Fake news. Its all the rage. Personally, I’ve been doing it almost every day for decades. Distorting the truth, telling porky-pies, making statements that I positively know to be untrue. But that’s called ‘satire’ and thus is allowed (I’m digging here, help meeee). But when it happens on an industrial scale, when it affects elections, when its done within the institutional world, then its a bit more insidious, a bit nasty and quite frankly, its wrong.

So I went to a talk last night, given by Charlotte Henry, whose book, entitled ‘not buying it’, which is being published as you read this, is all about fake news. Is that true? Or is it fake? Ooohhhhh… It was also about a phrase I’d not heard before but instantly fell in love with: “post-truth”. I love it because it conjures up a time when the truth is redundant, when we reach an era in which there’s no longer a need for honesty anywhere. But it don’t mean that. Sadly. Or gladly. What it means is that the meaning of an argument is actually secondary to the message given, that message designed to appeal on an emotional level. Like Nigel Farage’s great pre-Brexit picture of a boatload of non-white refugees queuing up to come to England. We all knew that middle-Eastern and far-Eastern migrants aren’t part of the EU, therefore had nothing to do with Brexit. But that image hit emotions in a debate which had been Faraged into one about immigration and the picture spoke a million words. None of which were actually part of the argument. Similarly the “£350million a week for the NHS when we leave Europe!!!!!” didn’t need even refuting it was so patently stupid and misleading. But emotionally people loved it. Nothing evokes more emotion in ‘little England’ than the NHS… except maybe immigration.

Fake news is different. Its self-serving, done to make money. Teams of scallywags in Eastern Europe make up stupid stories which get posted online and however daft they are, every ‘hit’ they receive pays them money through Google-ads or wherever. They don’t care about the message, nor the impact, just the dosh. “Elvis shagged my granny! Last Night!!!” is of the same interest to these people as “Trump joins the KKK”.

The whole ‘post-truth’ thing is a modern take on what was called ‘spin’. There’s intention to deceive, there’s moving the gist of the story away from what’s unfavourable and twisting it into a more flattering light. Because the emotional side with spin was gained by changing the bias.

There all biased. They’re all liars, spinners, post-truthist fake-newsers and bastards.

If you don’t read it here you simply can’t believe it.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx