[Infowarrior] - Fwd: referral: The Fake News Fallacy

[Richard Forno]

> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: dan
> 
> Worthwhile article from the New Yorker magazine
> 
> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/04/the-fake-news-fallacy
> 
> --dan
> 
> 
> The Fake-News Fallacy
> Old fights about radio have lessons for new fights about the Internet.
> 
>   By Adrian Chen
> 
>   Radio, in its early days, was seen as a means for spreading
>   hysteria and hatred, just as the Internet is today.
> 
>   On the evening of October 30, 1938, a seventy-six-year-old
>   millworker in Grover's Mill, New Jersey, named Bill Dock heard
>   something terrifying on the radio. Aliens had landed just down
>   the road, a newscaster announced, and were rampaging through the
>   countryside. Dock grabbed his double-barrelled shotgun and went
>   out into the night, prepared to face down the invaders. But,
>   after investigating, as a newspaper later reported, he "didn't
>   see anybody he thought needed shooting." In fact, he'd been duped
>   by Orson Welles's radio adaptation of "The War of the Worlds."
>   Structured as a breaking-news report that detailed the invasion
>   in real time, the broadcast adhered faithfully to the conventions
>   of news radio, complete with elaborate sound effects and
>   impersonations of government officials, with only a few brief
>   warnings through the program that it was fiction.
> 
>   The next day, newspapers were full of stories like Dock's. "Thirty
>   men and women rushed into the West 123rd Street police station,"
>   ready to evacuate, according to the Times. Two people suffered
>   heart attacks from shock, the Washington Post reported. One
>   caller from Pittsburgh claimed that he had barely prevented his
>   wife from taking her own life by swallowing poison. The panic
>   was the biggest story for weeks; a photograph of Bill Dock and
>   his shotgun, taken the next day, by a Daily News reporter, went
>   "the 1930s equivalent of viral," A. Brad Schwartz writes in his
>   recent history, "[23]Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of
>   the Worlds and the Art of Fake News."
> 
>   This early fake-news panic lives on in legend, but Schwartz is
>   the latest of a number of researchers to argue that it wasn't
>   all it was cracked up to be. As Schwartz tells it, there was no
>   mass hysteria, only small pockets of concern that quickly burned
>   out. He casts doubt on whether Dock had even heard the broadcast.
>   Schwartz argues that newspapers exaggerated the panic to better
>   control the upstart medium of radio, which was becoming the
>   dominant source of breaking news in the thirties. Newspapers
>   wanted to show that radio was irresponsible and needed guidance
>   from its older, more respectable siblings in the print media,
>   such "guidance" mostly taking the form of lucrative licensing
>   deals and increased ownership of local radio stations.  Columnists
>   and editorialists weighed in. Soon, the Columbia education
>   professor and broadcaster Lyman Bryson declared that unrestrained
>   radio was "one of the most dangerous elements in modern culture."


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