Access the blog by Álvaro Nieto
The concept of 'fake news', which has become so fashionable in recent times, carries a terrible message in its very name. Its literal translation, fake news, presupposes that there is information that is published that is not true. And, given that it is the media that are in charge of producing the news, the term 'fake news' assumes that newspapers, radio or television stations are spreading falsehoods. Therefore, by using this syntagma we are already suggesting that there are those who make up the news. Hence, many politicians have embraced these two fetish words to discredit information that was not favourable to them. Donald Trump as to Pablo Iglesias. They want to discredit the work of the media, and the 'fake news' thing suits them like a glove.
But in reality, the media do not usually spread false news, or at least not deliberately. Of course, some media outlets are better than others, as they do not all work with the same professionalism, but 100% is subject to judicial control. If someone feels harmed by a piece of information or considers a news item to be false, they can always go to court to demand a rectification or even compensation. This control is carried out on a daily basis, but very rarely is a media outlet condemned for lying.
Therefore, when we talk about 'fake news' rather than fake news we should talk about hoaxes, as they are not fabricated by the media, but by clandestine websites, counter-propaganda agencies or, in many cases, idle citizens who decide to write a WhatsApp message making up any kind of nonsense. And this phenomenon, that of hoaxes, is not exactly something new, however much they would have us believe otherwise. It is true that social networks facilitate their propagation, but hoaxes set in motion by unscrupulous people have always existed. Remember that mess with Ricky Martin on Antena-3 caused by a call from an unscrupulous person to a radio programme when he claimed to have seen on television what never happened.
Despite this, there are politicians who try to convince us that democracy is endangered by fake news, and have even set up advisory bodies to fight so-called "disinformation", putting a lot of money on the table. The European Union, for example, is particularly sensitive to this issue. And, in the heat of it all, so-called 'fact-checking' companies have proliferated.
In general, these companies are in the business of debunking anonymous hoaxes spread on social media. "It's not true that drinking bleach protects against covid", they have even headlined on occasion. It is a somewhat curious way of protecting ourselves from hoaxes: often by denying them, they give them more publicity than they would have if no one paid any attention to them. Something that would have been confined to a few citizens suddenly becomes a national problem.
That said, the work of debunking hoaxes is undoubtedly commendable, as is the work of verifying what is true in the data contained in a politician's speech or in a parliamentary debate.
But, thanks to this work, verification companies have ended up being hired by social networks to judge the content that appears on their platforms, in such a way that they have also ended up examining what the media publish, and even arrogate to themselves the right to label some of their information as "hoaxes". In other words, these verifiers have set themselves up as real courts and determine in real time whether what a journalist says is true or false. And the problem is that these companies generally have fewer staff and resources than a media outlet, and they also screw up and, of course, have their own ideological biases and shareholder interests.
The 'ABC' hoax
And so, for example, it turns out that the ABC newspaper found a few days ago that a news item by him about a new Aragonese law was labelled a hoax. But it was completely true, to the point that the verifying company the following day published a "correction" admitting that its initial verdict had been based on a draft of the law, not on the text that was finally approved. In other words, the hoax was propagated by the verifier in an attempt to correct ABC, but the thing remained as follows a mere "correction" the following day because there is no verifier to check the verifier and therefore to call the verifier's bluff if he or she is wrong.
Despite the correction, the reputational damage to ABC and the journalist who published the information has already been done. Some politicians used the note in which the ABC story was described as a "hoax" to attack the newspaper, because, of course, no one dared to question the sacred verdict of the verifier. Even the Association of Journalists of Aragon intervened to oppose the Madrid newspaper.
Does this make any sense, and should we let companies that have sprung up out of nowhere emerge as new courts of truth? Why are we so arbitrarily delegating a task that belongs only to the courts of justice?
And to top it all off, there is the very curious selection system that these companies usually follow to choose the news and the media where to look for hoaxes: they will hardly see television stations such as La Sexta or newspapers such as Eldiario.es, media with which these verifiers often collaborate, as targets for their criticisms.
Let's look at a practical example. In recent days it has been written and said on several occasions, and in some cases by journalists of some repute, that the putschist Antonio Tejero was pardoned by the Government of Felipe González. This 'information' is completely false, because just the opposite happened, the PSOE government rejected the request for pardon. However, some people do not care about the truth in their unbridled eagerness to justify pardoning the leaders of the 'procés'. It is all about looking for precedents, even if they are lies. But, curiously, at the time of writing, no verifier has yet appeared to deny the matter. Coincidence? Surely this is an unintentional error and they will get round to it this week.
Álvaro Nieto
Journalist