and right political parties as singular discourse communities, rather than the complex ecosystems they are—have become polarized, never reaching common ground through discourse, each’s ideologies, and how they reflect the material world, have become, to some extent, unreconcilable. Therefore, worst case scenario, each discourse community’s understanding of the world is incompatible with the other, and no progress can be made discursively between each because common ground is impossible to find.
Figure 4