Wednesday panel puts fake news in spotlight

The truth is I’ve probably written about “fake news” as much as anyone has over the past 10 years, and I’ve been an equal opportunity critic.

I’ve blasted conservatives for phony stories about President Obama, and I’ve blasted liberals for phony stories about President Trump.

So when Sean Anderson of the ImagineIf Libraries of Flathead County called to ask if I would participate in a panel discussion about “fake news,” I jumped at the opportunity.

I was happy to see that, in a press release about the panel discussion, Anderson emphasized the importance of “information literacy” and “critical thinking skills” in sorting through published information. Those are the most important weapons against fake news, same as they are the bulwark against politicized science, political chicanery and politically correct propaganda.

Problem is you can lead a reader to information, but you can’t make him or her think. I don’t expect the panel, which will be held Wednesday at 6 p.m. in the Arts and Technology Building at Flathead Valley Community College, to resolve that, but at least it’s an opportunity to make a start.

One of the most annoying things about my job as editor is receiving tons of forwarded emails from people who didn’t bother to check on the authenticity of the “news” before wasting my time with it. You can usually gauge just how fake these email news alerts are by how many exclamation points they use in the subject line, as well as by the use of words like URGENT and SHOCKING! Did I mention upper-case hysteria?

One of the telltale giveaways that you are dealing with fake news is that there will be a claim that it has been verified on Snopes.com or some other arbiter of authenticity, but without providing a link back to the website. Take five seconds to do a Google search and you can disprove 99 percent of these SHOCKING mass-distributed emails.

Of course, in recent months, as regular readers of this column know, I’ve had my hands full keeping up with the mainstream media as they worked overtime spinning more lies about Trump out of whole cloth than Rumpelstiltskin got gold out of straw.

I wrote about CNN’s fake shock that President Trump was asking for funding for the proposed border wall instead of submitting an invoice to Mexico.

I wrote about the media’s fake contention that President Trump’s disdain for “the dishonest media” was an unparalleled divergence from what had been expressed by presidents before him.

I wrote about the New York Times’ phony claim that Trump had called all news media “the Enemy of the People” when actually he had singled out the Times, NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN as the enemy.

I wrote about the narrowly scripted and intentionally biased claim that Trump’s “America First” policy is anti-Semitic when actually Trump is poised to be one of the best friends Israel and the Jews have ever had.

But even before that — before the last 18 months of Trump Derangement Syndrome — I had written repeatedly of the danger of turning our beliefs over to either the government or the lockstep media, which together are the modern equivalent of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

What I wrote in 2012 accurately predicted the echo chamber of anti-Trump media of the past two years.

“As described by Orwell … the Ministry of Truth works constantly to update the past to bring it into alignment with the ruling party’s current propaganda. They do this through a massive campaign to falsify public records and to delete opposing ideas.

In the prophetic novel, “Anything that no longer corresponded with the official version of reality was discarded by employees of the Ministry of Truth by sending it down a chute to ‘enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.’ These chutes that led to collective amnesia were known as “memory holes,” and if you are starting to have the feeling that what you read and hear in the news no longer corresponds to what you remember, it may be because your old truths have gone down Orwell’s Memory Hole.”

The question we face as individuals is “How much responsibility do we take for looking past the headlines, asking the right questions and being eagle-eyed guardians of the truth rather than blind recipients of propaganda?”

It is not unreasonable to suppose that, on the answer to that question, hinges the future of our country. I look forward to an enlightening and civil conversation Wednesday and encourage you to attend.