Yes It Is, It’s True: Fake news has been with us a long time

There’s been a lot of talk lately about fake news, particularly the kind that has been distributed widely on Facebook and the Internet. Being in the business for more than four decades, I can say without fear of contradiction that fake news, manipulated news, massaged news, packaged news, etc., have been with us for a really long time, at least throughout my career.

Like so many others even today, I wasn’t aware this beast existed until I got to see it up close and personal. It was in my salad days as a community journalist under the tutelage of Wayland Globe Editor and Publisher Irvin P. Helmey.

One particular incident stands out for me. It was in in 1973 when I got a press release about a Hopkins FFA student who attended a poultry seminar in Kentucky. The local student was pictured shaking hands with Col. Harlan Sanders, founder of the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.

I thought nothing of it, but Irv sternly told me the photo was a shameless attempt by KFC to get free advertising. I told him I thought it was news that a Hopkins lad got to meet the famous Col. Sanders in person, but Irv warned me about celebrity journalism and the concept of public relations firms constantly trying to use the media to promote its products and logos. Irv insisted it’s not really news when somebody local meets somebody famous, especially when it’s packaged in a way to obtain free advertising.

Such was the beginning of a career-long attempt to understand and combat “fake news,” that which isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

I learned shortly afterward that some of the greatest purveyors of fake news were politicians who would show up at CROP Walks or March of Dimes fund-raisers just to get their “feel-good” pictures taken with volunteers. Taking a cue from Irv, I learned how to crop the politicians out of photos I took when they were gaming the system for free positive publicity.

Then there was astroturfing, a process in which letter writers are set up by letters already written by leaders of causes or points of view, but signed by local people to give a phony sense of grass-roots people at work. I recall one time that Allegan County GOP leader Gerry Hildenbrand once affixed his signature to an astroturfed criticism of Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s husband, along with many other signatures to the very same postcards. None of them were published on my watch, but two were printed in the Grand Rapids Press.

Many corporations have their own public relations people who craft press releases in hopes a lazy media will publish them almost verbatim with an uncritical eye, letting them get away with a positive spin on what could have been negative news. The most common example has been when a new company official is welcomed, but the person he or she succeeded is ignored entirely or is reported to have “resigned to spend more time with family,” when actually he or she was terminated.

The reason why so many reporters and editors are regarded as cynical and skeptical is that they have been lied to so often that they come to expect it whenever something happens. Corporate CEOS, school administrators, athletic coaches and politicians and just about anybody in the public relations or marketing industry have gotten so good at what they do — dance around tough questions and sell half-truths — that someone like me expects them to play fast and loose with the truth.

Through the years the game has gotten really sophisticated. Indeed, there are too many web sites that generate stories that aren’t true, and their poisonous and cancerous material is easily spread world wide because of the marvel of modern technology.

Some of the most egregious in recent years are “news items” that report totally false accusations, such as First Lady Michelle Obama really being a man, her husband being a Muslim born in Kenya and Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring inside a pizzaria. The real problem is that too many people are too naïve or too ignorant to dismiss this stuff for the trashy gossip it is.

The truth indeed is difficult to find in these hard times. It is being drowned in a sea of information, too much of which is bogus and outrageous, but too many believe such supermarket tabloid crap as “Dwarf rapes nun, flees in UFO.”

I have told my few friends during my lifetime that if I ever have a tombstone erected after I shrug off my mortal coil, I would like it to say, “Dave tried to tell us the truth. We didn’t want to hear it.”