A few days ago, I saw a buddy on Facebook post a piece of blatantly false news. It came from World News Daily Report, a site I’d previously visited. I checked the site’s Wikipedia entry and found that it was described as in Tel Aviv [discuss] that claims to be an American Jewish Zionist newspaper but is actually satirical and dedicated to reporting news and happenings from across the world in a ridiculous manner.
According to the Buzzfeed report, the website’s owner was named Janick Murray-Hall. Even the description of the site itself was a red herring, possibly with some strange political or racist connotations.. There was no shortage of bogus political headlines on Janick Murray-World Hall’s News Daily Report: “ISIS Leader Calls for American Muslim Voters to Support Hillary Clinton” and “Morgue Worker Arrested After Giving Birth To A Dead Man’s Baby” were among the five hits in the top 50.
One of his other sites, the Journal de Mourréal, is the top Google hit when searching for Mr. Murray-Hall. This site tries to mimic and ridicule the real Journal de Montréal. Although Murray-Hall is referred to as Bob Flanagan in this piece, a search for that name will turn up nothing of value. In a French-language investigation of fake news, a friend of Murray-Hall and co-founder of JdM and WNDR, Olivier Legault, was interviewed. The Wikipedia page for the WNDR was bolstered by this additional source.
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The World News Daily Report is their website
These “humorists” were tearing their shirts off to protect the Journal de Mourréal, as well as their freedom of speech and the right to satire in general, while our two friends were busy spreading lies and hoaxes over the English-language web, says the article’s author. The World News Daily Report is their other website (WNDR). Laughter or satire is not to be found here. ‘This is a complete hoax, a smear campaign.’
It’s all for a good cause, in that it’s a way of exposing people to their own shortcomings, he said. Legault replies that if people choose to believe something, it’s their problem essentially when they’re pressed about how many people won’t think hard enough to notice even obvious hoaxes. It’s only people who want to take it seriously that take it seriously,” he said. It’s a silly thing to say, but…. We want to bring in new members through preaching the gospel. It’s a joke for the most part, but some people spread it because they want to believe it, not because they actually believe it.
Later, Legault admits to being disturbed by how easily people are led to believe anything, saying: It’s possible to invent anything and have people believe it..” When you realise that, it’s a little unnerving. What people want to think will be shared as long as you confirm it. They’ll assume it’s fake news if you say anything that contradicts what they believe. They’ll give their views right away if you follow their lead. Critical thinking goes out the window.”
Journalism students should use this workflow to learn how to conduct internet research and to have a place to publish and collect fresh information as soon as it is discovered. When it comes to learning how to use Wikipedia, I see no reason why journalism students shouldn’t do this kind of practice.
WNDR Wikipedia page
Exploiting people’s stereotypes and lazy assumptions has a number of problems, not the least of which is the fact that many of these assumptions are founded on racist, xenophobic, or misogynistic conceptions of the world. Finally, Legault says that he has a copy of a Quebec magazine that reprinted one of his stories as proof that they are true. As far as I know, Legault does not believe that he is promoting people’s self-criticism, but rather exploiting people’s lack of it.
However, these sources should be included on the WNDR Wikipedia page in order to enhance the resource and make it easier for visitors to recognize the site as a place dedicated to exploiting the confirmation biases of people who don’t think too hard about the news they produce. WNDR Aesthetically and narratively, WNDR resembles ‘Weekly World News,’ a paranormal news publication included in the Fake News exhibition at the Bradford Science and Media Museum, where I just interviewed curator John O’Shea. While this periodical exploited people’s beliefs to gain money, it also acknowledged that it was a hoax at times.
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As a journalist, you can help Wikipedia by adding references and fresh material to articles like this one when you come across information that Wikipedia does not have. Wikipedia and real journalism both aim to improve people’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction, and I believe that they complement each other in key ways.
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Our notion that humans are rational actors and that we are patronizing them if we claim they are too easily exploited has been shattered by reading Daniel Kahneman’s book on cognitive biases, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” A thousand distinct rules of thumb are employed by people’s brains to limit the amount of mental effort they have to put in. This carelessness is exploited by Fake News, like many other psychological strategies, and it doesn’t care because it’s profiting from it.
Society and political systems are at risk from this and we must provide people with the means of seeing it when they are being taken advantage of. It was via the process of using Wikipedia as a starting point for my study that I was able to fill in the gaps in the content on the page and create a repository for the new knowledge I learned through internet research. While doing my own research and learning new things along the way, I was able to design a routine that allowed me to return to the Wikipedia page and simply share my findings with others.
