Why fake news sells better than traditional news

I want to be that optimistic. Optimism requires a generous assessment of humanity and a trust in human beings' basic sense of fairness and justice. Some days I can achieve it.

By chance, I just finished reading Numero Zero, a satirical novel about the Italian media by the best-selling author Umberto Eco. It portrays a group of hard-bitten, hard-up newspaper hacks hired by a multimillionaire to launch a newspaper that will predict future events. The time period was 1992, when Italy was in the midst of a huge political corruption scandal.

Eco treated readers to editorial staff meetings in which the publisher encouraged journalists to write stories that insinuated, manipulated, equivocated, twisted, distorted, and outright lied about known facts to achieve business and political ends.

All of the half-dozen journalists on staff were up to the task, as they had plenty of experience cocking up stories built on labyrinthine conspiracy theories. Wicked stuff, but uncomfortably close to the truth about the way media operate.

I laughed at the truth I could see in Eco's novel, but I was hoping that the optimistic folks at Reuters had it right, that humanity would ultimately redeem itself and actively search for the truth. The only way to help that along is to find ways to produce the highest quality journalism and do all in our power to see that it becomes part of the public discourse.

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