People ask me all the time about fake news.
I tell them I like it, it's an important part of what we do, and we publish as much of it as we can because it is so much more interesting than real news.
I say this fictitiously, of course.
People will believe practically anything if it is well-packaged and seems like it comes from a source that ought to know or appears to know something. Wasn't it P.T. Barnum who once said, "There's a sucker born every millisecond"?
For the receiver, fake news is gossip gone bad. (Is that oxymoronic?). It is fed by our instinct to think the worst of people who hold a different point of view and to believe others are secretly plotting against us in some unscrupulous way.
It almost always casts someone in a bad light or exposes an unfairness being perpetrated upon us and our like-minded friends.
When we read fake new and believe it, it validates the deep and ever-churning suspicions we harbor.
Of course, our response is the same when we hear real news we don't like or find threatening, or that confirms our worse fears. The difference is, with fake news, we get the added bonus of having to back off our haughty high horses. Thus it cheats us of our much-deserved outrage.
People ask me about fake news, presumably because I'm in the news business and its been in the news lately. I'm not an expert, if there is such a thing. But finding the truth may be more difficult today than it has ever been.
Fake news has proliferated as Internet use has grown-which it has exponentially-and since social media has come into play, taking the dissemination of information to a whole new stratosphere.
Practically anybody can build a convincing Website now. Practically anybody can get an audience. It is easy to put something out there that seems credible but that is laced in treachery.
In biblical terms, fake news is the equivalent of bearing false witness-one of the "do nots" in the Ten Commandments.
This is not to be confused with media organizations publishing or broadcasting wrong information, which they sometimes do. Honest and unintended mistakes happen.
But planting false information to influence an outcome is an altogether different animal and one that is intrinsically dangerous to our common good.
When false news is exposed, a normal reaction would be to feel duped. Then with frequency, many people don't know what to believe or whom to trust. The end result being an "informed" population that will soon begin to doubt if those calling it fake news are trustworthy themselves, and might they indeed be pushing their own private and poisonous agenda?
Gridlock. Polarization. A nation sharply divided. Whom do you trust?
With communication networks spanning the globe, the threat can come from inside and outside our borders. It can represent insider meddling or a foreign incursion.
If they can get your credit card information, they can plant a fake news story.
Fake news is not a new phenomenon.
It has been around since biblical times, some say.
But the origin undoubtedly has its roots in warfare.
In World War II, the Allies used print and particularly broadcast media to get good information to friendly forces, and sometimes planted bad information to throw the enemy off. Sometimes the good information was bad, and sometimes the bad information was good, depending on our counterintelligence.
It was spy vs. spy stuff on the European front.
Nothing much has changed, except the scale of the battlefield and our information technology.
When it comes to fake news, we are at war now with enemies both foreign and domestic.
At stake is the truth, trust and maybe our sanity.