How Fake News Confirms Biases and Amplifies Division

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Sophisticated tools are used to promote false or misleading stories, messages and narratives. And when people repeatedly exposed to lies are confronted with the truth, too many double down and believe the lies even more.

Story & Video by Greg Guma  

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“I think there is a broken relationship with reality,” Salman Rushdie said in 2017, referring mainly to the fractured mood of the American people. In his latest novel, The Golden House, one subplot involves the presidential campaign of a comic book villain. He calls this character The Joker, an apt nickname for the man responsible for the break.

Two years after turning national politics into surrealistic satire, Donald Trump’s use of the phrase “fake news” has gone global, becoming a meme and a weapon. So powerful is the idea as propaganda that politicians and state media in at least 15 countries exploit it to challenge real news and stifle dissent. It has been one of the main rallying cries to justify crackdowns in Russia, China, Venezuela and Turkey, among other places.

Since the election, Trump and his enablers have continued to employ the term in a stream of misleading counter-attacks that cast critical press outlets as purveyors of "fake news." Hard as it is for some to believe, the targets are mainly what used to be called corporate or mainstream media.

In 1984, 50 companies owned most of the country’s major media. Today there are just six big players: Comcast, Murdoch’s New Corp & Fox, Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS. Nevertheless, Fox News and an insurgent media alliance of “Alt-Right” platforms, think tanks and national press outlets have successfully coalesced to hijack the national debate, elect a president, and since then to smear government officials and legislators who dare to dissent.

Before Trump, fake news was easier to define. It meant both pseudo-news — from Daily Show satire to trivial gossip — and presenting falsehoods as if they are true. But now the phrase can serve an effective dismissal directed against any news a leader doesn’t like. In Syria, for instance, President Bashar Al-Assad has used it to discount allegations of torture in one of his military prisons. "We are living in a fake news era," he explained. 

Actually, political use of false stories goes back hundreds of years. In a recent message, the Pope — who defines fake news as the “spreading of disinformation online or in the traditional media" — suggested that the first "fake news" story dates back to the Book of Genesis, when a "crafty serpent" lied to a woman. Equating sin’s early “history” with fakery is clever, but not that enlightening.

Historically, one of the first people to practice it in the US was Benjamin Franklin, who printed a phony newspaper to mislead the British and create sympathy for his new country during negotiations. Even Honest Abe Lincoln worked with newspapers that sought to shape the news through speculation and partisan attacks.

Throughout the 19th century, publishing lies about political opponents was a common tactic, culminating in the Hearst-led propaganda camaign before and during the Spanish-American War. By the 1920s warnings were being issued about radio, and in 1927, the League of Nations passed a resolution opposing “obviously inaccurate, highly exaggerated, and deliberately distorted news.” In the 1930s, an International Federation of Journalists set up a tribunal to handle information that promoted hatred and violence. Too little, too late, some might argue. But democracy survived and recovered.

The difference is that more sophisticated techniques are used today to peddle false or misleading stories, messages and narratives. Unfortunately, when people exposed to lies are confronted with the truth, some double down and believe the lie even more. Two reasons are that 1) repetition works, even when the lie is part of a story that debunks it, and 2) people tend to believe what they want to believe, a concept known as confirmation bias, or wishful thinking, the influence of desire on beliefs. 

Unfortunately, this can also lead people to stop looking for answers. And it suggests that we don’t always see things objectively. Rather, we tend to pick out what makes us feel good or confirms what we already believe.

In a recent study of Facebook that analyzed posts between 2010 and 2014, scholars found that people mainly shared information that confirmed their prejudices, with little attention to facts or truthfulness. The result, said the report, is the “proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust and paranoia.” 

The authors specifically studied trolling — the creation of provocative, often false information with the hope of spreading it widely and sparking an overreaction. “Many mechanisms cause false information to gain acceptance,” the report notes, “which in turn generate false beliefs that, once adopted by an individual, are highly resistant to correction.”

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During the last election, the claim that Hillary Clinton was a pedophile appeared in a Facebook post, spread to Twitter, then went viral with the help of platforms like Breitbart and Info-Wars. But it was initially unclear whether “Pizzagate” represented mass hysteria or the work of connected interests with real resources and hidden motives. It took almost a year for researchers to expose the digital trail.

In the end, it appears to have involved a variety of participants — online activists, Russian bots, foreign agents, domestic operatives, and ordinary people who were taken in. Many of the online promoters were associated with the Trump campaign; others had connections with Russia. Working together, though sometimes unwittingly, they were amplified in a new "post-truth" information ecosystem, a place where false claims are defended as indisputable facts. The difference, says Samuel Woolley, an expert in “computational propaganda,” is that this phony story was "retweeted and picked up by some of the most powerful faces of American politics."

At this point, it’s not unreasonable to ask whether a tsunami of hoaxes and rumors on Facebook and other social media helped to swing the election. It does look more likely. Evidence began to emerge right after the vote. Journalist Jay Rosen made a solid case that fake anti-Clinton stories helped give hesitant Trump voters more reason to vote for him or against her. And the Daily Beast's Gideon Resnick explained that "automated networks of social media bots spread erroneous information," mostly to Trump's benefit. 

Basically, what we experienced was a successful disinformation or perception management operation, a form of “hybrid warfare,” including but not limited to the weaponizing of hacked documents. During the campaign President Obama became obsessed with Velez, a Macedonian town that experienced a “digital gold rush” when a group of young people there published more than 100 pro-Trump web sites, attracting a massive Facebook following. 

Afterward, he framed the issue this way: "If we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems." 

The new media ecosystem "means everything is true and nothing is true," Obama explained in an interview with David Remnick. "An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers' payroll. And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal—that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation."

On the other hand, most Americans are better informed and less impressionable than we may think. In the popular imagination, society is divided into two segments of roughly equal size: the liberal and right-wing “bubbles.” In reality, there has never been much proof that this is true. The “echo chamber” runs deep and hot, but it is narrow and confining. While many of us are exposed to fake news, far fewer are taken in. Most people still get their news from a variety of sources. Routinely exposed to opinions they don’t share, they do not live in an echo chamber.

So look on the bright side. The two “bubbles” are exaggerated, a distorted construct. Despite hybrid warfare, perception management and the painful struggle over what is or isn’t fake, most of us still share a fact-based view of reality. On the other hand, polarization is increasing around the world, right along with faster communication. 

The situation is reminiscent of an experiment by psychologists in 1970. Students were divided into two groups —  high and low prejudice — based on their initial answers to a questionnaire. Each group was told to discuss controversial issues, then answer the questions again. 

“The surveys revealed a striking pattern,” notes Elizabeth Kolbert. “Simply by talking to one another, the bigoted students had become more bigoted and the tolerant more tolerant.” This is how societies break down and extremism spreads. Instead, we need to think outside the bubbles and echo chambers, and relearn how to disagree without escalating every conflict into an apocalyptic showdown.  

Despite presidential lies and the eruption of fake news, fair, fact-based reporting survives. In fact, being bullied and called fake may have provided some needed energy and focus. After years of declining public trust, both establishment and independent journalists are gaining credibility again, and demonstrating why the truth still matters and a free press is more essential than ever.

This article is adapted from Greg Guma’s lecture on “Journalism in the Era of Fake News” at the UVM Alumni House in Burlington on March 15, 2018, sponsored by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

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Journalism in the Era of Fake News

Feiffer’s Game: Questioning Myths and Selling Fantasies

Put-downs and pathos at Bennington College (1969)

Jules Feiffer didn’t look much like the hunched, self-doubting characters he drew. But his attitude and what he was willing to reveal about himself did make him seem more like Bernard, his introspective cartoon creation, than outward appearances at first indicated.

Greg Guma photos, shot for Jan. 1969 story

The satirist, novelist and playwright was an understated Woody Allen, an impish intellectual who masked his problems in wry humor directed mainly at his own generation and lifestyle. When he visited with a small group of women in the Carriage Barn at Bennington College one Friday afternoon in January 1969, the students who expected him to take their side on the “generation gap” and put down middle-class hypocrisy were treated instead to a mustached David Susskind (then a serious TV panel host) who was more interested in hearing opinions than pushing them.

Feiffer wore a turtle-neck and puffed compulsively on a cigar as he moderated a rambling dialogue that ranged from the women’s movement and psychoanalysis to old movies, American fantasies and drugs. The room’s white backdrop created a neutral space somewhat like the world his cartoon figures inhabited, a stark environment that focuses attention on the speakers. One of the few men in the room, I was there as a reporter for the local daily on one of my early feature assignments. 

Jules Feiffer: “We usually dream what we are supposed to.” 

Pulling his straight-backed chair into the center of the space, away from a young woman who was trying to record the discussion, Feiffer began with a little irony. “The people I spoke with this morning said the talk was so high-minded that they didn’t get to talk about what they wanted - cartoons. Well, maybe we can spread about a minute and half on that.”

The group laughed. Feiffer also laughed, as he usually did when he thought he said something funny. After that the topic of cartoons, for which he had become nationally famous, wasn’t mentioned again for two hours.

He had just returned from an artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, he explained , and had written a play about “the sex lives of people from 1940 to 1969.” The play, although never produced, became the Mike Nichols film Carnal Knowledge. The comment sparked a lively dialogue on women’s rights. 

Feiffer: “The only way to go through life
happily is to be lobotomized.”  

“I’ve been doing a lot of reading about women, analysis of women and what the creatures want,” he confided slyly to a room full of them, most waiting for a humorous insight. “And what I’ve found is that there is a slightly patronizing tone in any books that men write on the subject. The things that make sense are by women.” It wasn’t a joke, but made the point. 

From there the conversation moved on to writing, and the status of women in that field. Warming up slightly, Feiffer shared his perception that “because men have always been more free to move around and incorporate this into writing, people used to think of writing as a field not open to women.”

Several students said they still felt this prejudice. But instead of agreeing Feiffer echoed what they had been reading lately in career guides, the idea that writing was a career now accessible to anyone, regardless of gender. Pressed for details, however, he agreed that unequal treatment of women remained a huge problem.

“People have a very important reason usually when they hold onto myths,” he continued. It was a theme in some of his work. “If a guy can’t feel better than his wife, he feels better than nobody,” he said ruefully. “His job is probably degrading to him, so his choices of who to dominate are narrowed to his wife or children. That’s how the game has traditionally been played.”

The discussion next shifted to “woman power” as a movement. “Isn’t it amazing,” he mused, “that you have to organize to do what must be obvious?”

Each time a topic was introduced, usually by a random remark from someone in the audience, Feiffer would quickly deflect the focus from himself and promote discussion among the students, sometimes nodding recognition and calling on others as they signaled interest. Maybe he was collecting material for another play, I thought at the time, or maybe a cartoon series on college attitudes and hang ups. Or possibly he just preferred to remain a bit of an enigma to his fans, who hung on each response and waited patiently for the punchlines.

The few personal details that did emerge included the facts that Feiffer was 40 at the time, married, and living with nagging feelings of inadequacy that had kept him in psychoanalysis for at least 10 years so far. And that experience left him firmly convinced people cannot solve their problems alone.

His general reticence vanished only once, when the conversation turned to a definition of male fantasies. Feiffer began by sharing one of the advantages of working for Playboy — that you could occasionally express your true feelings about the publication directly to the editor.

“One night Hefner was telling me how his magazine has helped liberate women,” he casually name-dropped, “and I said maybe I could believe that if my image of the “Playboy Man” wasn’t someone who walked into a room, elegantly dressed, with a girl on each arm.”

Still, he characterized Hefner’s periodical a “fantasy magazine,” adding that it presented “what every guy is supposed to dream he wants out of life. And we usually dream what we are supposed to. There are lots of those people out there reading it and it’s not for the fiction, I swear to you.”

Continuing on the subject of fantasies as expressed in media, he suggested that Vogue likewise targeted the “female dream, a composed, sophisticated and dominant female, escorted by an effeminate male.”

Toward the end of the afternoon, Feiffer did acknowledge that dominant fantasies were changing, and that people were beginning to “have fantasies they aren’t supposed to have.” Two examples he offered were Lenny Bruce, the controversial comedian who had become a martyr for free speech and the young upon his death a few years earlier, and Phillip Roth, author of the sexually-explicit Portnoy’s Complaint. Both had given voice to formerly taboo fantasies, he argued.

Speaking of taboos, he pivoted, “the only thing that bothers me about the drug culture is the use of drugs for escape rather than as a force moving forward.” He clarified by suggesting that both drugs and alcohol could potentially be valuable as therapy, then clarified further by noting that this was not usually how they were used. 

Personally, Feiffer admitted, he preferred “the therapeutic value of booze.” So much so, in fact, that he believed his drinking helped him to clear his mind when he became confused or upset about his work or life. Talk about a fantasy. 

Fielding each question or comment with respect and keen attention, he often seemed much too serious and mainstream that day to be the same artist whose sharp perceptions — an original mixture of put-on, put-down and pathos — had made him a pop philosopher and one of the leading illustrators in the country.

After two hours, however, it became quite clear why Jules Feiffer was able to capture the insecurity of middle-aged men. He was one of the gang, another captive sending out desperate messages, and possibly a few personal confessions along the way. 

Only once did Feiffer’s dark streak fully break through. Asked about happiness in life, he puffed on his cigar, scratched his forehead with a single finger, and then replied: “The only way to go through life happily is to be lobotomized.” 

The audience laughed. Feiffer smiled. Success.