What Is Fake News?

I want to make an argument that sounds more extreme than it is: the news, as most of us consume it, is bad for you.

Not every journalist is dishonest, and not every story is false. The problem is the structure of modern news, what it selects, how it frames things, and what it does to your mind over time. It works against your understanding and your well-being far more often than it serves them.

I don’t say this as someone who hates the press or thinks reporters are villains. There are good, careful, honest journalists. The problem isn’t a shortage of good people.

The problem is a machine whose incentives reward the negative, the shallow, the alarming, and the divisive, and that machine shapes what even good journalists produce. Let me walk through what I mean, and then you can decide for yourself.

I’ve watched this machine for most of my life, first as a loyal consumer and later as an outright addict, and I’ve come to resent what it does to people. It takes decent, curious citizens and turns them into frightened, angry partisans who are sure the world is ending every night on the evening broadcast.

The News Focuses on The Bad

Did you know that over 90% of the news that’s reported is negative?

You don’t believe me? Do an experiment and open up a newspaper, watch a news program or review a news website. Ignoring whether or not you agree with what the article says, note down how many times they report something negative versus how many times they report something positive. As I said, ignore your political affiliation, your leanings to the right or the left, and simply judge what’s written or said by the news as being either positive or negative.

For example, there are hundreds of thousands of police officers working every day, doing their jobs diligently and ensuring the general population is safe. The vast majority of these officers are good people doing the best they can to help their communities. Of course, individuals occasionally make mistakes, do the wrong things, and so forth. But on a daily basis, the vast majority just go through their routine, do their jobs, help people, and arrest the bad guys (and gals).

What does the press focus on? The single corrupt cop or the one unfortunate incident. Reading about the police in the news, you’d think every officer was trying to shoot as many people as possible and every police force in the country was corrupt. The press makes little to no attempt to balance a single, isolated negative event with anything positive. I think that’s a disgrace, and it’s unfair to the people who put on a badge every morning and go do a hard job well.

If you’ve ever talked with reporters, you’ll find they, as a rule, want the glamorous story exposing some huge scandal. This is how they get promotions and raises. I doubt if any reporter ever got praised for doing stories about cops helping communities or the police successfully stopping crime.

News Causes Anxiety and Depression

It should be obvious that content in media can affect your emotions. A happy, lively movie can make you feel good, a horror movie might make you feel terrified, and an action movie can make you feel anxious and give you that rush of adrenaline.

It’s true that there are a lot of bad things happening in the world every day. There’s always crime, automobile accidents, politics, war, and similar things happening at any minute of any day that you choose. Someone got into an accident this very second while you read this. Someone else was in some way victimized by a criminal, and it’s highly likely that there’s a war going on somewhere in the world while you read the sentence.

But do you really need to know any of that?

Is it important that you know about that long car chase on the 101 freeway in Los Angeles? Do you need to understand the ramifications of the terrorist bombing in Iraq that happened 20 minutes ago? Is the riot in some city far away from you important to you and will it affect your life?

By putting these stories on the news, the answer from the media is “yes, you need to know this stuff”. The news media takes the stance that you need to know every single thing that Donald Trump did wrong today, or every little fault committed by Hillary Clinton. You also have to know, 20 times over, about the person who died in an automobile accident in Las Vegas, clear across the country from you, and you certainly must have all the details about a police shooting on the other side of the country.

According to the news media, the intimate and thorough details of all of these events are vital to your survival. So vital, in fact, that the news will often show you the same story over and over again.

All this negativity tends to make people anxious, depressed, terrified, and upset. A study in 1997 looked at the psychological effects of viewing negative news items. It found that those who watched negative news bulletins were significantly more anxious and sadder than those who watch positive or neutral news bulletins.

One important step to coping with depression is to stop watching, reading or listening to the news.

News Misdirects

A real problem in the news media is that coverage often skews heavily in one direction. It emphasizes data that reinforces a chosen narrative and omits data that complicates it. This happens on all sides, and it happens regardless of which party is in power.

For example, one analysis of network coverage of a sitting president found that the overwhelming majority of it was negative, while positive developments during the same period, including economic ones, received comparatively little attention. You can find studies like this pointing in every political direction. That’s rather the point. Whatever your politics, the need for conflict and negativity skews the coverage you’re getting, and no commitment to the full picture balances it out.

What’s the point? If you want a balanced coverage of the Trump administration, or anything else for that matter, you need to look elsewhere than the mainstream press. You’re not going to get balanced anything from the news.

News Exaggerates Corruption

The news focuses on the exceptions, the glamorous or the extreme because that makes ratings higher. Apparently, at least in the way of the thinking of the news, no one wants to know about the police officer who walks his beat every day, stopping crime, preventing violence, and building up his neighborhood. That’s what happens with the majority of police: they do their jobs and help people and communities.

However, the news feels that the masses want to see and learn about the exception: criminal actions, racial attacks, and even unkind remarks by police officers. The tens of thousands of officers who do their job every day following the rules and doing their best are ignored because of the racial remarks said on social media by a single officer. Worse yet, the news often implies that there’s deeper corruption within the police, sometimes by simply saying an investigation has taken too long or hasn’t gone in the direction toward proving the officer was at fault.

Of course, it would be boring to tune in and hear the anchor announce that all the police officers did their jobs satisfactorily today. Most news days would be as dull as can be, because on most days almost everyone is doing their job as best they can, following the rules as much as possible, and not harming anyone. Personally, I’d take a dull news day over a manufactured nightmare any time, and I suspect most people would too if anyone ever offered them the choice.

The problem isn’t that the news reports on corruption (yes, we do need to know about corruption so we can deal with it) but that th media exaggerates the corruption and implies that the entire structure is rotten to the core. The media does this often by choice of words, adjectives and adverbs, that makes the problem seem much more intense than it really is. News writers take advantage of logical fallacies and cognitive biases of their own and their audiences to warp isolated events into nonexistent patterns and failures of entire systems and communities.

The net result of this is people who watch the news tend to have very negative opinions about subjects on which the news reports. Even though the vast majority of police officers are simply doing their job and doing it well under difficult conditions, the community might feel, because of the news media, that the entire Police Department is corrupt and needs to be thoroughly investigated and everyone fired.

This leads to feelings of anxiety and terror around police officers that’s unnecessary and unwarranted by actual circumstances.

News Is Presented Without Context

News outlets constantly take things that are said and happen out of context. This occurs quite often in videos of police shootings. The only thing that shown on the news is the shooting itself. You don’t get to see what happened before and will happen after.

The above video is an example of the news media taking comments out of context. If you watch the whole thing, you’ll see that she did interviews where only small portions were used to illustrate points the reporters wanted to make even though those points had nothing to do with what she said.

News Is Shallow

Every single day, the news cycle demands a constant flow of the new and different. Because of this, the news media rarely provides in-depth knowledge or detail about anything.

Their articles tend to be shallow and laced with bias and opinion. A complicated story gets chewed down to a headline and a couple of quotes, then dropped the moment something shinier comes along, a disservice to every reader.

A journalist finds out there’s a story. They’ve limited time to interview, research, write and edit the story. They’re looking for the most “sexy” and glamorous approach, and once they find their angle, the story is written. By the next news cycle they need to find new things to write about.

What this means is when you watch or read the news, you’re getting a very shallow view. You won’t get much, if any, follow up information (unless it’s a big story) and you won’t get a well-researched, balanced narrative. Don’t go to the news media if you want to get any depth of information.

News Reinforces Echo Chambers

Social media causes a phenomenon known as echo chambers. Social media wants to show you posts, articles, pictures, videos and so forth that are related to your interests. It does this to get you to remain on the social media platform and showing information related to your interests is a great way to keep you glued to your computer screen, smartphone screen, or whatever.

As you comment on, like and share articles, images, videos and so on, social media build up a picture of what you want to see. Once the platform has this picture, it seems you want similar information.

As a result, your worldview tends to become warped because social media is continually hitting you with data that it believes you want to see, and that data has been trained based on what you’ve already looked at.

This means if you enjoy articles that lean toward the left, the only articles you’ll see on social media will lean toward the left. This presents a distorted worldview. That’s self-reinforcing and causes you to become very biased about life and reality.

Media coverage feeds directly into these echo chambers and reinforces whatever bias they happen to carry at the time. The media attempts to understand what the majority of people want to see, and report on that. That becomes an echo chamber in its own right. If the media is slanted to the left, then you’ll see articles that are biased to the left (and vice versa).

The video below is an example of how echo chambers work and what one man did to overcome them.

Echo chambers are extremely damaging to society because they mutate the opinions and beliefs of vast groups of people to the point where those people believe what’s said without question. They’re hit with the same basic message over and over, day after day, month after month, year after year, from whatever echo chamber they live in.

That scares me more than any single headline ever could. A person who’s heard one message a thousand times loses the ability to hear anything else.

These echo chambers make it very difficult for people to change their minds and form opinions of their own. The “facts” that they believe are real from their own echo chamber give the appearance of being truths supported by a vast number of opinions and evidence.

Sadly, echo chambers are simply another form of groupthink, and they’re always wrong.

Your echo chamber is always wrong. You can prove it for yourself by leaving your echo chamber, gathering your own facts, and coming to your own opinions and conclusions. That can be very difficult. Sometimes the only way to do it is to cut the news media and social media almost entirely out of your life, and I’ve had to do exactly that myself.

News Is Addicting

Have you noticed that if you watch the news regularly, you feel like you’re missing something if you don’t tune in, read or otherwise get your daily dose of the news media? The news is addictive, and it’s almost as hard to give up as any other hard addiction.

I should know, because I was addicted to the news on all types of mass media from newspapers to television. Every single day, I jumped onto the Internet to watch several different news channels, read articles, and look at what was happening and what people were saying.

I’d quit this addiction several times, sometimes for months on end, and then something would happen in the world or in the country that I felt that I needed to know. Then I’d just have to go look, and get absorbed into whatever story was going on, and watch the talking heads until I couldn’t take it anymore.

The last time this happened was the 2018 midterm elections. I just had to watch a news story, which upset me, and then I had to watch another and another and another after that. I found myself sucked right into the news. Within a short time, I was looking at the news on Twitter, Facebook, the various news sites, YouTube, and anywhere else I could get it.

After a couple of weeks, I found that I was so upset at what was going on that I simply had to stop watching, reading, or listening to anything related to the news at all. The noise from every direction, left, right, and center, had become impossible to take in without it warping my mood and my view of the world.

Looking back, the worst part is how easily it happened. I knew better, and I’d quit before, yet one election was enough to pull me right back in, upset and angry, clicking from feed to feed for news that didn’t change a single thing in my life.

News Reinforces Group Think and Mob Mentality

But what about politics? Don’t you need to know that? Wouldn’t it be better to go to the politicians actual website, attend their events, listen to their speeches, and read source documents about the actual accomplishments then to read and listen to the radically biased, often uninformed opinions of so-called news anchors?

Our political system’s problem these days is many of us get our information from the news media and social media, none of which have any relevance to actual data, facts, and real-life situations. Turn off the news and keep it off if you want to get real information based in fact about political candidates and issues. You’re not going to get any facts from social media, the news media, or any political action groups. They’re all going to be biased strongly in one direction or another.

Let’s take an example of the recent flap over the so-called caravan coming from Honduras to Tijuana. All sides of the political spectrum used these people for their own ends. The right said they were a danger, the left said they were poor people fleeing from horrible economic conditions. The garbage the news spouted about the caravan was bent to fit each outlet’s own agenda. Real people turned into props for somebody’s ratings and somebody else’s talking points is ugly.

But what’s worse, is the news encourages groupthink symptoms and mob mentality. The mob of people on the left scream, as a group, that the caravan consists of people who are fleeing from hard economic conditions and that the United States should let them in freely and without resistance. The mob of people on the right scream, again as a group, that the caravan is an invasion and the country needs to resist it with as much force as needed.

Both of those viewpoints are groupthink examples.

Group think is always wrong. According to Psychology Today, “Group think fosters a strong ‘us versus them’ mentality that prompts members to accept group perspectives in the heat of the moment, even when these perspectives don’t necessarily align with their personal views.”

Group think occurs when a group of well-intentioned people make irrational or non-optimal decisions that are spurred by the urge to conform or the discouragement of dissent. This problematic or premature consensus may be fueled by a particular agenda or simply because group members value harmony and coherence above rational thinking. In a group think situation, group members refrain from expressing doubts and judgments or disagreeing with the consensus. In the interest of making a decision that furthers their group cause, members may ignore any ethical or moral consequences.

With group think, issues become “you versus me” or “us versus them”. People no longer work together to find solutions or work through problems. Instead, individuals allow the group to think for them, and that’s always extremely dangerous. In practice, the news media tends to go with the group and reinforces group think. In fact, it magnifies group think because the media can reach entire populations instantly. This article about Communication Theory explains groupthink theory in greater detail.

News Boosts Small, Vocal, Dangerous Voices

Journalists are on the lookout for “interesting”, glamorous or alarming events or people for their stories. Because of this, they often look for opinions from the fringe of society, giving recognition to small but vocal minority groups because they’re loud and have definite opinions.

The calm, encouraging voice doesn’t get much news play. The radical, screaming, foaming at the mouth, highly opinionated, almost insane person gets the microphone and the exposure because they’re loud, obnoxious, and “interesting”. The voice of calm or reason isn’t interesting. To a journalist, the voice of insanity is what’s interesting.

Why is this a problem? Because what’s needed in emergencies and difficult circumstances is the voice of calm.

The person who takes control of the situation and does their job competently and efficiently, without shaming or slamming other people or groups is exactly the person that we want to hear from. We don’t need to hear from the fringe groups or the loudmouths or the people who claim they’ve been done wrong by everyone else. We need to hear from those who are succeeding at handling whatever’s going on.

News Encourages and Supports Terrorism

Think about terrorism for a minute. In most cases, the attack is small, isolated and the casualties are few, if any. A bomb might go off in a garbage can or some white powder is an envelope sent to some highly placed individual.

Those minor events grow a hundred thousand times larger because the news reports them over and over and over again. Turn on the news media after one of these minor attacks, and you think the world ended. Reporters interview experts, police are told to take action, the president of the United States makes statements (or Tweets), and political candidates weigh in with their opinions on the effectiveness of the police and military forces.

Terrorists depend on the news media to be their ally in their terrorist attacks. Yes, I use that word intentionally. The news media is an ally to terrorism, because without this massive reporting on terrorist attacks, terrorism wouldn’t have the effect that it does, and might not exist at all. News encourages terrorism.

This might be the simple facts of the attack: “a small bomb went off in a trashcan a mile from an airport, two people were wounded, and the police are investigating.” Nothing else need be said. There’s no reason to panic, no need to call out the National Guard, and the police department and other services are handling everything just fine.

But that wouldn’t make for good news. Oh no. The news media, in its infinite wisdom, feels it must magnify this by reporting it time and again on show after show for days. The coverage brings the feeling of panic, anxiety, terror and alarm throughout the community, the state and even the entire country to a fine boil. Without a doubt, people will blame the current US president, whoever he or she is, for the attack, and the vitriol will spread throughout social media.

Yet based on the simple fact of the matter, nothing significant happened. More than likely, the police will have the culprit in custody within a few days.

What is fake news?

None of this makes journalists evil or every story a lie. The point is that the news, as a system, is built to capture and hold your attention, and the most reliable ways to do that are to alarm you, to anger you, to oversimplify, and to keep you coming back for the next jolt. Strong bias, shallow coverage, relentless negativity, and the steady manufacture of outrage are what the incentives produce.

So when I use the phrase “fake news,” I don’t mean a grand conspiracy. I mean something more ordinary and more pervasive: a picture of the world that news outlets systematically distort through what they select, how they frame it, and what they design it to do to you. A version of reality optimized for engagement at the expense of truth.

A highly effective move, if you feel anxious, overwhelmed, or like the world is uniformly hostile, is to turn off the news for a while and see how you feel. Then go find your own sources.

Read original documents. Listen to people directly instead of through a layer of commentary. Seek out writing that’s depth, that follows up, that’s willing to be boring in the service of being accurate. Every source has some bias, but you can choose ones that inform you instead of farming your attention.

Decide for yourself. That, in the end, is the point. I spent years letting the news decide what I should be afraid of and who I should be angry at, and I won’t hand it that power again. The news would prefer to do your thinking for you. Don’t let it.

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