[Newspoint] A fake news moment

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It’s election time again, and, as has been the case in this free-wheeling information age, fake news for political propaganda again poisons the air.

Everyone is agreed: The only way to combat falsehood is with truth. But getting at the truth alone is no simple task. It requires digging for every component fact of the truth, an undertaking that can be so laborious that before it’s done the falsehood could have gained a decided currency as itself the truth.

Then, there’s the matter of deploying the truth effectively, deciding the forms in which to put it so that they match the levels of appreciation of the audiences. In fact, before anything else, those audiences, or, at any rate, those among them who show any aptitude for it, should have been instructed in ways of sensing falsehood, if not of being able somehow to tell truth from falsehood on their own.  

Some of the news media have come together in a collaborative system of instant fact-checking, jumping to it at the moment an issue presents itself, in hopes of putting as quick an end as possible to the spread of falsehood. Other groups, from civil society, academia, and other institutions, are also doing what they can. But, necessarily heavy with facts and reason, truth is bound to fall behind, while falsehood, being a concoction from nothing but air, is made for fast and easy travel. Still, one’s duty to the truth, being a moral one, brooks no compromise.

Just this week I took part in a debate over which ought to be believed, the news media (newspapers and periodicals, broadcast networks, online media sites) or the bloggers, and the labeling alone for the occasion betrayed a compromise. Billed as “mainstream media,” the news media were divested of their institutional distinction. Labeled “social media,” on the other hand, the bloggers were given, by suggestion, a proper civic role, legitimized for the night. I didn’t mind, though. That our two sides were pitted against each other in a debate constituted a plain-enough acknowledgment that never shall the twain meet.

Anyway, the choice of which deserves to be believed should be easy enough to make, but trust the bloggers to muddle up the issue. For not only do they have interests and principals to serve and protect, they have their own profiles to raise, for self-promotion in a lucrative trade. Indeed, given the nature of their trade, they are unable to provide credible assurances of prudence and truthfulness, key virtues in the business of news and information. As happens for the news media, these are virtues rooted in a sense of institutional duty they have developed in a centuries-old tradition that began once they were anointed on the altar of democracy as collective watchdog for the people on the powers that be and bestowed a freedom that is not only specific to it but may not be abridged — enshrined as “the press.”

To continue to deserve that singular bestowal, the press has drawn up for itself rules and standards of practice and systems of training for aspirants to its ranks as well as tests for the constant validation of the work of its practitioners. Every piece of their work is put through layer upon layer of review before it is made public, and any error that somehow escapes that filter is owned and corrected promptly and publicly.

One of the two bloggers in the debate claimed, rather irrelevantly and typically without citing any basis in fact, that those press rigors go widely unobserved, although, again, it might be a point worth discussing on another occasion, say, for assessing the fidelity of the press to its sworn role. In fact, the one all-too-relevant point that went undisputed is that bloggers go about their business individually and with no semblance of standards governing it.

In any case, there’s no guarantee, not even with the best effort by the press and the others, that truth will even sell well, let alone triumph over falsehood, especially for the short-term purpose of leveling the electoral playing field by ridding the air of fake news. Never mind their numbers and rich resources, never mind that they have the Internet, that indiscriminate dump-cum-dispenser, to propagate their fakes — those determined fakers are favored by masses of voters who have become so desperate, thus so easily brainwashed or bribed or otherwise fooled, they can believe the most bizarre fakery so long as it sustains their hopes and persuasions or simply sustains them for the moment. 

The battle seems to me just too heavy for the press and the rest of the truth army to fight alone; they need allies among the electorate.  And it’s precisely because too many voters are so impenetrable by truth and reason that I have proposed an alternative constituency to be organized from among the voters who seem reasonable enough. I’d like to think this a viable, significant first move toward a breakaway from the culture of patronage that has bred this blind or bought loyalty, which in turn serves the bloggers well.

Well, that’s unless, after close to 40 years of waiting, my prospective constituents are still not too keen about more activist ways of pursuing change, and prefer to go on dreaming that Congress, the political-dynasty club itself, will finally pass the law that shall implement the constitutional prohibition against political dynasties. 

The alternative came to me upon observing the fervor that burned for Leni Robredo during her 2022 presidential run. It was a phenomenon unseen since Cory Aquino had successfully taken on Ferdinand Marcos, martial-law president for 14 years, in the snap election of 1986. Robredo herself lost to the dictator’s son, but Junior’s presidency has been haunted by suspicions of electoral fraud, suspicions credible enough for the Supreme Court to entertain doubters’ questions and order the Commission on Elections to explain. It has not complied satisfactorily. 

Officially, Robredo is listed to have polled 15 million votes, a concessionary number that itself comes to more than 26% of the 56 million who turned out to vote. Two-thirds of that (about 10 million), or even just half (7.5 million), should make for a potent bloc, potent enough to vote common candidates into office or mount effective boycotts and other civil-disobedience campaigns or deploy masses out on the streets to register the bloc’s sentiments on issues.

To be sure, the enterprise entails a huge effort not only of organization but also of reorientation. Most basic is a shift in the rallying point, a shift from brand personality to cause, the sort of reorientation that has no place for idolatry, that instead encourages an unsentimental, conscientious reading of the character of the men and women who aspire to official leadership. Yes, character reading is the thing, for the crisis the nation is in — has been in for generations actually — is a cultural and moral one. – Rappler.com