Marc Abear: There's nothing new about fake news, cannot be stopped

To The Daily Sun,

Fake news is not new. Media owners, editors, and journalists aren’t the heroes of our republic they often claim to be. They profit financially from fake news, use it to help their preferred parties, their goals or to feed their egos.

Today fake news comes largely in one political persuasion because of media ownership. It favors Democrats and Leftist priorities by volume. Media bias spawned an industry of smaller outlets; voices from radio and podcasts. That’s a wonderful thing with plenty of challenges.

Myriad sources with sundry points of view and differing supporting facts means we are faced with trying to figure out if or who is communicating truth.

The conflict between fact and fiction in our media led the Democrats to say our government should decide the truth. That’s wrong. Why? Because there’s never been a moral or ethical government, only legal ones.

They set up disinformation boards full of partisans who don’t want to spread the truth. They want to limit communication ... to only their version of the truth.

Today the fake news challenge is made more difficult by the AI revolution. Our eyes and ears can be deceived by stuff looking and sounding real, but it’s not. Some of us kind of like fake news and supermarket tabloids.

We like it so much some of us spread it on purpose; we enjoy deceiving people or feeling important. Sometimes we spread fake news because we’re just really busy; we read a headline and that’s enough. We’ll never stop fake news.

The human condition is just drawn to it. ... We like consuming it, sharing it, gossiping about it. Human behavior is not going to change. We can and should try to change, but for now, our goal should be to spot fake news and call it out.

Marc Abear

Meredith