Faking News

Abstract

All news is fake news. By this I mean that all reports of current events are to some extent 'made up' by the time they are received by a mediated consumer distanced from the original source. Recall that 'fake', from the Latin facere (to make, to do), is a member of the family of making words that includes fact, factory, fashion, artificial, and face. Also in that family is the name of one of the main players in the realm of fake news: Facebook. One study found that in the final three months of the 2016 US presidential campaign, 'the topperforming fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets'. 2 With all these facere words in mind, it is ironic that the standard test for whether news is 'fake' is to subject it to 'fact-checking'. Facts themselves are thingsartefactsthat we make through artificial processes of Creation and Production. Any 'fact' deserving of the name is something established by some process involving human skill and judgment. What matters is not whether news or facts are made upthey always arebut how they are made up and what relation there is between the thing at source and the thing as made up for public reception. Public reception also plays its part in the broadcast of fake news. Whereas an electronic radio receiver is passive, the human receiver of a message 'is an active producer of meanings'. 3 We therefore need to think in terms of what I call 'Receiver Responsibility', from the case of the journalist who receives the factual grain of a promising story, to the editor who publishes journalists' copy, to the online user who retweets a tweet.The UK's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee concluded that the term 'fake news' is 'bandied around with no clear idea of what it means' and that it 'has taken on a variety of meanings, including a description of any