Tag Archive for: Fake News

FAKE NEWS, FOX NEWS, REAL NEWS, THANKSGIVING

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By AB Plum

Thanksgiving is always a tough subject for me. Both my parents died—twenty years apart—on the holiday. A good friend also died in between that timeframe. I was an adult, but roasting turkey can still stir up some tough memories. Sometimes all the food porn in every magazine out there gives me a tummy ache and a conscience twinge for serving so many different—and rich—dishes.
But this blog isn’t a sermon. Instead, I want to share a story that someone sent my husband recently. Skeptic that I am, always on the lookout for fake news—especially from Fox News—I did a little research on the story. I think it’s real news and perfect for Thanksgiving—a reminder of how much we have to be thankful for.
Maybe you’ve read about this project or seen the pictures, but I hope you’ll check out The Fallen: 9000 Silhouettes on Normandy Beach. WARNING: Content sadly joyful. NOT A BUMMER.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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AB’s latest book, The Reckless Year is the fourth in her dark, gritty psychological thriller MisFit Series. It was released in early November. Quite frankly, she often questions why she wrote this noir series …. but believes darkness does lurk in the human heart. However, she’s grateful for an overly active imagination and how much she’s learned from writing about a psychopath from his birth to falling for his first love.



Prejudice and Fake News

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by J.M. Phillippe

I have been reading comments on stories about Trump’s outrageous lie over the weekend that Obama had Trump Tower wire-tapped and here is how it seems to go: Trump wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t think it was true, which means there is proof of it, and we need an investigation to find that proof – of the thing there currently is no proof of.

This is very different than the stories about Trump’s ties to Russia where journalists are pointing out facts – all these people tied to Trump talked to the Russian ambassador and other folks at these times, while these other things were happening, and these particular Trump aligned folks then lied about it. 

A real story starts with facts and sees where they lead, and a real journalist lets the facts create the theory. 

A conspiracy theorist starts with a theory, and then insists there must be proof of it, and any failure to find the proof just proves how powerful the people responsible for the conspiracy are. In selling a conspiracy theory, facts are irrelevant, and fear and outrage are all that matter. 

This is how you can tell fake news from real news: did it start with facts, or with theory? Is someone drawing conclusions for you, or letting you draw your own? Is there a clear line of events you can trace, or a corkscrew of situations that only add up to something if you follow a particular twisty path? 

And, as always, follow the money. Find the motivation. Not a secret motivation that only makes sense if you’re a Bond villain or part of the MCU, but a real, human motivation like, I dunno – protecting your known and unknown financial ties to a foreign country.

Take any particular bias you have against the people involved in a story out of the equation, and ask yourself: does this make sense? 

That’s the beauty of logic – it’s not interested in what we want to be true, but in finding out what actually is. 

The horror of conspiracy theories is that they are only interested in what you (and your biases) want to be true, and never care about – or can find any tangible connection to – what is actually true. They only make sense through the lens of bias. They justify prejudice and hatred, and in fact only exist to serve that purpose. 

And that’s what I kept reading – comments about hate for Obama that gets to continue to be justified by a story that paints him as a villain capable of any evil act. Because Obama is evil, the story must be true. The story must be true because Obama is evil. There is no room for actual facts in that equation. Prejudice is its own proof.

The solution to fake news isn’t more facts. What researchers know is that facts don’t change minds, and in fact, there have been some studies that show that being presented with new facts can actually make someone double-down on their prior (often irrational) belief. If you want to get rid of fake news, you have to first attack the thing that makes people want to believe in it in the first place: prejudice. 


My first training on bias and prejudice was when I was studying journalism as an undergrad. Journalists are trained to try to be as objective as possible. How?

You have to be willing to be wrong to follow facts instead of prejudice. You have to be able to handle the idea that the facts may not lead where you want them to, and that your beliefs may be challenged in a way that may even force you to change them. You have to commit to the idea that truth is more important than comfort. You have to be able to tolerate the tension of not knowing all the answers and not jumping to any conclusions. You have to find sources — as many as possible and as close to the center of the story as possible — to make sure you have all the information possible. 

This is what ethical journalists do, every day. If you want to learn to consume media the same way the best journalists report it, you have to start in the same place as journalists do – by identifying and moving past your own prejudices. And if you want to convince someone else that what they are reading is fake news, you have to first convince them that they have ulterior motives for believing it —  you have to convince them that they are reading through the lens of prejudice. Only once they recognize WHY they are so willing to believe the story — why they will believe anything of someone they hate or a group they know little about (and often fear) — then they can start to see the facts from a more objective point of view. Maybe they’ll even be convinced. 

Or, maybe they’ll just form new prejudices. 

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J.M. Phillippe is the author of Perfect Likeness and the short story The Sight. She has lived in the deserts of California, the suburbs of Seattle, and the mad rush of New York City. She works as a family therapist in Brooklyn, New York and spends her free-time decorating her tiny apartment to her cat Oscar Wilde’s liking, drinking cider at her favorite British-style pub, and training to be the next Karate Kid, one wax-on at a time.

ALTERNATE FACTS—WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL?

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By A B Plum

What’s the big deal about alternate facts?

Depends.

Now, before you send me “hate mail” rubbing my nose in the error of my ways, let me attempt one view on my response. (Misguided, shallow, inane, naïve, etc., etc., etc., though that view may be). 

Read on. Please.

We writers of fiction deal with alternate facts every day. Alternate facts have provided the drama, the comedy, the romance in fiction since . . . forever.

Take the story of Adam and Eve. Is it a fact that a serpent tempted Eve to succumb to that apple? Have you ever met a snake—other than maybe a two-legged one—who communicated with you? Tempted you to do anything but scream and run the other direction?

In the story of David and Goliath, is it a fact—or thinly veiled political propaganda, aka an alternate fact—that helped establish David’s rep as a formidable foe in battle?

Snow White ends up in a glass coffin waiting for her true Prince to waken her with a kiss. How many of us believe a talking mirror landed her there? C’mon, that’s just a bit of a jump from a speaking serpent.

How about the superheroes of comics? Is a guy who “leaps tall buildings at a single bound” a symbol of symbol against evil—even if he wears a red cape, tights, and funny boots? Certainly, he’s a product of several writers’ gluing together disparate alternate facts (a mild-mannered newspaper reporter steps into a phone booth and shoots into the sky—not to be confused with a bird or a plane).

Wonder Woman came on the American scene from ancient Greece in December 1941—a time of prolific alternate facts spouted by dictators in Germany, Italy, Japan, and the politicos in the U.S. Here comes Wonder Woman, another alternate fact embodied as an emblem of hope during the very real good-vs-evil-battle raging across the civilized world.

The term alternate fact will, I suspect, become a buzzword and a meme. The phrase may even get included in the 2017 list of new words added to the Oxford English Dictionary. We’ll undoubtedly see/hear thousands of rebuttals, defenses, satires, gibberish, and rationale about the political impact of alternate facts ad nauseam.

Personally, I like the discussion.

At the same time, I wonder why the big deal? Readers, movie fans, TV viewers, video-game aficionados, Wall Street movers and shakers, and all the rest of us come up against alternate facts every day. Every day. Often they’re even passed off as facts.
We don’t need a writer to point out, tongue in cheek, that some of us have more critical genes than others. Or may it’s more synapses synapsing. Or whatever.

Those of us who write fiction certainly know about trying to persuade fans that alternate facts are the truth. Readers let us know pretty quickly when we underestimate their intelligence. Many of them go so far as refusing to buy our next books. Ouch.

Bring on the alternate facts. I imagine them galvanizing us across party lines and ideological platforms. We’ve already seen the demonstrations and discounted the fake news accounts that no one showed up.

Fake news, like alternate facts, fools no one.

The fact is, people—not just readers of fiction—dislike being underestimated.

We can clearly see that army of snakes slinking through the underbrush from miles away.

And if we can’t see ’em, we can smell them. 

Here are the straight facts:  AB Plum works and writes dark, psychological thrillers in Silicon Valley. The Lost Days, her second book in The MisFit Series should hit the shelves in mid-March.