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JAMES LILLIN
Staff Writer
On April 12, the final Brown Bag lecture of the year took place in the Williams Center, featuring communications professor Mike Igoe and computer science professor Michael Scialdone, both choosing to tackle the rise in fake news and media bias.
“I decided to talk about ‘Fake News and You’ because it’s a topic that’s very close to my heart,” said Igoe, as he started his presentation. “I want to thank Donald Trump at the start, Donald Trump has given me many, many teachable moments.”
Igoe proceeded to list a litany of “Trump-isms,” including “alternative facts” and “fake news,” expressing frustration at what seemed to him to be the waning importance of reality.
“At first I was pretty aggravated by it, but when I saw the reactions of my students I wasn’t as bothered by it,” said Igoe.
Igoe has seen a substantial rise in attendance in his public speaking course since the 2016 election and notes a renewed interest among students to make a difference, eager to learn from Igoe’s long career as a journalist and television personality.
“When I was a young journalist I was told very much, ‘Don’t put your opinion in the story,’ but then Fox News came along to change the equation,” said Igoe. “But to quote Theodore Roosevelt: ‘To announce that there should be no criticism of the president is morally treasonable to the American public.’”
Igoe noted that the power of the media to incite huge change is not new, citing the yellow-journalism tinged feud between rival newspaper publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer which lead to the Spanish-American War. He also explained that fake news stories were not new and that older newspapers like the New York Sun published lies about newly discovered life on the moon as far back as 1835.
“The supposed wonders of the moon included beavers that walk on two feet and ‘man-bats,’ really interesting stuff in 1835,” said Igoe.
He linked the history of the New York Sun to a personal anecdote of his younger days working as a newspaper salesman involving one particular customer who would buy a stack of copies of the National Enquirer everyday.
“I looked at him and said, ‘How could you buy all this stuff?’” said Igoe. “He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘They couldn’t publish it if it wasn’t true.’”
Igoe ended his presentation by talking about his “three Cs” for dealing with fake news.
“Be curious, be cautious and cut ‘em off,” said Igoe. “If you start sharing stuff, often times it prolongs the problems.”
Scialdone’s lecture dealt primarily with identifying the complexities of online communication and information gathering, using the online radio service Pandora as an example.
“With Pandora’s complex feedback algorithms, it makes intelligent decisions based on what you like and dislike,” said Scialdone. “Some of my best friends can’t predict my music taste, but Pandora seems to get it every time. I keep coming back, I keep engaging with it.”
Scialdone dived into examples of online “affordance,” or the meaning that an image signifies across different platforms. He noted that an emoji that appears to be a grimace on Apple devices can look to be a huge smile on others, creating significant confusion in meaning. He proceeded to connect this to the ways different news sites process different stories, showing two different headlines for the same story.
“Look at this from CNN: ‘Benghazi Panel: No Bombshell, But Faults the Administration,’” said Scialdone. “But then there’s Fox, with ‘DAMNING REPORT’ in bold with frowning pictures of Obama and Clinton.”
Scialdone noted that not only can social media enhance these biases, but can profit off of them, with Facebook earning $62 a year on average from advertising revenue of American users.
“Facebook is doing the same thing with the sorts of suggested news stories as they do with advertisements,” said Scialdone. “Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, all do it too. It helps reinforce what we’re interested in and what we already know, reflecting our own biases. Advertisers on Facebook can even discriminate by race on who can see their advertisements.”
Scialdone ended his presentation by drawing a connection between social media and Pandora, highlighting the similarities and dangers.
“This is what I refer to as the Pandora effect,” said Scialdone. “I keep coming back, and it feels awesome, but in social media our perception of events, what we like and how we see the world is being determined by similar algorithms.”
During a Q&A session after the presentation, Igoe and Scialdone were asked if there was any way to combat fake news.
“There’s really no way to combat it, just to make yourself more aware,” said Igoe. “You’re never going to stop it. The fingers are out of the dike, the horses are already out of the barn.”
“If I may add to that, I think some of the folks consuming fake news actually don’t care,” said Scialdone. “It takes effort to debunk, and it confirms [our worldviews], so I think we’re in trouble with fake news for reasons such as that.”