There are many factors leading to the prevalence of fake news.
An important cause is that capitalism depends on fake news and manipulation of information for its daily activity. We have advertisements that carefully conceal problems, and associate products with good times, family, success and so on, when the product is largely irrelevant to these joys. We can have advertisements that blatantly lie about products, and the transformations that will happen when you buy them, to get you to buy them; sometimes these lies may be ‘ironic’ so as to make the falsehood obvious, even while making it. Advertisements aim to keep you consuming when you already have enough and could more sensibly invest money elsewhere.
We have companies continually hyping products that are in development to undermine markets for existing products and rival products in development. We have science being attacked to keep products on the market, and successful, a long time after they are known to be dangerous or destructive. We have PR organisations whose sole role in life is to make their clients look good when they have done harmful things and to discredit any opposition or criticism. For sales and functioning, the appearance of integrity is more important than real integrity. Fake news is not marginal to capitalist functioning. As deceit and misdirection works to keep corporate profit high and seems entirely natural in capitalism, it is not surprising that its use is extended elsewhere.
The general thesis of this article is that, given that the Right tends to be busy implementing policies that will benefit the corporate sector at the expense of everyone else, they have an incentive to issue fake news to keep voter support, or at least keep voters in perpetual confusion.
They are helped in this aim, by a web of corporately supported ‘think tanks’ who get massive amounts of money to support their various corporate sponsor’s lines and provide ‘useful opinion’ and ‘policy advertising’. These think tanks are routinely quoted to provide ‘independent’ support for the corporate sector and its ‘free markets’, or to attack (or ignore) whatever science shows that the Right is living in a fantasy land. This seems normal in capitalist practice, as asserted above. Reporting information from these sources also saves corporate media money, as the media do not have to spend much on investigation. As well as commercial distortion, political parties can also try to distort news for political advantage, and misinformation can easily be spread when it supports corporate ideology, or if it attacks those who have doubts about corporate dominance. Similarly, governments who are warring against each other can also issue fake news, to try and influence the populace of other countries – hence the Russian involvement in the US elections, which seems to have been successful enough.
An important question in studies of informational bias, is ‘who owns and controls the Media, and how do they work?’ The answer is simple: most media is corporately owned. Consequently most media is biased in favour of the corporate sector, and of corporately controlled politics and markets. Such media depends on corporate advertising for revenue, so it has another incentive to be nice to the corporate world. Business pressures add to the problem; things like keeping advertisers, time pressures, getting news cheaply from PR firms and from hype press releases, and attracting customers through sensation, gossip, and previously unheard stories. This adds to irrelevance and fakery. On the whole, this makes it extremely unlikely the media will criticise the current set up of power relations other than to allege we need less regulation of the corporate sector.
Theories which rely on the proposition that left wing intellectuals and “cultural Marxists” have taken over the media in an attempt to brainwash the population into progressivism, have to explain how it is that (uniquely in this form of business), management and owners are not running the show for their own benefit, and to promote their own ideas. The only other explanation for this assertion is that the poplar market is largely left wing? Which I doubt people making this assertion will agree with.
A media takeover by left wing workers also seems unlikely as, in general, the media tells me how wonderful the free market is nearly all the time. If the right does anything bad then it tells me how the ‘liberals’ ‘have done something equally bad’, while if ‘liberals’ do something bad it does not need to make any equivalences. It can report the smallest right wing protests over days, portraying them as popular movements, and can completely ignore much larger left wing protests unless they are absolutely huge. Even then you don’t get much information about what people were protesting about and the coverage rarely lasts for more than one report. The media gives equal time to people who deny there is an ecological crisis, but does not give remotely equal time to the large numbers of people who think free market or neoclassical economics is rubbish. It reports next to nothing about the hardships of working class people or the protective actions of unions. It ignores tales of industrial accidents, and keeps telling us how wonderful successful business people are and how much we depend on them. The number of times people like Noam Chomsky, left wing anarchists, or known Marxists, get access to the mainstream media is close to zero – although it is true that people like Obama will be labelled as left wing to make it seem as if there is balance. Failures in the system are supposed to arise from corrupt individuals who can be ignored, not because that is the inevitable way the system works. No detailed critique of the system is allowed. In the US, the media has spent 30 years or so passing on Republican slanders about the Clintons to the extent that despite all the truly lengthy investigations that have turned up nothing, people still think they are guilty of something.
Then there is the kind of censorship that Chomsky discusses, in which information people should know is just not made easily available because it goes against rightwing dominance. Most people in the US do not know labor history, or the way that capitalist elites have attempted to suppress the workforce, they don’t know anything about the number of industrial accidents that are ‘normal’, they are not aware that high levels of unemployment result from pro-business policies to keep wages “under control,” they don’t know what socialism is about and so on; they just know ‘free markets’ are good and socialism, or unions, are bad, as they are told this repeatedly.
Then there are media organisations such as those in the Murdoch Empire, who seem to deliberately promote a right wing ideology at all costs, and who specialise in name calling and attacks on ‘liberals’. At least according to folklore, Murdoch workers get the message as to what is to be written and they write it, or face the sack. I was recently told by a journalist who had worked for the Murdoch Empire that the articles they submitted would be rewritten to support the official line if they deviated.
The hard right media appears to promote the idea that any other media is ‘liberal’ (in the contemporary sense of vaguely left) in order to appear less biased, get their audience angry with other sources of news, and keep those audiences loyal, and dismissive of other media, other information or other modes of understanding. There is little free speech in such media. There is no shortage of extreme right wing radio or right wing internet news (from Rush to Alex). In Australia, right wing ‘shock jocks’ and late night broadcasts get high promotion even when their audiences are tiny. Again, these media corporations have the problem that the right wing ‘neoliberalism’ ‘free market’ guff, they support and as is practiced in politics today, can have no other effect than boosting corporate power and dispossessing ordinary people of a good life; thus abuse of others, “culture wars,” fakery and promoting anger is a way they try to keep people onside, angry and not thinking and purchasing their product and advertisements. It is vitally important that their audience be made to distrust anything else. Even if their audience does not trust them, they should trust others even less.
There is little to no large scale left wing media in the US. I wish those people who think there is such a thing could point me to this left wing media. Perhaps, the LA Times might count, but on the whole such media is small scale, amateurish and badly funded – think Mother Jones or The Daily Kos. People usually suggest things like The New York Times, or MSN but these are not particularly left – just more humanist and more likely to be pro-Democrat and polite than, say, Fox. Not every piece of right wing media is as extreme and devoted to promulgating pro-corporate views, as the Murdoch Empire. Some media even allows a bit of divergence.
There is better media and worse media. There is hard right media and soft right media which has a cursory acquaintance with truth. Some of the latter can occasionally be bothered to check whether some right wing politicians are using ‘real facts’ or just making things up. On the whole the soft right media do not like Trump – possibly because they know about his business history and Trump does not listen to all the corporate sector – he has marked favourites, and seems to be using the Presidency to boost his commercial success – which could be considered unfair. They may even suggest President Trump is corrupt, but they won’t run with it like they did for Clinton, even if Clinton was not possibly treasonous. They find it very hard to talk about business and corruption, because this is the nature of the capitalism they support, and as Trump is a wealthy businessman, he must be good. The soft right media can also recognise that Climate Change is a threat to stability of the corporate sector, and hence tend to report slightly more, but only a little more, news about it. However, they are not left, as they would not discuss how the organisational drive for profit is one of the major causes of climate change, or that we need to restructure the economy and social life to defeat it. That is too much to ask.
In Australia I read the Fairfax press more than the Murdoch Empire, and that press is full of right winger opinion pieces supporting the righteous coalition government, and attacking the opposition and the Greens. It has three regular columnists who belonged to the right wing Coalition and non from the parties of the ‘left’. It has regulars from right wing think tanks and only occasionally people from the left (there aren’t as many). However, its economics columnist does not always promote neo-classical economics, it has an ex-architect who is appalled at the way neoliberal policies produce bad design and ignore ordinary people’s needs. It also has a moderate muslim academic. As a result, the paper is branded Far Left by those in the Murdoch Empire.
However, despite the right wing inclination and the culture wars, there is very little real conservative input into media, as capitalism is not conservative. In capitalism the only virtue is profit and, as real conservatives realise, capitalism has no use for tradition if it gets in the way of markets and profits. Self-reliance, virtue, community, liberty, national unity, economic responsibility, there is nothing capitalism will not sacrifice to maintain profit. Thus there is a sense in which the media does appear ‘liberal’ in the old sense of liberal, as pro-free market.
Ultimately, the idea that there is a leftish media is another piece of fake news, spread about to make it easy for the Right to dismiss anything other than blatently pro-Right party-line news as biased.
Some classic books:
Alterman “What Liberal Media?: The Truth about Bias and the News”
Boehlert “Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush”
Davies “Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media”
Hermann and Chomsky “Manufacturing Consent”
Kitty and Greenwald “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism”
Kitty “Don’t Believe It!: How Lies Becomes News”
Oreskes and Conway “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming”
Otto “The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It”
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 