Don’t look now but an awful MSM has discovered post-truth, in everyone else of course. Domainfax is at the forefront:
In the lead-up to the US election, FBI director James Comey’s letter about the agency looking into newly discovered emails related to the Hillary Clinton investigation dealt a significant blow to her campaign.
But for many voters, the damning FBI intrigue only deepened from there. Hundreds of thousands of people on Facebook saw a shocking follow-up story: “FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in apparent murder-suicide”.
Online media giants are changing their policies to combat bullying and improve accuracy.
The thing is, the second story was a complete fabrication, about a fictional FBI agent in a fictional American town and published on a fictional newspaper’s website – “The Denver Guardian”. But that didn’t stop the story’s spread: it was picked up by numerous other rogue websites and shared by outraged Americans on Facebook posting comments such as “Wow two more to the Clinton body count!” and “Someone needs to stop that murdering witch!”
In the election post-mortem, the role of Facebook and other online platforms has come under intense scrutiny. Its influence on our news consumption is well established: almost half of American adults (44 per cent) say they get news from Facebook, according to a Pew study.
A familiar thread of critiques of Facebook is the “bubble” effect – people’s social media feeds only exposing them to content they agree with from their like-minded friends and family, intensifying their beliefs and prejudices, and blinding them to others.
But the other thread, which is gaining increasing attention, is what is proliferating inside some of these bubbles: fake news, usually with outrageous clickbait headlines, which is warping our sense of what is real and what isn’t.
One analysis by Buzzfeed this week found engagement with the most popular fake news content – such as the “Denver Guardian” story, or another one erroneously claiming Pope Francis had endorsed Trump – intensified significantly in the final three months of the election campaign, so much so that the engagement (measured by shares, reactions and comments) of the top 20 stories from fake sites surpassed that of the top 20 stories from major mainstream news websites.
One creator of viral hoaxes, Paul Horner, expressed some surprised to The Washington Post on Thursday that his bunkum work was so successful, and even picked up by members of the president-elect’s campaign.
“His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist,” said Horner. “I just wanted to make fun of that insane belief, but it took off. They actually believed it.”
I’m not here to defend Facebook news feeds. They clearly stink and need some fact-checking reform. What I will observe is that Domainfax blaming “post-truth” for the loss a US election is such a dripping irony that is hard to know where to look. “Fake news” did not begin with the internet. It began with the MSM response to it.
For anyone with a memory span beyond last week, the evolution of the MSM post-internet is a tale of utter business model woe. Newspapers used to be immensely profitable creatures based upon the supply of generalised information across a string of monopolised vertical market advertising streams, classified ads, in other words. When the internet arrived, those golden silos were fragmented into specialist websites with far more specialised and superior editorial with much lower costs that stole all of the eyeballs (and the ads).
The MSM was exposed for what it was, a pack of also-ran hacks whose most precious attribute was not talent but the high barriers to entry in the printing and distribution of paper. Thus its business model has collapsed in the most spectacular fashion and, as its revenues have flowed out the door, it has responded not by creating new value but by cutting costs and sacking the more expensive few journos that were worth reading, tipping itself into a doom loop. Accompanying this, the MSM also splintered along political fault lines to secure whatever “base ” it could of intensely ideological (and therefore sticky) readers.
We see this across the Murdoch stable as, more and more, its news reflects the values of its owner, via Fox News.
But, we also see it on the other side of the duopoly, at Domainfax, which has increasingly dedicated itself to the global Left, replete with its vehemently open borders ideology, social justice war, political correctness and associated issues. The Domainfax US election coverage has been the most one-eyed, biased, short-sighted stream of doggerel that I can recall. I have very little time for the obnoxious politics of Donald Trump but to be openly campaigning for his defeat versus actually understanding what is driving his rise is not journalism.
And this is where we come to the post-truth of it. For all of its faults, the Fairfax of yesteryear at least had a corporate memory to match its diversified revenue base. Today that is gone, very deliberately replaced by a much cheaper generation of junior writers whose primary goal is to make the next banal Seinfeldian social observation. This trivia is not random. It sets about creating and recreating Domainfaxman, a mindless, memoriless, moron who seeks apotheosis in the collection of investment properties and, thereby, supports Domain revenues, the only profit centre left at the dying firm. Financial markets today value Fairfax at the same value of Domain. That is, everything else in the company is worthless. A uniquely perspicacious set of numbers!
This is the ultimate irony of the MSM post-truth whinge. Donald Trump has risen to power on the promise of fixing the plight of an American working class sold a globalisation pup that has turned out to be more trough for protected interests than it has meritorcratic market. Given his trickle down economics, Trump’s post-truth is that he will almost certainly fail to lift his working class supporters. But this is no more destructive (and probably less so) than the post-truth reality at Domainfax, which is engaged in a toxic class and inter-generational war at home upon the unpropertied working poor of Australia. Domainfax editorial does not support open borders, political correctness, and liberalism for the benefit of society, it supports it for the benefit of property prices, and its own profits, thus replicating the very debauching of markets and meritocracy that created Trump’s angry mob in the first instance.
