“Fake News”, Censorship, Darwin and Democracy
Censorship is not helpful to democracy–rather, it is the death of democracy.
The mainstream media is awash with hyper-active headlines about “fake news.” How can we make sense of this sudden obsession?
Perhaps we can start by separating “news” from “analysis” from “commentary.” “News” is “he said this, she did that, this happened.” Analysis tries to make sense of trends that are apparent in the news longer-term–for example, why did Trump win? Is the economy actually healthy or not? “Commentary” is opinion that establishes a point of view and defends it while attacking other POVs.
All three of these news flows are constantly being spun /manipulated to support specific agendas and narratives. Now we are being told some of these news flows are false/ misleading and their intent is to disrupt democracy.
I would counter that censorship is not helpful to democracy–rather, it is the death of democracy. It’s all too obvious in the MSM hysteria over “fake news” that the narrative being pushed is: any criticism of Hillary or questions about her health, foundation, etc., were BY DEFINITION Russian propaganda.
Never mind that few if any voters changed their mind as a result of the “Russian hacking” (the Podesta emails); voters were already so polarized that the content of the the emails did not influence their decision, which was based on deeper foundations than “news.”
The fear of those who want to preserve democracy is that under the excuse of “eliminating Russian propaganda” the status quo will restrict everyone who is inconveniently challenging the status quo narratives with data-based analysis.
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