Too much misinformation

The title of Rob Brotherton’s new book, Bad News: Why We Fall for Fake News,  published this year in May, suggests a timeliness, and an implicit understanding of this human failing. Mr Brotherton plunges into a historically renowned example of fake news, in the very first line of the first chapter of the book: “Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News.” 

The special news bulletin on Sunday, October 30, 1938, was about tentacled extraterrestrials landing on earth, around 20 miles from Princeton in the United States. It was, in reality, Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of H G Wells’ 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. The episode, broadcast on the night before Halloween over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network allegedly caused mass hysteria. Those who had tuned in to the show really believed the country was being invaded by Martians. 

Mr Brotherton then delves into various definitions of fake news, before casting them all aside to explain the scope of his book, and to set up his apparatus for the exploration of the nature of news: “Rather than focusing on the fake, we’re going to focus on the news  — because fake news, however you define it, is just one small niche within the much broader news eco-system.” 

His inquiry leads to an unearthing of historical events and archival news reports. He tells of the lighthouse and wooden hut on the rocky coast of Cape Race in Newfoundland, which, in the 19th century, performed vital roles in the reception and transfer of news. A telegraph, with connections to inland Canada and New York City, lay within the hut. News boats would make their way from the cape to the transatlantic steamers that carried the news. One such steamer, the SS Anglo Saxon, was wrecked on the jagged coastline on April 27, 1863, as it attempted to round the cape in thick fog to deliver the news. He uses the anecdote to discuss a brief history of speed and freshness in the news business; a dependence on the arrival of the mail in the 19th century, which led to news writers promising more news, but only “if the Post faile us not.” In 1833, the Mobile Advertiser  published a charming apology for the scantiness of its pages:  “The failure of all the mails must plead our excuse for the barrenness of our columns to-day.”  

Bad News: Why We Fall For Fake News 

Author: Rob Brotherton
 

Publisher:  Bloomsbury Sigma

Pages: 352

Price: Rs 599

Mr Brotherton also quotes essayists, philosophers, statesmen and novelists who inhabit eras before the 20th century to provide historical evidence of disparagement for the news. Henry David Thoreau described the news of the day as “the froth and scum of the eternal sea.” In Charles Dickens’ 1844 novel, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit,  New York newsboys holler, “Here’s this morning’s New York Sewer! …Here’s this morning’s New York Stabber! …Here’s the New York Rowdy Journal!” 

But Mr Brotherton doesn’t engage with history alone; he deploys it to bear upon the present bewildering news-scape, available in varied formats on multiple screens for customised consumption. He discusses the media’s preoccupation with “bad news”, and poses a tantalising question: “Why does bad news seem to make for good ratings?” He provides a glimpse into the studio of Boston news director Peter Leone, and the coinage of phrases such as: “if it bleeds, it leads”, and “blood on the sidewalks”, in the 1980s. He decries the all-pervasive nature of news, and the existence of echo chambers or metaphorical walls within which our own beliefs are reinforced and even amplified. He warns of the dangers of “deepfake” technology, about which The Guardian  proclaimed, in 2018, “Deep fakes are where truth goes to die.”

Bad News  is a meticulously-researched discourse on the state of the news, and the psychological impulses that determine how we consume it. Perhaps its inadequacies are embedded in its assumptions. 

Mr Brotherton, whose first book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories  was published in 2015, has a PhD in the psychology of conspiracy theories from Goldsmiths, University of London. 

Bad News is a little too earnest in its endeavour to trace the complex trajectory of the news through tumultuous eras and their specific histories. The book often reads like a thesis, determined to prove its many suppositions and observations with quoted material and psychometric analysis. 

The reader would well be irritated by its all-knowing tone and hopelessly entangled in information. The warmth of a narrative voice, which could have been a guide through the confounding terrain of buzzwords and technologies that manipulate photos and videos, is missing. A bombardment of facts and a careful list of references only illustrate a problematic aspect of the news, discussed in a chapter aptly titled “Too Much News.”  

It is a timely book, obviously, in a day and age grappling with a pandemic and all the misinformation that shrouds it. But it isn’t a deeply empathetic one; its dependence on cold facts perhaps gets in the way of real understanding.