If we have learned one valuable lesson from the Trump era, it is that this terminology of ‘fake news’ can be translated as modern day propaganda. With all this fake news, Americans are left confused about the facts, especially with politics, in this era more than ever. “Fake news” is a broad term that can cover satire, propaganda, conspiracy theories, sensationalism and bent political news stories.
In recent events, Russia is accused of creating “fake news” to influence the 2016 election. Russian officials deployed a mixture of spam and human agents to generate information that would be favourable to the Republican Party. This was proven very effective during the election. These fake stories created by Russia were shared more than 213 million times during the race, according to an article in the Washington Post in November.
Calling all of this “fake news” bares the truth of what the phenomenon really is: propaganda. Designed to erode the foundations of democracy itself. We live in a digital age, the most technologically advanced era. However, history seems to repeat itself as this propaganda renews itself and news outlets have been used to further propaganda. Adolf Hitler controlled the production of radio, TV and film in Germany during the Third Reich. This created an image of power and victory to his empire.
Newspapers could only stay in business if they broadcasted stories for the Nazi Party. Germany’s control over the media during WW2 created a force over national newspapers to ignore the massacre of the Jews, homosexuals and people with disabilities. This allowed newspapers to actually have the people of Germany believe that what they would see in newspapers was a conventional war, not a war of extermination and utter dystopia.
The current ‘fake news’ stigma serves a similar purpose in the current era, by normalising the abnormal. The difference with this propaganda is the scale. The silent vote may just be the only way Trump won office, while Americans still seems to be divided between utter disgust for the President-elect, or extreme excitement. The perfect example is the popular vote during this election. A top result on the Google search engine following the election was a site that claimed Trump won the popular vote. However, Clinton, truthfully lead the popular vote by around 2 million votes.
It seems the whole country is turning into clickbait, as these disguised propaganda news articles are becoming increasingly more popular. Hoaxes have always gained more attraction to a reader than the facts, but now we have created a leader like Trump, and still seems to question why or how this could have happened. Propaganda today seems to be more powerful than ever, but less understood. If journalists investigated propaganda, rather amplifying it, things would be much different today.
“When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.” – Soviet dissident Yevtushenko
Journalists have the power to write up an enemy, like a novelist would in a fiction novel. The attack on the enemy cities like Iraq, Libya and Syria happened because each leader of these countries didn’t essentially belong to the West. The WikiLeaks even revealed, that it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, was he attacked.
So while our media speaks up for feminism for the sake of a cute story on the evening news, we are supporting rapacious wars that deny the rights of women, and their rights to life in Iraq, Syria and Libya. Ironically, unlike Clinton, Trump was not prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China. Could that be why the media seemed so relentless to back Trump? And perceived Clinton as a person of peace? Maybe our society just loves war; and that is why we are relentless to avoid propaganda.
