“TinTin’s a girl; he’s asexual,” shouted French philosopher Cespedes from the rooftops. (These French get away with anything, don’t they? Note how they’ve induced us to break our fixed deposits to go see their iron tower).
Then, he shouted possibly from the iron tower itself, “Fake news, mes amis . Seriously! Don’t take me seriously.”
Everything’s fake nowadays — hair, lips, Tinder profiles, currency — so why not news?
The pregnant Rohingya girl is actually a severely ill little child from Brazil. Vendors selling candy outside your child’s school are not frantically peddling crystal meth. Bites from a pock-marked insect won’t give you a pock-marked hand. That Gautier guy found neither Nostradamus’ trunk nor trunks. The soldier who complained about bad food in the army isn’t dead, claims the indignant soldier himself. And yet the highest and mightiest (and loudest) fall for it all.
Paresh Rawal demanded that Arundhati Roy be tied to a jeep for having sympathised with the Kashmiri youth tied to a jeep. On learning it was fake news, he probably wished he were tied to the jeep instead, while the only one who got really taken for a ride was the reader.
We are in the throes of an epidemic, (yes, yes, dengue too, but that’s off topic) of post-truth/fake news, and yet its propagators run free. Intentions are obviously malignant, hate-inducing, even murderous – like accusing men “of a minority community” of carrying cow-meat. Those arrested for the lynching of the meat carriers are those who bought into the fake news, never those who created it.
Are the authors of fake news just having a bit of fun on the side? Or fulfilling their frustrated ambitions of being fiction writers? Or for their own Machiavellian agenda, fuelling rage? Unless you’ve emerged from a coma, you’re aware by now of the lumbering PR armies employed to churn out fantasies about political or ideological rivals, which then get forwarded at the speed of cheetahs chasing down dinner. Often, with results as horrific.
Or is faking it about the money? Thousands of ballot boxes, pre-rigged in Hillary Clinton’s favour were found by an electrical worker. The news, the ballots and the electrical worker were all created in an hour by a fresh college grad in the US, who admitted it earned him thousands of dollars in ad revenue. No news, fake or otherwise, of his conviction, ever appeared.
You aren’t helpless, of course. You could seek the truth and follow the fake-slayers for a change. Snopes will assure you that Elvis Presley didn’t turn up dead last week — or alive in a Home Alone film. Closer home, Alt News or SMHoax Slayer will tell you that the Chhattisgarh bridge was lifted from Vietnam (the picture, not the bridge).
Finally, it’s up to you and me and our trigger-happy fingers. Hitting that forward on an inflammatory video may be easy but some fact-checking would be right. Slay the dragon, don’t kill the mockingbird.
Where Jane De Suza, the author of Happily Never After, talks about the week’s quirks, quacks and hacks.
