George Ayoub: Time has come to ask for ‘proof’

Enough already with “fake news.” We are weary. We are worn out.

Prove one way or another or put a lid on the nonsense. 

Nebraskans, or anyone for that matter, probably don’t have fake news on their “what’s really important” bingo cards. Nevertheless, we’ve been wading through its seriously deep grease for the last decade, so much so that the concept has lost all meaning, and those who traffic in it, all perspective. 

None of which stopped the president from recently booting journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico out of the White House, citing sins of reporting “fake news” as the reason. As usual — and most important — no details of what was “fake” were provided. So the melodrama continues, this time with constitutional consequences. 

Please, just make it stop.

While the journalists’ banishment runs contrary to the First Amendment, it did help some in the White House press corps and legacy media types find a spine. After CNN, MS NOW and Politico reporters were shown the door, the press corps stood in solidarity with the outcasts, foregoing any pool reporting, which silenced presidential sound bites for a couple of days.

The whole shebang ended up in court, where a federal judge issued a 14-day restraining order against the White House and ordered press credentials and access returned. He ruled on due-process grounds, rejecting a national security argument offered by White House lawyers.

You may be thinking a newspaper columnist writing about the loss of a press freedom is self-serving, but when the White House becomes off-limits to those whose constitutional responsibility is to assure government accountability, we have crossed yet another bright line away from democracy. 

For the record, fake news can be whole-cloth lies, propaganda, disinformation, misinformation, even satire and parody. Its origins can be traced to the days of yellow journalism when newspapers occasionally just made it up in an effort to boost sales. 

Going down these conspiratorial rabbit holes reveals an even longer history, too. Twenty centuries or so ago, Octavian used “fake news” in his smear campaign against Marc Antony during their war for the Roman Republic’s corner office, calling his rival a drunk and philanderer, famously writing that the commander even had a fling with Cleopatra. England’s first code of laws, the 1275 Statute of Westminster, made it a political crime to spread false news. In 1835 the New York Sun ran a story that an astronomer had recorded life on the moon, including descriptions of “unicorns, two-legged beavers and even flying bat-men.” The newspaper passed it off as satire but not before sales skyrocketed. 

Today’s technology means modern pieces of fantasies, fictions or simply bad intel can be passed along at a pace somewhere between lickety split and warp speed. But then the rate at which a lie is spread has no bearing on its truthlessness.

If you think we’re doomed to continue to buy what’s bogus, we’re not. A 2024 study from three University of Texas psychologists and published by the National Institute of Health demonstrated that while fake news and other misinformative distempers are prevalent and pervasive, most of us are fairly skilled at discerning the truth from a lie. They also found that partisan bias in the passing along of misinformation is widespread and forceful, but that you’ll find among us far more skeptics than the gullible.

All of which leaves us with how Nebraskans and the rest of the world might navigate the choppy seas of public lying. Fake news should have little impact if we employ faculties the Texas researchers believe we have and bolster them with a little reasoning. By the way, fake news differs mightily from the facts or unflattering reporting. Just saying … in case that fits somewhere. 

If, however, we choose to believe evidence-free stories, theories or rumors, we’ll run the world on lies. We’ll believe that elections are rigged, that vaccines are unnecessary, that prices are down, that Ukraine started a war to take its own territory, that legions of noncitizens are voting and that our history can be rewritten without consequence. 

Of course, what the ancient Romans, New York Sun readers and the White House press corps all had — and have — at their disposal, is this request of anyone claiming fake news: proof. 

As in please provide some about the story you insist is fake. We’ll wait … but please don’t dally. It’s been a long 10 years.