Fake news hangs in the air for long time – Daily Monitor

By Odoobo C. Bichachi

Fake news is one of the things we are most alive to today as we consume information on social media and in the mainstream traditional media.

This has spawned a healthy skepticism that enables many people to ask questions of everything they see or read. Still, there are millions of others that consume fake news without knowing or questioning it.

It is important to note that there is fake news and false news. The former is deliberately created wrong information aimed at influencing the public in one way or the other, usually for politics. The latter, on the other hand, is wrong information innocently (sometimes deliberately) put out to the public usually because of failure or laziness to double check, or just the itch to clique forward.

Sounds a little like splitting hair? Perhaps yes, fake news and false news, after all, are complimentary. What is significant about the two, though, is that they hang in the air for a very long time. I give two examples from the past and very recently.

In 2009, Kenya and Uganda relations dipped over ownership of Migingo Island, a one-acre rocky outcrop in Lake Victoria along the two countries boundary. With sabre-rattling from Kenya and stoic silence from Uganda, President Museveni was asked at a press conference to comment about the issue.

He explained that the problem of the colonial boundary demarcation in Lake Victoria was that some islands are in Kenya while the water is in Uganda. Without understanding the context of the presidents explanation and checking the maritime boundary information, a Ugandan journalist simply wrote a story that President Museveni had said the disputed island is in Kenya while the water is in Uganda!

It was picked up and circulated widely and today, that false information that hangs everywhere whenever you clique Migingo Island. So why does the matter remain unresolved if it was simply a matter of the land and the water?

The other example is the list of achievements by recently deceased Tanzanian President John Pombe Magufuli, specifically the outlandish claim that he oversaw the tarmacking of 50,000km of roads in five years! This claim, wherever it was picked from, has subsequently been thrown around social media and peppered discussion about the great leader.

However, without diminishing his many and truly outstanding achievements in a pretty short time, any discerning reader should ask how possible it is to build 10,000km a year or 27km every day for 365 days considering what it takes to build a road!

For the more discerning people, who include journalist, it should be easy to find out that the driving distance in Tanzania north to south from Mutukula to Songea is 1,625km.

Conversely across the country, the driving distance from Dar es Salaam in the east to Kigoma in the west , is 1,374km. In fact, the total road network in Tanzania is 86,472km long, of which 12,786km is classified as trunk road and 21,105km as regional road.

It is, therefore, impossible that President Magufuli, his energy and enthusiasm notwithstanding, oversaw the tarmacking of more than half of the countrys road network in just five years! You bet for a long time, many people will give him this credit which he would never have accepted himself.

So just what gives life to fake news and false news? First, its creators that, according to http://www.webwise.ie, are driven by six primary reasons shared below (slightly edited):

Click-bait: Stories using sensationalist headlines to grab attention and drive clicks at the expense of truth or accuracy.

Propaganda: Stories created to deliberately mislead audiences, promote a biased point of view or particular political cause or agenda.

Satire/Parody: Lots of websites and social media accounts publish fake news stories for entertainment and parody.

Sloppy Journalism: Journalists may publish a story with unreliable information or without checking all of the facts which can mislead audiences.

Misleading Headlines: Stories that are not completely false can be distorted using misleading or sensationalist headlines. This type of news spreads quickly on social media.

Biased/Slanted News: Many people are drawn to news or stories that confirm their own beliefs or biases and fake news can prey on these biases.

The second factor is you and me that keep sharing false information without checking it out!

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Fake news hangs in the air for long time - Daily Monitor