Is it fun to celebrate April Fools Day in the age of rampant fake news? – Monterey County Weekly

Dave Faries here, still chuckling over the Weeklys little April Fools jokes. No, Alvarado Street Brewery is not dropping beer in favor of wine coolers. Nor is Pebble Beach suddenly embracing the homeless community and converting the ritzy Inn at Spanish Bay into housing as part of a Homekey program.

Its April 1, when even news organizations succumb to the urge to play pranks we hope readers find amusing once they catch on. Such reporting can be obvious hoaxes. We think its clear from the beginning that no sane brewmaster would try to revive the wine cooler craze. Here at the Weekly, we dont have the resources for a stunt the BBC famously pulled, reporting with visuals on Switzerlands bumper spaghetti harvest one year.

April Fools stories can also be written in such a way they appear to be accurateat least until the outlandish details mount. Sports Illustrated once featured a baseball prospect named Sidd Finch who showed serious promise. His background was just obscure enough, commentary from baseball scouts and photos all came together so seamlessly, that many readers failed to catch obvious fabrications, such as his 168mph fastball.

Using satire or parody is a relatively harmless form of fake news. Entire publicationsThe Onion, The Journal of Irreproducible Resultshave been built around humor packed in a reserved format. Only the helplessly gullible would fall for The Onions jibes. Neil Armstrongs first words when he stepped onto the lunar surface in the publications backdated July 21, 1969 issue? Holy living fuck!

Supermarket tabloids teeter between the ridiculousWorld War Two Bomber Found On Moon (to continue the lunar theme)and damaging. The tabs have faced many lawsuits over the decades, but few are the informed readers who take them seriously. Advertising sections disguised as news also tip on this border, perhaps less dangerously so.

Much more harmful forms of fake news exist: Outright fabrication of news stories, images and video. Since the advent of internet-based news aggregations sites and social media, there has been a flood of fake news designed to exploit fears, confirm bigotry or false beliefs, support or slander political leaders and parties, stoke hatred and tear apart the societal seams that bring people together.

Fake news did not start with the communication revolution, of course. Headline shockers have always sold papers, and people with a cause have always been willing to distort the facts in their favor. Indeed, the phrase dates back to the 1890s and the height of yellow journalism, but the practice is much older. Sam Adamscousin of John Adams and a determined advocate of revolution from English rule during Americas colonial dayspenned many a published broadside. According to Eric Burns, historian and author of Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism, Adams form of fake news might well have been the best fiction written in the English language for the entire period between Laurance Sterne and Charles Dickens.

Whether thats high or low praise, it was brutally effective at the time. A favorite target of fake news was Massachusetts Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Spurred on by the revolutionary press, a mob torched Hutchinsons house in 1765. An article in the Smithsonian compared the cause and effect of fabricated articles then to 2016, when ridiculous posts alleged that a D.C.-area pizza restaurant was a front for a child trafficking ring operated by Hillary Clinton.

This is a notion any sensible person would readily dismiss. By the 2016 election, however, so much misinformation had been hurled around social media, and so much distrust sown about accurate media outlets, that those who wish to cast the other side as pure evil bit on the lurid tale. Despite the fact that real news sources like New York Times and Washington Post had easily exposed the fiction, a North Carolina man steeped in fake news that he now believed armed himself with a rifle and a handgun and rushed to their rescue, his AR-15 blazing.

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His purpose may have been noble, but his mission was clearly flawed. Once he realized the entire story was false, he dropped his weapons and surrendered without incident.

The Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara presents an informative overview of the issue and how fake news as applied then differs from nowas well as why so many people are swayed by obvious distortion. The speed at which it is spread and the magnitude of its influence places it in a different category from its historical cousins, the CITS reports. The combination of ideological interests and technology have made foreign agentsRussians, but other nations play, tooor individuals adept at social media and at manipulating images, videos, voice and documents the jockeys of fake news volume, rather than rag newspapers. They give certain pundits with no ethical limits the fodder they require. And these individuals are willing to dive deep into distortion.

But scholars at CITS believe that how fake news is disseminated today is in part to blame for how readily some people receive it. Social media is source agnostic, the document notes. That is, they collect and present news stories from a wide variety of outlets, regardless of the quality, reliability or political leaning of the original source. In addition, fake news plucked from an unreliable site can be easily shared. Followers of Ann Coulter were dupedas she clearly waswhen she tweeted a false report that Mexico had lowered its age of sexual consent to 12.

Unfortunately, fake news can seep into mainstream outlets, if journalists are not careful. Recently it was revealed that Facebook had planted false and damning stories about its fast-growing rival TikTok. Some local and national news organizations took the bait. Some years ago I shared drinks with a Fox News reporter who was based in Tel Aviv, but vacationing in Prague where I worked at the time. He related how Palestinians were perplexed how a reporter could work for a network they recognized as distorting the news. I tell them my reporting is accurate, he said. I cant help what they do with it in the studio.

It was a disturbing cop out. But as historian Terri Halperin told the Smithsonian when discussing the pitfalls that come with an independent media, free of government control, I think [James] Madison was probably the best on that one when he basically said you have to tolerate some sedition in order to have free communication. You cant root out all.

So maybe were stuck with it. Our only defense is to lean on credible sources of information, even when politicians stung by accurate reporting or people exposed to ideas they would wish to avoid lash back and accuse the truth of being false.

Now enjoy our presentation of some hopefully harmless fake news.

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Is it fun to celebrate April Fools Day in the age of rampant fake news? - Monterey County Weekly