The fake news blame game

MEDIA

Fake news is false or misleading information presented as news. It often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue. – Wikipedia.

By PETER PUSAL
FORMER Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Peter O’Neill first started using the term ‘fake news’ to dismiss disparaging reports against his administration in the last two years of his reign.
It was an all-purpose comment used to allay blame and deflect criticism and make the listener think O’Neill was merely the target of unfair and unfounded claims about his leadership and the decisions he made, underwrote, and co-sponsored.
The term also served to cast doubt and ridicule those asking the tough questions or being critical of his administration.
Soon one would see the term begin to infiltrate social media posts (in PNG) on topics usually related to politics but other news items as well; commenters would begin to use it to dismiss views and information which they did not agree with or considered unimportant, unsubstantiated and thereby unworthy.
But by far, the man who popularised its use and made it the ‘in’ thing, as much through repetitive utterances as his labelling of America’s predominantly leftist media, was Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States (2016 to 2020).
Incidentally, O’Neill’s time at the top of PNG politics was from the second half of 2011 to the second quarter of 2019. O’Neill’s documented use of the term came to prominence around 2018.
According to Lucia Graves of the Pacific Standard “during his first year in office, Trump averaged more than a daily use of the word ‘fake’.”
“Over time, examples of the phrase have popped up here and there, but Google Trends shows it didn’t become commonly cited until Trump essentially made it so.”
“Fake news” she writes was dubbed the “Word of the Year” for 2017 by the Collins Dictionary, which found that the term’s usage had risen by 365 per cent since the 2016 US presidential election.
Back to O’Neill. In 2018 he rejected as “utter nonsense” a report that claimed his country would have been better off without a massive liquefied natural gas project.
During a speech O’Neill dismissed the report as “fake news”. After his speech, O’Neill admitted he had not actually read the Jubilee Australia report.
He was at it again that same year when the question of his citizenship came up in Parliament raised no less by Madang MP Bryan Kramer and known social media poster himself.
PNG’s then attorney-general, Alfred Manasseh, announced an investigation into the citizenship status of all 111 MPs to determine if any held dual citizenship, which would disqualify them from holding public office or even being able to vote in the country’s elections.
O’Neill issued a statement denying that he was a citizen of any country but PNG, calling the story of his alleged Australian citizenship “fake news”.
And then in 2019, O’Neill’s government flagged the restricting or banning of Facebook and other social media in the country, after a tumultuous period in politics which was inevitably leading to a vote-of-no confidence in the prime minister.
O’Neill said he would order Cabinet to conduct a “complete review” of social media.
He said “fake news” was destroying PNG people and society.
So what is fake news? According to Wikipedia: Fake news is false or misleading information presented as news. It often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue.
However, the term does not have a fixed definition, and has been applied more broadly to include any type of false information, including unintentional and unconscious mechanisms, and also by high-profile individuals to apply to any news unfavourable to his/her personal perspectives.”
The end of that last sentence in the definition certainly applies to how the term is used by some of PNG’s elite.
Wikipedia goes on to say that fake news was once common in print, but the prevalence of fake news has increased with the rise of social media, especially the Facebook News Feed. Political polarisation, post-truth politics, confirmation bias, and social media algorithms have been implicated in the spread of fake news.
It is sometimes generated and propagated by hostile foreign actors, particularly during elections. The use of anonymously-hosted fake news websites has made it difficult to prosecute sources of fake news for libel.
In some definitions, fake news includes satirical articles misinterpreted as genuine, and articles that employ sensationalist or clickbait headlines that are not supported in the text.
While for all intents and purposes nothing came of the claims against O’Neill, it is interesting to note that his use of ‘fake news’ as a bat to swat away allegations and purported misinformation has seeped into everyday use in the country.
Any manner of contrarian or alternative information on a wide range of issues is met with the claim of fakeness by commenters or some similar derivative.
The problem is that while fake news does exist in all its iterations, simply referring to anything that is counter to what one has been told by the authorities (or persons in positions of authority) negates the need to understand issues and ideas – to give time to all sides (and views) of an argument or idea – and basically keep an open mind.
It is also troublesome when public figures rely on the term and use it to cast off rather than take the time to answer questions intelligently with supporting references to correct misconceptions and most importantly be honest and forthright.