Artificial News

April 28, 2017

I’m not saying fake; fake news is meant to amuse, to lead the reader down a fictitious path – to demonstrably bogus conclusions. Fake news tends to sensationalize with headlines like “Alien Elvis Impersonator Gives Birth to Sasquatch Love Child!”. The reader is responsible for interpreting the headline as intentionally false, suspending disbelief (since it’s fiction) and scrolling quickly to page 12 for details.

It’s meant to be entertainment, not journalism.

Recently we’ve seen a lot of propaganda disguised as fake news, but mostly the “Hillary Sells Children from Pizza Parlor” and “Obama’s Plan to Give Our Guns to Radical Islamic Feminists” stories fail to meet the high journalistic standard expected of Fake News.

Authentic Fake News has a long, storied, history rich with alien abductions, orifice probing and celebrity spawning. The history spans back to the advent of the printing press; some say, it started on cave walls with exaggerated sizes. We may not care for it, but it’s got its own mojo.

Being an internet phenomena, Propaganda Fake News history tracks back only few years. And while it’s not fair to compare the centuries old body of work enshrined in traditional Fake News with the infantile discharge Propaganda News offers, it is fair to enumerate that, mostly, the new stuffs sound like it was written by an illiterate or, perhaps, someone who knows a little English as a second language. The writing is sloppy and hard to understand.

And for propaganda, it really lacks focus. The narrative is just all over the place. Come on comrades, if you’re going to tell us a story, how about some interesting characters and a plot? Here’s an idea, read something with characters and a plot, something local. I suggest Crime and Punishment or, maybe, War and Peace. We expect much better drama from Russians than the crap you’ve been throwing at us.

But, I’m not talking about that either.

I think of Artificial New as the highly pasteurized, slickly packaged, low information, high emotion nonsense our profit-driven media companies offer us instead of reporting facts. (Okay, I may have a slight chip on my shoulder after the media fucked-up covering the last election, but I promise to be just as fair and balanced as those I critique.)

To my point: this morning, again, the mainstream story-tellers were interviewing Trump voters. They asked about feelings. “How do you feel about Trump, now that we are nearly at 100 days and you’re still unemployed?”

The Trump faithful, who, by the way, all looked like hyper-typical mid-west salt-of-the-earth down-home folks, still felt they did the right thing in voting for the Donald. They still thought he was going to bring back their factory/mining/good-paying jobs any day now. That was their story and they were sticking to it.

OF COURSE, THEY WERE! Did the networks really expect Trump voters to admit they had been duped by a con man in front of millions on national TV?

So, this morning’s artificial story was about no changes to or by the (cable ready) average middle Americans. I wonder, had they asked Hillary voters the same questions, would the narrative been this boring?

Probably not, but it would have been harder to package.

After entertaining one-hundred-seventy-one days of repetitious post-election Trump voter rationalization, the republic gets it. They want their jobs back, and they don’t care how. So, good luck with that.

It’s not news.

In Peace and Justice,
osv