Genre labels and fake news

In a previous post I wrote about the genre "real news" as opposed to "news" on the assumption that the genre label "real news" wasn't well-established, but that the rhetorical move performed while invoking it was very strong indeed.

In the present post, I address a genre label that has risen to prominence in recent years: fake news. 

A crucial, sometimes efficient, sometimes highly problematic, feature of genre is that genres tend to naturalize themselves. They become habitual, invisible even. We can do a lot of thinking and a lot of acting with genre with knowing it. "Fake news" is such a chameleon.

Today, the genre label "fake news" is everywhere in debate. It's well-nigh impossible to log on to social media without encountering it, and the phenomenon it covers seems to be responsible for major societal challenges. However, this is a very recent development, and if you go back just a few years not only did few people know what "fake news" meant, those that did, knew that it meant something else. It meant news satire. Thus, this book which is on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. Notice the subtitle.

This one about The Onion and Philosophy is also quite confident in its usage of the "fake news" label to mean "news satire". Again, notice the subtitle.¨

I know all of this, because I research news satire and used to say that I worked with "fake news". Way back then, in 2015 and early 2016, I drew well-nigh no public attention at all with the term and had to explain it wherever I went.

However, at some point during 2016 all of this changed. "Fake news" was suddenly on everybody's lips. It wasn´t even early in the year, more like mid-late 2016, when the US presidential election heated up. But the genre label had a new meaning (or rather two new meanings, I'll get back to that); and the older meaning was well-nigh forgotten. If you say "fake news" today you definitely don´t make people expect to hear about news satire. This demonstrates two interesting features about genre labels.

• They can can change their meaning; they can even rise to prominence without retaining their original meaning. 
• When a cultural phenomenon rises to prominence it is going to need a genre label.

Along the way, the meaning of the word "fake" in the genre label itself changed. An old beloved dictionary of mine defines the word "fake" in this way:

To do up, to cover up defects and faults so at to give a presentable appearance to, to doctor; to contrive, to fabricate, to make up from defective material; to cheat, to fraud, to deceive. n. A thing thus prepared for deception, esp. a manufactured antique <...> a swindle, a dodge.

In this sense, in its original meaning, "news satire", the meaning of the word was ironic. The news satire services themselves pointed to the fradulent character of their news reporting. Thus UNnews, a service of the Wikipedia parody Uncylopedia describes itself like this:

UnNews is a service of Uncyclopedia that spreads misinformation and cons the public into swallowing it hook-line-and-sinker (and worm), by guilefully making it resemble authentic news articles. UnNews stories use satire to ensure the most unfair and biased reporting possible.

So, the cheating is clearly labelled, and there is no actual disinformation taking place, though there is a lot of pretend disinformation. (Isn´t it lovely btw?)

In the new usage, however, the "fake" in the term clearly refers to a fraudulent intention in the supposed news reporting. It is a purposeful swindle, a dodge. Like a manufactured antique, it is there to make you buy something that you would do better to avoid. The sudden rise to prominence of a genre label clearly points to the fact that something had become exigent in the public sphere: the information value and trustworthiness of what appeared to be news reporting. Disinformation in presumed news reporting had become critical.

As recent developments in the Cambridge Analytica- scandal have again demonstrated, it is no coincidence that this happend alongside the Brexit-vote and the US presidential election. Fake news has been a key term to understand both. And it has been pertinent ever since. However, no sooner had the term risen to prominence, before it acquired two different meanings. Related, but quite obviously opposed.

One was the disinformation posing as news spread by the likes of Breitbart, InfoWars and similar - sometimes even more obscure - "news" services, but also frequently presented by supposed serious media institutions. Here, false stories were fabricated to achieve a social impact - in particular through repostings on social media. It's worth noticing that these stories are closer to bullshit in the Frankfurtian sense than to lying. It does not matter if the untruths get exposed; in fact claiming that the pope or this or that actor supports Trump's election is bound to be found out. However, the revelation lags behind the fabricated story which spreads like wildfire across SoMe and reaches far more people than the, less dramatic, correction. So, the swindle-stories are written for effect; not to hide the truth per se, but to spread a certain kind of disinformation. In this case, therefore, the "fake news" genre label is used to warn against a certain kind of disinformation. And as such it has been fairly effective.

However, at the same time, or following it closely. another meaning arose. It was used by the very disinformers themselves to attack not fabricated news stories, but the channels that reported the actual news. If, for example, a news story is inconvenient to the sitting US president, it is labelled "fake news"; no matter how well documented it is. Rhetorically speaking, it's a lame-ass bully defense and can be torn apart easily in rational discourse, but again it is strangely effective. Again, it doesn´t matter if the lie is disingenuous and exposed as long as the disinformation works; as long as you can get the MAGA-crowd to shout "fake news", you can de-legitimize the actual news reporting and legitimize your own actions without having to answer for them.

So, the genre label "fake news" has moved from a fairly harmless, if somewhat confusing label for news satire to a critical cultural battleground in the fight to retain Western democracy as we know it. If you can define what news stories belong to the genre, if you can label them, you can win the rhetorical battle over what information gets to count in the public sphere and thus further the public acceptance of your political agenda. Be it democratic or despotic.

For further reading, this rather good academic article disambiguates the different usages nicely.

The blog post was originally written as a Twitter thread to celebrate my 5000th follower. The thread can be seen here.

Update April 16th: I forgot to mention that most of what I know about genre labels I have learnt from my former PhD student Jacob Ølgaard Nyboe. Some of Jacob's fine work with genre labels and genre signatures can be found in his brilliant article "The Game of the Name" here.

News and Real News

We all know what "news" is, or at least we think we do; and over the last few years we have come to learn more about "fake news" (see my blogpost on the genre label "Fake News" here) than most of us ever cared to. But another genre term lingers in the background. In discussions of news, we repeatedly hear ourselves or fellow debaters say sentences like, "but the real news is that..."

So, if we take this distinction to be meaningful what, then, is  implied by it? If you look at the newsflow you will see "news". Defined loosely as "notable events that have happend within the last approximately 24 hours". Interestingly, the "happend" here may also mean that a previous, sometimes much older, event has come to light (think #metoo), or that an existing story has taken a new turn. Thus, one of the reasons (but only one) why a player in the media landscape may opt to not comment on a given story is that the comment updates the story, and gives it new life and a new turn through the news cycle; or probably two new turns as there is likely to be comments upon the comment.

But, and this is where the genre label "real news" comes in, underlying this stream there may be other factors at play, some much more fundamental than what is made evident in the news cycle.

To add an example, picked again, as in previous posts, from the UK Brexit debate. When Theresa May declared a few days ago that the UK will leave the customs union when Brexit kicks in. she may do so to appeases the hard Brexiters in her party. However, by consequence, she also declares for a hard border in Northern Ireland and Gibraltar. The only alternative is to demand that the EU should no longer even try to control its own outer border, since that would be for the benefit of the UK, but is otherwise a fairly strange demand. This, in turn, fits into a much longer narrative of both the manifold twist and turns, and the overarching structural questions at play in the Brexit process.

The border/customs union double-bind, as well as the inept handling of it, is brilliantly caricatured by SKZ Cartoons:

So, returning to the starting point of this post, the news may be May's declaration of her intention for the UK to leave the customs union. The real news, however, is that this declaration is undercut even before she makes it. This is, obviously, slightly exasperating. As long as the attention of the news services stays in the news, you'll get an endless flutter of turns and twists that leaves nobody the wiser and only contributes to confusion and - ultimately - a dejection with politics.

However, the problem remains: the underlying story, critically important as it is, stays the same, and it all springs from the badly underpinned assumptions of the decision to Brexit. However, the real news usually does not change enough in a 24 hour cycle to make it into the news cycle. Thus, it most be a recurrent attempt to get complexity somehow represented in the more simplistic genres of the news cycle.

Therefore, if you want the real news represented in the news, the former must be constantly updated and recontextualized to match the latter. This, however, is usually more than can be handled within the famework of a fast moving news cycle, or within the individual story. So, the story roars on, and all we can do is to try to insert the real news into the stream of the news at opportune moments. Here, for instance, you can see an attempt to introduce the real news into the news of the customs union/border example mentioned above.

Moving back again to the genre perspective. news is an established genre; real news is not. However, it still much used, as it gives form to a recurrent rhetorical move: The attempt to contextualize the news, to tell the underlying, more slow-moving, story that is of more importance, and of a wider reach, than most of the news stories that appear in the news cycle.

Like many other genre moves, this one is a battleground. A person keen on Brexit might say that the real news is the EUs recurrent attempt at keeping the UK from winning its sovereignty back. The guiding opinion would be different, but the genre move would remain.

Thus, as often before, genres are fields of action: we have the news, the real news, the struggle over what the real news is, and the recurrent attempt (not covered here) by different actors to make their real news appear in the news. No wonder this is confusing.

Oh, and if you want to see more of SKZ Cartoon's brilliant work on Brexit look here.

Update
Even years later the real news story remains  well-nigh the same. Here is  SKZ Cartoons in late August 2019 after a meeting between newly "elected" PM Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel.

NB: Like the previous post, this one was originally a twitter thread. You can see the thread here.

Update April 16th, 2018: Added link forward to blog post about fake news genre labels in the first paragraph of this blog post.

Updated again 22 august, 2019. Cartoon from SKZ Cartoons added. You can find more of the artist's work here.