Fake News is Real...
...and more prevalent than you think
Looking back on the past year and a half, we’ve covered a lot of ground in this blog regarding what’s wrong with the media today. But one thing we haven’t touched on that I find absolutely fascinating is when journalists flat out make up stories that aren’t true. A lot of people used to roll their eyes when President Trump talked about “fake news” (*did you know that Hillary Clinton, not Trump, actually brought that term into the mainstream after she lost the 2020 Presidential race? Read this Time Magazine piece for more info), but the fact of the matter is, fake news is unfortunately all too real, and way more prevalent than any of us likely knows.
The story that reminded me about this problem was this 1/8 Politico piece on a freelance writer named Ruth Shalit Barrett who’s suing The Atlantic for $1 million. Apparently, Barrett’s Atlantic piece – The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League-Obsessed Parents – included a “fictional child” in it; in other words, a woman in the story, named Sloane, lied and said she had a son. Not only that, but it was Barrett herself – the author of the piece – who apparently told Sloane to lie about having a son.
The whole thing is bizarre (the son is literally a TINY part of the story and almost nothing is ever said about him at all), but if you have a few minutes, read the Atlantic’s brutal description of what transpired (it’s posted on the webpage where the story used to be), which accuses Barrett of having a history of plagiarizing at a previous job in the late 1990’s (a very public gossip-fest if ever there was one). Barrett’s story, by the way, is riveting and very well written. But what I find scariest about all of this is that Barrett apparently wrote features for Elle and New York Magazine between the alleged plagiarism incident and this one at The Atlantic. Was any of that fake news, too? I’m not sure we’ll ever know.
The first-ever fake news story I heard of was Sabrina Erdely’s “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA,” published in Rolling Stone in 2014. This was a raw and powerful rape story that destroyed many young mens’ lives, marred UVA’s reputation and sparked a national outrage… before turning out to be completely fabricated by the alleged victim, a young woman identified simply as “Jackie.” It was also a story that Erdely and her Rolling Stone editors took at face value and, without verifying any of the key facts (most especially the name of the alleged attackers), published.
It’s a cautionary tale in many respects but this line from a Columbia Journalism Review article about the whole debacle explains, in my opinion, why the story was a failure from the start: “Erdely and her editors had hoped their investigation would sound an alarm about campus sexual assault and would challenge Virginia and other universities to do better.”
In other words, instead of just reporting facts, the writer and editors in this case all had an agenda. And when people have an agenda, their very human instinct is unfortunately to bend the truth to fit the narrative. Want more proof of this? Consider the story media outlets and social media users alike concocted about Nicholas Sandmann, Covington Catholic High School and the March for Life in January, 2020 (Sandmann has since settled with multiple media outlets who were responsible for spreading misinformation about him to the general public).
But the most egregious example of “fake news,” or fabricating significant elements of stories to fit a narrative, I’ve ever discovered was written by 33-year-old Claas Relotius, a German reporter who won CNN’s “Journalist of the Year” award not once, but twice. Relotius was apparently assigned by a German periodical (Der Spiegel) to spend a month in Minnesota “Trump country” and write about what it was like, says journalist Bill Wirtz in this Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) piece. The only problem? “A staggering amount of details [in Relotius’ story] were false,” says Wirtz. “Names changed and stories told that were embellished, fictitiously extended, or outright invented.”
“For instance,” Wirtz goes on to say, “the journalist added that the town had a sign saying "Mexicans Keep Out" in the entrance despite no such sign having ever existed. He also described a Mexican student being bullied and called “drug boy” and “fence boy,” claimed the local cinema was showing American Sniper at the time, and that the city was in decline economically and population-wise. It all fit perfectly into what a German upper-middle-class left-wing Spiegel reader would expect a town in Minnesota to look like. Overall, the German Spiegel reporter clearly went in with the intention to make the people of Fergus Falls look bigoted for the purpose of painting Trump supporters that way.”
In other words, once again, the writer had a narrative and / or an agenda ahead of his assignment, and he was more than willing to bend the facts to make the story fit it. What’s worse, says this Daily Mail piece, he did this for at least 14 different stories about the town, and every one of them was published and read by hundreds of thousands of people.
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Each year I am invited to speak to journalism classes about my work, my career and my experience as a journalist. One of my favorite things to tell aspiring journalists is to think of themselves as empty vessels, waiting to be filled with facts and stories. Basically, what I’m trying to tell them is that they shouldn’t come to any story assignment with any preconceived narratives or agendas other than to learn about and discover the facts. Unfortunately, the current trend in journalism – an almost irresistible pull toward social activism instead of both-sides reporting - is just too strong for many of them and they end up following the crowd instead of heeding my advice.
As readers, though, the bottom line for all of us should be this: if a story sounds too good to be true - too closely affirming some popular narrative or ideal in the world today - treat it, as Wirtz’ piece about the CNN Reporter of the Year suggests, with a hefty dose of skepticism.