Oprah Winfrey's Powerful Attack on Fake News

Oprah Winfrey Medal of Freedom

I'll try to write a fuller analysis later. But note Oprah Winfrey's commencement speech about fake news. She told students graduating from the University of Southern California's famous Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism that, "You can answer false narratives with real information and you can set the record straight."

Let's take a moment to say what fake news is. Fake news is produced by persons or agencies who have little or no information-gathering staff or capabilities, and who simply invent stories out of thin air. Some of them were just run by teenagers in an apartment. Some of them were Russian troll farms. One Russian computer troll even explained the entire process.

Fake news agencies sometimes call themselves satire sites in the (very) fine print. The defunct National Report was an example. Sadly, many readers believe the nonsense that fake news sites print. Just as bad, many, maybe most, people think that real news is fake, probably because they have no interest in the truth.

Now, what is not fake news? A reporter who makes an honest mistake is not producing fake news, although he or she is making a mistake. Such a reporter is obligated to issue a correction as soon as possible, and most of them do, but that is something different from fake news.

Similarly, a news story that President Trump doesn't like is not fake news. It's just news that he doesn't like.

That doesn't mean that I defend incorrect news. Wrong news reports are bad. But the problem of fake news, which is fabricated from nothing, is so serious that we should never, ever call anything else by the same news.

Today, news is under attack for several reasons. One is that powerful people, like Mr. Trump (and many others) don't want to face criticism. If they make a mistake, they don't want it reported. And so they criticize the people who report news that they dislike.

Another reason that news is under attack is that much news is highly political. News with a political slant sometimes lacks credibility, but it's not fake news. It's slanted news, which is also bad, but in a different way. There is nothing new about this; a hundred years ago, the Cleveland Plain Dealer was a liberal Democratic paper, and their neighbor, the Akron Beacon and Republican was, well, you can figure it out. Today, you can watch Fox News or MSNBC or RT or CBN for hours and still be poorly informed--because you'll only have heard one viewpoint. That's why good social studies teachers always urge their students to get their news from more than one source.

The graduates to whom Winfrey spoke are going into a battle where their readers will often prefer falsehoods to truth. So be it. Such is the sad state of fallen humanity. But she was wise to give a speech to them, and to tell them to stand for truth.

Truth is not necessarily the human condition. We need to fight for it. Winfrey's speech was important, and to express values like this is one of the best reasons to give a speech.  That is why she said, "the sniping at one another, the trolling, the mean-spirited partisanship on both sides of the aisle, the divisiveness, the injustices, the out-and-out hatred." Good for her.

Image: Oprah Winfrey receiving Medal of Freedom, White House Photo, 2013