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Fake News from Karlsruhe
54 Plays6 years ago
This week we stroke the ego of the good Doctor and talk about their new (draft) paper, "What is fake about fake news?", whilst also catching up with Josh's hatred of 90s music.
Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23YmqgzZ-yQ
Learn more about M's academic work on the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories at:
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Transcript
Technical Difficulties with Internet Connection
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello listeners, just a short warning, the recording of this particular podcast episode was marred by some problematic internet issues. So there are points in time where we're talking over the top of each other and parts of time where we cut off from each other during the discussion.
00:00:16
Speaker
So some of the discussion will jump around quite a lot because we're dealing with a dodgy internet connection. But things will be fine next week when I'm back in Bucharest and I'll be hardwired into the internet. So I apologise for the fake news in this episode about fake news. Listener beware. The
Introduction of Hosts and Their Locations
00:00:39
Speaker
podcast is guide to the conspiracy.
00:00:43
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to conspiracy. My name is Josh Edison. I am sitting in Auckland, New Zealand, but actually I was going to say not sitting, but you are probably sitting, aren't you? I am sitting. I am sitting somewhere in the world. I am the common San Diego of sitting. Sitting, but not in Auckland, New Zealand is the crucial point.
00:01:06
Speaker
Is Dr. M.R.X.Dentiff? Where are you today? Well, actually, to find me, you will in fact have to travel to one of four countries and then see whether you can find one of my many minions there that will give you a hint to the fact that I am in Karlsruhe in Germany. Right. Oh god, I've given it away. You should have been wearing your big red, white-brimmed hat.
00:01:28
Speaker
I couldn't even have spotted you. And a suitcase. Those hat are a pain to take around the world. Carmen Sandiego really should be congratulated for her ability to travel with a large hat at all times. Yes, I admire it. But yes, no, for the second week in a row, you're in Karlsruhe, Germany. Coincidence? I think so. And today, you're going to move aside the curtain, but not in a dirty way.
00:01:56
Speaker
and let us into the goings on and the ins and outs, again, not in a dirty way of what you've been up to there, I understand. And reveal that there was never a curtain in the first place. I've got electronic blinds. Ah, well, there you go. The curtain was all in our minds. I suppose we could crack straight ahead to the news. Do you have anything else before we do that? No, not at all. No. I mean, I could just shout out the word penis.
00:02:24
Speaker
But I'm not going to. I was going to say it's been done, but it has literally been done on this podcast more than once, as I recall. Yes, in fact, actually in our early days, there was an awful lot of ejaculation going on of the word penis. Yeah, great many penis ejaculations. And I mean that in the classical sense, obviously.
00:02:42
Speaker
And, of course, now I'm thinking about that segment from QI about how often Watson ejaculates in the... He does. ...jock home stories, including ejaculating out of windows. He does. Watson ejaculates out... Who among us has never ejaculated out a window at one of our friends? I just find the notion that the word ejaculate has changed meaning so entirely in the space of 100 years to be really quite fantastic. Well...
00:03:10
Speaker
One of the more metaphorical meaning, or rather less metaphorical meaning, is acquired prominence. It's a fairly common-ish thing in linguistics, that if a word acquires a meaning that's a little bit rude or taboo or something, then that tends to overshadow all its previous ones. Gay being the obvious example, but prophylactic is just one
00:03:34
Speaker
of a preventative until people started using it to refer to condoms and now that's all it means, ejaculates another one. Language, it's fascinating. No, it's not. Be fascinated, damn you. No, language is very boring. Very, very boring. Say it straight to the news.
Aaron Banks, Russians, and Brexit Fake News
00:03:48
Speaker
Breaking, breaking, conspiracy theories in the news. We start the news from the mother country, dear old Blighty. What have our masters and mistresses and Westminster been up to, old chap, old fellow? I'll tell you how. Conspiring with the Russians.
00:04:02
Speaker
Not again! Am I doing the accent the whole time? We can give up if you like. Is nowhere safe from claims of conspiring or colluding with the Russians these days? No, not even your mother. Touché. Anyway, the rolling fiasco, which is Brexit, continues to cause trouble for everyone. This time, Aaron Banks, who helped fund Leave.eu, one of the many pro-Brexit campaigns prior to that particular referendum.
00:04:27
Speaker
Banks, who met with Russia's UK ambassador three times in 2015 and 2016, discussing Brexit and Donald Trump's election campaign, has admitted the Leave campaign used fake news because they were running a campaign deliberately aimed at making fun of people.
00:04:47
Speaker
Banks is now claiming that talk of his meetings with the Russian investor, two meetings of which he never admitted to prior, are simply remainers re-moaning about losing that Brexit referendum. This is the same Aaron Banks whose Brexit campaign failed to report nearly £100,000 they spent on the Leave campaign? Yes. The same Aaron Banks whose campaign was fined by the Electoral Commission for breaches of electoral law over the Leave campaign they ran? Yes. Sounds like a top bloke.
00:05:16
Speaker
We should not besmirch this character any further. Meanwhile, we should get to the bottom of the deep state plot to stop Russians from being able to protest and rally in the streets of Washington, DC. Ooh, sounds juicy. Do tell. USA, really, is an offshoot of...
00:05:29
Speaker
Russia's federal news agency and they wanted to run a rally celebrating Donald J. Trump's birthday. He's one of those US President Malaki fellows, isn't he? Allegedly. Anyway, they applied for a permit to hold the rally, but the permit they applied for was a film permit, which was rejected as the authorities looked into the replication and told them that they should have applied for a permit for a rally rather than for the filming of an event.
00:05:50
Speaker
So USA really is now claiming this is part of a deep state plot to stop Russian media interests from rallying in support of a US president. Scandalous. A conspiracy by the deep state to stop Russian interference in US politics. What has the world come to? Indeed. Add to this recent and unsubstantiated rumor that Donald Trump likes to tear up all his paperwork.
00:06:11
Speaker
And things in the US are looking decidedly weird at the moment. Actually, on that paperwork issue, there's something quite nice and illustrative about conspiracy theories right there. You see, even if we end up being agnostic about that particular assertion being true, it's one of those things which feeds into conspiracy theories about Trump generally.
00:06:31
Speaker
The Obama administration was known for its very careful handling of paperwork, which crossed the president's desk or was touched by him. Given there is a requirement such paperwork is archived. However, the Trump administration is not known for its careful procedures. So it seems plausible to people that Trump would be the kind of person who would screw or tear up paperwork when he's done with it. Which, I guess, supports either the notion the administration is either incompetent when it comes to data retention
00:07:02
Speaker
or conspiring to keep the information the president knows about secret. Precisely. The fact the story ends with the sources claiming that they were then paid to piece together torn up documents with sticky tape just makes it all the better, since it suggests there are forces in the White House fighting back against Trump and what he stands for. Conspiracies upon conspiracies what will they think of next?
00:07:26
Speaker
And now, grunge news. Josh, you're the only person in this duo who A, owns a flannel shirt and B, thinks music in the 90s was any good. So you can take the lead on this one. Thank you, Ian.
00:07:39
Speaker
Now, I think M thinks that I don't read these scripts in advance. I do read them. I'm just too lazy to alter them. So bearing that in mind, I say this of my own free will and not because I've been scripted to, but the 90s were pure horseshit and nothing about them and nothing was any good. Indeed, I will go burn my flannel shirt as soon as this recording is finished. But before then, some news about Kurt Cobain's guitar.
00:08:05
Speaker
and Courtney Love. That was very, very sincere sounding. Although I should point out that Hole was pretty good. Interior word. Damn good, actually. Nothing about the 90s was good, nothing. So the daughter of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, Frances Bean Cobain, had an ex-husband, Isaiah Silver, whose father's lawsuit against Courtney Love.
00:08:29
Speaker
He alleges there was a conspiracy to assault, kidnap and murder him and it's all over contested ownership of a 1959 D18E Martin guitar Kurt Cobain played at Nirvana's 1993 MTV Unplugged appearance. Juicy. So what about this murder-kidnap plot? Well, just after midnight on June 3rd 2016, Silver alleges that three men broke into the house he had shared with a estranged wife in what was an attempt to take the guitar. The men allegedly beat and groped Silver, stole his phone and he dragged him to a waiting car and drove away. However,
00:08:59
Speaker
Silver wasn't alone, and a friend not only called 9-1-1, but blocked the street with his own car. Now, no arrests were made, because Silver was warned that Love, his estranged wife, and the three men, controlled the judicial system, the LAPD, and the media. So Silver told the police the whole thing was a prank, which had gone wrong. Okay, that sounds weird. Eh, it gets more interesting. Silver thinks that had his friend not intervened, that he would have been taken somewhere and murdered.
00:09:26
Speaker
Not just that, but the men and Courtney Love went to great lengths to create the impression that he was depressed, a drug addict, and on the brink of committing suicide, and that he'd recently acquired about where to obtain a firearm. Silver's claim someone hacked his iPhone's message app in order to text falsified suicidal remarks to a friend, and even so he found someone settling, he reported it to police. Well, this gets grander and grander. And this is all about a guitar. Yes, basically Silver claims Francis gifted him the guitar.
00:09:54
Speaker
Courtney says this isn't true, and the guitar was never her daughter's to gift anyway. However, he's recently managed to secure ownership of the guitar through the courts, and this new lawsuit seems to be related to that struggle. Any references to the death of Kurt Cobain? But of course, Silver claims Kurt's mum Wendy told him that she thought Courtney was involved in the suicide of her son. Well, that's quite the story. More proof, I think, that the 90s are still causing harm to all and sundry.
00:10:20
Speaker
Let that decade burn in hell. Now I would like to point out to listeners who don't watch the video version of this podcast, in the video version of this podcast you will see myself cracking up at particular points where I've forced Josh to say things against as well. But of course in the podcast version I can quite easily remove my laughter from that and make it sound as if everything was very serious indeed. But finally Star Wars. Ah Star Wars.
00:10:47
Speaker
So, do we have a juicy conspiracy theory about Supreme Leader Snoke or some such? Not that Star Wars, Reagan era Star Wars. Precisely.
Hughes Jr.'s Disappearance and Assumed Identity
00:10:57
Speaker
Now back in 1983, Air Force officer Captain William Howard Hughes Jr. disappeared, apparently just before or whilst en route to the Netherlands for work purposes.
00:11:08
Speaker
His family found his disappearance was mysterious and authorities thought at the time he might have defected to the Soviet Union. But it seems he just went to California and started a new life under an assumed name. Why? The 80s, Joshua. The 80s. As frightening a place to be alive as the 90s. Worse even, atomic war was always just around the corner.
00:11:33
Speaker
Note Hughes Jr became Barry O'Byrne and he lived in California for 35 years before finally being found out over inconsistencies with his passport. And this is conspiracy news how exactly? Well the thing was because people assumed Hughes had defected or been kidnapped there were references to him almost every time there was a disaster in the 80s and early 90s.
00:11:57
Speaker
He knew things about the Star Wars programme and the like, so shuttle disasters, the explosion of the Ariane rocket and French Guyana and the like were all thought at one time or another to be the result of sabotage with Hughes, a possible source. But instead he was just living in California. Allegedly.
00:12:17
Speaker
There is still some investigation going on about his story, but it seems he may well have just got fed up with being a G-man and gone to ground. Just like your mum. Hey, we don't talk about my mother's work for the Secret Service. Cut the feed! Righto, well, this just in!
00:12:35
Speaker
And by this, I mean M. And by in, I mean in Karlsruhe. And by just, I mean for about a week or more. But you get the point. Stuff's happening. It's all happening. It's all go in Karlsruhe, Germany. It all go regarding fake news, I understand. So this
The History and Weaponization of Fake News
00:12:52
Speaker
week, we're going to be talking about a forthcoming paper, an early draft of which I have been privileged to read by the name of What is Fake About Fake News by one MRX
00:13:06
Speaker
I guess before we get into the paper, can you tell us a bit about the New Europe College and the hijinks you've been up to with them? Well, it's in Europe, it's a college and it's new. What more do you need to know? So the New Europe College is an advanced research institute in Bucharest in Romania.
00:13:23
Speaker
It was set up just over 20 years ago now. It essentially was a kind of offshoot from the University of Bucharest. So long story short, 20 years ago certain members of the University of Bucharest thought that the university wasn't producing adequate research and so they sought external funding to start their own private research institute which has maintained itself.
00:13:50
Speaker
I should point out that no matter what the founders of New Europe College thought at the time, the University of Bucharest now is a first-class world-standard university. It has a very good placement record of its PhD students into good positions elsewhere around the world.
00:14:10
Speaker
You wouldn't need to start the New York College now, but that's where I'm resident. It's an advanced research institute and I am one of its fellows. That's fellows with a capital F because that is a title. It is and it is in your capacity as a fellow of the New York College that you're in Karlsruhe at the moment.
00:14:29
Speaker
Does it? Basically, yes, I'm a visiting fellow here. You could describe me as a non-stipendary visiting fellow at the debate lab at KIT.
00:14:42
Speaker
So I'm here for two weeks talking with the people here about conspiracy theories, secrecy and fake news. And because I was meant to be presenting a paper on fake news at a conference in Bucharest whilst I was away in logistics of going to Germany, going back to Romania to give a one hour talk and then coming back to Germany, really didn't work out. I'm presenting the paper as a written submission to the proceedings.
00:15:12
Speaker
And that's what I'm working on whilst I'm here in Germania. Fabulous. So, what is fake about fake news? No surprises for guessing why a person would be talking about fake news in this day and age.
00:15:28
Speaker
But maybe this is an obvious question, but what exactly is the problem with fake news then that you're investigating? So the problem with fake news appears to be its centrality to certain kinds of contemporary political discourse. So fake news has been with us probably for as long as there's been news. There's always been a situation where people have presented stories as news stories.
00:15:54
Speaker
and they've been presented in such a way to deliberately mislead some target audience. And we find examples of fake news going throughout the entire newspaper era in Western history. So at the beginning of the 20th century, end of the 19th century, there were lots of tabloids in the UK. Those tabloids produced sensationalized stories, so partially fictionalized accounts of things, and sometimes entirely fabricated stories in their
00:16:24
Speaker
pages. So fake news is not a new problem. What it is is a new label for an existing issue, an issue to do with the how we judge the reliability of sources, how we judge the trustworthiness of sources, and also the really awkward question when it comes to a kind of epistemological framework. How do we make claims about the intentions of the people behind these stories?
00:16:53
Speaker
The what's new about the problem, as I said, is probably it's become weaponized in the last few years, largely because of one man, US President Donald J. Trump, who likes to go around talking about fake news and the fake media, which has taken a term which has been around for a while and made it into something really quite big and stupendous.
00:17:21
Speaker
Yes, I mean, fake news as a phrase certainly came to prominence during the last presidential election. And we must remember that Donald Trump did not invent the term. In fact, as I recall, in the context of the campaign, it was Democrats talking about the things that Trump had been saying that they started calling that fake news. But then the Trump campaign turned their own weapon against them. He took the term
00:17:46
Speaker
You might say he put his thing down, flipped it, and reversed it, if Donald Trump is worthy of mentioning in the same breath as Missy Elliott. But since then, he's kind of taken ownership of the term. In fact, didn't he try to
00:18:01
Speaker
sort of copyright suggests he was going to copyright the term fake news at one point or something. I'm sure that was one of the many things he said. I do remember something along those lines trying to make the claim that he at least invented the term, which as people pointed out, no, there's prior art by the Democrats, but also the Democrats themselves got it from left wing media analysis from the 80s and 90s. So you find the term fake news appearing in academic works.
00:18:31
Speaker
And it's very much a left-wing attack on right-wing news. What's interesting about what Trump has done is that it's almost entirely reverse now. So it's not a new problem, but it's perhaps a newly pressing problem. I guess as good philosophers we should start with definition then. What exactly counts as fake news and is it
00:18:55
Speaker
Is it separate from disinformation? Is it as one a species of the other? Yes. I'll just start with the definitional issue.
Defining Fake News: Deceptive Narratives?
00:19:03
Speaker
So fake news is going to be any story presented as news, which targets an audience and is by design meant to deceive. So basically any time where you modify a story in such a way to make it warrant some particular viewpoint,
00:19:23
Speaker
So I mean, so I was having this discussion with a colleague the other day, can fake news be entirely true? And I think it can be if you are leaving out salient points, which might act as mitigating factors. So you might that reminds me. Yeah, sorry, you keep talking. I'm just
00:19:42
Speaker
I'm just going to look something up now that I thought of it just based on what you said. Excellent. So I think it is possible to have a fake news story, which is entirely true, but actually misses out on salient details which explain certain features. Now, as I was having a discussion with Grigor Betts at KIT here,
00:20:03
Speaker
And he was talking about the way that the inauguration crowds were reported at Trump's inauguration. And it is true the crowds were smaller than that of Obama's first and second inauguration. But if you leave out salient details about the weather forecast of that day,
00:20:22
Speaker
then that goes some way to make the story seem more fake than it is. So if you are aware ahead of time that there were heavy showers forecast for that day, that then suddenly explains why people were less likely to be at that inauguration or the weather forecast for Obama's first and second inaugurations were for good weather, which thus encouraged people to go out there.
00:20:51
Speaker
But the kind of fake news we tend to be concerned about are cases where the story contains fabrications or is entirely fictitious. So that's the fake news stuff. But of course, what's also interesting, because it's kind of a first order issue,
00:21:08
Speaker
is the second order issue which are of course allegations of fake news because alleging something is fake news doesn't tell you it is fake news and indeed one way to get people to not believe the news is to label that news as being fake. So there are two phenomena that need to be kind of disambiguated here.
00:21:32
Speaker
Now, have you found the thing that you were looking for, or should I move on to the disinformation point? Because I just feel like I'm vamping it. I have. No, no, no, I have found it. You talk of the potential of something being fake news and containing nothing but the truth reminded me of the case of the slandering of Claude Pepper. Now, I don't know if the story is actually true or not, but it's a story that's been around for a long time. It was a 1950 congressional election.
00:22:02
Speaker
when George Smathers was going up against Congressman Claude Pepper and supposedly gave a speech, the implication being that he was sort of talking to a bunch of ignorant country bumpkins, but he gave a speech where he alleged that Pepper's brother was a known homo sapien, that his sister was a practicing thespian,
00:22:22
Speaker
He accused Pepper of matriculating into college and claimed that he practiced celibacy before marriage. Again, that sounds a little bit too good to be true, but it immediately popped to my mind as a case of a person saying things that were entirely true, but meaning them to have a negative effect on its audience history.
00:22:43
Speaker
Sometimes it's lies. Oh, I like that example. Please send me through. I'll send it to you here. I'd like to use that because, yes, I mean, what a terrible thing to matriculate into college. I mean, that sounds quite sinister. Yeah, just the first page I came to had a few ideas, questions, whether or not it's true, where no one seems quite certain about it and pointed to other examples such as a
00:23:10
Speaker
a fictitious speech from Mad Magazine where someone talks about someone subscribing to a phonographic magazine and practicing nepotism with his sister-in-law. But yeah, anyway, it's an interesting idea. But carrying on from definitions though, so I mean, this is a, this here is a podcast about conspiracy theories. You yourself are an academic specializing in conspiracy theories, and here we are talking about fake news.
00:23:38
Speaker
Does fake news necessarily, or at least in general, imply some sort of a conspiracy? Fake news itself, not necessarily. The allegation of people producing fake news often does imply a conspiracy. So think of Donald J. Trump talking about fake media, fake news outlets, and fake news. He uses that as a way of describing a liberal media conspiracy against him.
00:24:07
Speaker
So the allegation of fake news often does contain within it a conspiracy theory. Yeah, and that kind of gets to the center of a lot of your paper is that there are actually two problems here when we're talking about the problem of fake news. One is the actual production and dissemination of fake news deliberately or unwittingly, especially in terms of the spreading of it. But there's also the problem of people
00:24:35
Speaker
called deflecting any criticism of them, naming no names, Donald J. Trump, by claiming that any sort of criticism is merely fake news.
00:24:46
Speaker
What do we think basically about the sort of dual nature of this problem? Well, I think it's a interesting case of how labeling something can make it automatically appear to be a problem. And we find this in the literature on conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists.
00:25:05
Speaker
If you can weaponize the term conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorists, then you can use that as a knockdown argument against anyone who questions what you might be doing.
New Zealand Media and Fake News Perception
00:25:18
Speaker
Oh, they're just putting forward a conspiracy theory. No, you shouldn't believe them. They're just a conspiracy theorist.
00:25:25
Speaker
and depending on the your political inclinations, the kind of society you live in and the like, that may or may not work in some contexts. So as we saw with the dirty politics material in the election before last back home, John Key described Nicky Hager as a conspiracy theorist putting forward a conspiracy theory and the public's response was well yes it is a conspiracy theory but
00:25:52
Speaker
Is it true? So sometimes this doesn't work. And what we're seeing with the Trump stuff with fake news is that it's very much targeted towards a particular part of Trump's base.
00:26:08
Speaker
So Trump's claiming that CNN produces fake news only works for the kind of people who don't trust CNN in the first place and think there's some kind of liberal media conspiracy to destroy Trump. It doesn't work on aficionados of CNN. They don't suddenly go, oh, my news network produces fake news. I should probably stop watching it. They end up going, no, no, that's just Trump doing his thing.
00:26:35
Speaker
Right. And so I guess the question, what can we do about this? In the draft of your paper that I read, you kind of hadn't got up to that point in the paper yet. There's just mention of polite society. So can you fill me in on your
00:26:49
Speaker
on what's percolating in your brains about what we might do about the problem of fake news. I think part of the problem of fake news, and I was having this discussion with Gregor the other day, I think also part of my solution comes from the weird kind of media landscape we have in Aotoro in New Zealand.
00:27:09
Speaker
So I think it's fair to say that in our home country we really only have one newspaper of note which is the New Zealand Herald. I mean there is the press, there's the Otago Daily Times, there are other smaller newspapers available but they don't have much in the way of circulation, most of the Herald is available everywhere.
00:27:33
Speaker
and we only have two major TV stations with competing news bulletins so we have an almost complete lack of diversity in our media space and that means that
00:27:49
Speaker
We have a kind of malformed media which tends to be fairly pliant and supplicant to whatever the government says. So it's a fairly well-known feature that when national are in charge, the Herald is very pro-national and anti-labour.
00:28:07
Speaker
And when Labour are in charge, the Herald ends up being fairly pro-labor and not as accommodating to national, because there's a kind of institutional buy-in going on at that particular point in time. If you want to be able to report what the government is doing,
00:28:25
Speaker
then you need to be on the good side of the government. You need to make sure you've got access to ministers. You'll be going to be able to go to briefings and the like. You can't take a stand against any particular political position because to the end the government of the day can go, well, we just won't deal with you.
00:28:44
Speaker
And because there isn't any other competing newspaper interest that points in the other direction, our one newspaper has to go, well, we just have to make sure we're always on the good side of whoever is in charge at any particular point in time.
00:29:00
Speaker
And that kind of creates a false sense of politeness, that whenever the government speaks, newspapers go, aha, yes, aha, well, thank you, Minister, for your time. Well, so it actually would be quite good to have a media landscape which actually is slightly antagonistic to claims of this particular type.
00:29:23
Speaker
So I have a feeling that my proposed solution does come ever so slightly from the weirdness of the media landscape we have in Ayatollah. But certainly it's true that certain news networks in the US
00:29:40
Speaker
absolutely lap up Donald J Trump's claims on fake news. So if you look at Fox and apparently Trump's favourite show, Fox and Friends, as soon as Trump makes some claim about the fake media this, the fake media that, the people or the hosts, I don't know whether the hosts on Fox and Friends are actually people or whether they're just very elaborate media robots,
00:30:05
Speaker
they end up going oh yes it's terrible what CNN is doing or MSNBC is doing that's just more fake news from those liberal media outlets and once again that's a kind of weird politeness that's going on here which is that as soon as the boss says something we go aha yes
00:30:25
Speaker
thank you for your time whilst if we kind of ditched that politeness and actually engaged in the robust cut and thrust of democratic debate claims of fake news wouldn't have as much power that's not to say there wouldn't be fake news but alleging something as fake news and using that as a knockdown argument against someone's position wouldn't quite work because you'd go
00:30:52
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you're saying it's fake news, but is it? Which is what we saw with the whole Nicky Hager, John Key thing. John Key tried to use a weaponized form of the term conspiracy theory, and the New Zealand public went, hmm, that is it? Is it? Is it, John? Yes. No. Hang on. What was the question? Is it a conspiracy theory or is it true? Actually, yes. Yes to both. Does it know? Can I change my answer?
00:31:22
Speaker
Will this affect my final grade? It will affect your final grade, but I gave you your final grade before the podcast even started. Okay, that's all right then. That makes sense in terms of New Zealand, although the US media landscape, as it appears from here, would appear to be extremely combative, and yet fake news is kind of where it's really blossomed. That said though,
00:31:48
Speaker
The left wing media who get called fake news do seem to be a little more supplicant, if that's the right word. And the right side, especially the Fox News, do seem to be a hell of a lot more antagonistic. So as part of the problem there, there isn't enough balance.
00:32:04
Speaker
that one side is more polite than the other, or what do you think is going on in that particular landscape?
Trump's Use of Fake News Allegations
00:32:11
Speaker
So I think something really quite interesting about allegations of fake news, because of course Donald J. Trump isn't the first person to allege that certain news networks produce fake news. Alex Jones has been making claims about media producing fake news all the time. And what's interesting is that
00:32:30
Speaker
If Alex Jones claims, for example, that CNN is producing false news reports about XYZ, CNN does not feel the need to respond to Alex Jones. Alex Jones is a prominent
00:32:43
Speaker
radio online host with a tendency to engage in conspiracy theories. He's got a fairly big presence online but he's not big enough for news networks to go at all. We must respond to what Alex Jones is saying about us.
00:33:01
Speaker
Trump, however, being leader of possibly the world's only remaining superpower, making claims about fake news and fake media, is the kind of thing that CNN needs to respond to. And the kind of response they give, as you point out,
00:33:20
Speaker
is more of supplication than it is of aggression. So whilst there's a kind of pushback against what the president says, by and large, what they try to do is get on the right side of Trump. And that's the kind of weird politeness to these particular claims that we should be resisting. I've heard it said that the US system and indeed most of the systems in the polite Western world lean quite heavily on the notion of shame.
00:33:50
Speaker
that if a person is caught doing something wrong, society shames them. They feel ashamed and therefore motivated themselves to do something about it. But the whole system falls apart when you're dealing with people who have no shame and who being confronted with having told a total lie, rather than going, oh, God, yes, you've got me fine. I've done wrong.
00:34:16
Speaker
I'll fall on my sword or whoever, instead double down and just say, hell no, that's who you're going to believe me, you or your lion eyes. There's a reference to the Shaggy song. It wasn't me in there somewhere, but I can't quite get it out of me at the moment. So it certainly seems that, yeah, they've managed to gain a fairly significant societal institution by themselves.
00:34:43
Speaker
not buying into what I guess you could call a form of politeness. So yes, perhaps the only alternative is to be less polite back. And of course, this actually speaks to a big issue with fake news in general, which is making claims about the intentions of the actors behind it. So there is a question here as to when Donald J. Trump makes claims about fake media and fake news.
00:35:09
Speaker
Is he sincerely trying to convince people or is he just completely agnostic about the truth of his claims? Because if it turns out that he's just saying things for political or pragmatic reasons and he's not, he's actually has no attachment to the truth of the claims, he's making. There's a question there as to whether that makes things slightly better or a whole lot worse. Well, yes, I mean, I've heard it said that
00:35:39
Speaker
Part of the strategy behind employing claims of fake news a lot is not necessarily about each individual claim. It's about the overall effect of claiming everything is fake news and that blank is white and up is down. Just simply erodes the notion of truth whatsoever so that they can get to the point where anyone can say anything and essentially get away with it because at this point people have given up on trying to determine what's true and what isn't.
00:36:08
Speaker
Certainly, I do get the impression from Trump that he simply sees whatever pops into his mind at the present moment that he thinks would be the most advantageous thing to say, even if he then goes and contradicts himself 30 seconds later. So, possibly in his case, there isn't such a long-term strategy going on, but it does seem to be something that's been jumped on by elements within the
00:36:34
Speaker
is why just circle and perhaps around the media that enables him. Yes and I mean this is one of these things where even though the phenomena we're talking about, news which is fake and allegations of people producing news which is fake, isn't actually new. The umbrella term fake news as it's currently being used is and so academics like myself are trying to
00:37:01
Speaker
work out a way to talk about the phenomena and get to the root issues because in the end I don't know that we'll be talking about fake news and allegations of fake news in 10 years time. I mean because the issue is a lot older than the umbrella term, presumably the term fake news will slip out of the political lexicon in
00:37:22
Speaker
a cycle or so. And we'll just go back to what the base issue is, which is trustworthiness, reliability and the intention of actors. But at this particular point in time, it's a fairly interesting phenomena to try and work with. And it's a great way of showing how you can apply epistemology to contemporary public debate. Indeed. Well, Dr. Denter, that's about all we have time for. Just remains for me to say, yes.
00:37:53
Speaker
Thank you for your time. Do you have any closing remarks? Yes, all of what I said was thank you.
00:37:58
Speaker
Right. Well, we've come to the end of another episode. The internet has been slightly ropier than usual throughout this. So the audio seemed fine, but the video actually really quite ropy. They come out a little fishy. So we'll just have to see, I'm sure we can put something together. But otherwise you're back in Romania from next week, are you? I am indeed. I return back to Bucharest tomorrow night. Indeed. Well, in that case, it'll be business as usual-ish.
00:38:24
Speaker
again until you're back in New Zealand, I suppose. That's true. So until next week, I don't see that there's anything left to say, then goodbye. And once again, everything on this podcast was fake news. What I really meant to say was hello. You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy.
00:38:48
Speaker
It is written, researched and performed by Josh Addison, a.k.a. Monkey Fluids, and M.R.X.Tenteth, a.k.a. Conspiracism on Twitter. This podcast is available where all good podcasts can be found, as well as iTunes, Podbean and Stitcher.
00:39:08
Speaker
It can also be watched on YouTube. Just search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, or, if you happen to be technophobic, consult the auguries. You can support the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy via our Patreon page, as listed in the podcast description, or just by searching for us on Patreon.
00:39:31
Speaker
You can also support us via the Podbean patronage system, if that is more your style. You do you. If you want to get in contact with us, why not email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com, or find us on Facebook. And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.