Liberal journalist/blogger Matthew Yglesias jumped into the recent “fake news” fray with a tweet that blamed capitalism:
Fake news is the natural manifestation of financial capitalism in the media industry.
If he wrote “is a” instead of “is the,” he’d be correct. Fake news is indeed something that has proliferated because people can make money proliferating it. But, it is not the only thing that capitalism in the media industry produces.
Capitalism also produces real news, real criticism of the establishment and the powerful elite, real investigation of wrongdoing, and real dissent against government. These things happen because there are people who are willing to exchange wealth for such information. Even in the days when network news was a money-losing proposition, the networks knew that their news arms added legitimacy and therefore viewer loyalty to their programming. I’m also pretty certain that Yglesias isn’t providing his columns and other writings free to the world, so he’s part of that capitalist system.
But, Yglesias used “is the” in order to make us think that fake news is the ultimate outcome of capitalism in media, and thereby to plant seeds in our brains that “not-capitalism” is the solution to this fake news “problem.” This is a sneaky ploy that’s an aspect of social critical theory. Instead of saying “here’s a specific problem, I propose this solution because it will lead to this outcome,” he merely declares that a broad aspect of society causes a specific problem, but proffers no solution. Why? Because if he offered a solution, our brains would consider the problems inherent in “his” solution. But, if we infer a solution ourselves, we’re not as likely to see the problems therein. It’s not “his” solution, it’s “our” solution. We won’t as critical or skeptical of a solution we theorized ourselves, and we are more apt to idealize or keep “our” solution vague so as to avoid any internal dissonance.
If we fill in the blank, we’ll fill it with an idea we’re likely to support. And, since people have a tendency to favor “something must be done” over letting the invisible hand of free market capitalism sort things out, we’re apt to say “where there was no control or supervision, we should now support control and supervision.” In other words, if capitalism is to blame for fake news (but gets no credit for “real” news), then not-capitalism is the solution for the fake news problem. What is “not-capitalism?” Government involvement. Yes, lets ask government to clamp down on fake news.
What a wonderful idea!
After all, government would never bias against news sites that were more likely to dissent and be critical, right? Government would never target conservative and Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny, would it? Government would never collude with news organizations in order to shape opinions and outcomes, would it? Government would never take charge of a news outlet in order to disseminate propaganda, would it?
But, Yglesias didn’t mention socializing news in his tweet. He left it for his followers to infer and mold into their own uncriticized narratives. He does more of the same in a Vox article that points out how the dissemination of fake news across social media is a structural problem. He was called out for hypocrisy by the same social media he uses to share his ideas, but it remains that his criticisms have a “fill in the blank” feeling about them, and even an overt proposal is a generalized “what” instead of a specific “how:”
Facebook can and should do more to crack down on genuinely fake news stories being shared on its platform. In particular, it can and should clamp down on fake-news content mills to at least prevent them from swamping everything else on the platform.
How? How should Facebook do this without smothering the propagation of real news and legitimate criticisms? While it’s easy to fact-check hard data e.g. the Knicks beat the Kings last night 103-100, it gets harder in the gray areas where opinions live. Any error on the side of freedom will likely be considered inadequate and met with a call for stricter filters. When those fail to be perfect, the next step might be to treat social media as a public good. There’s a great idea – government oversight of the free exchange of information. That’s the way to fix the fake news problem. The Soviets and Red Chinese would agree.
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