Palisadians Sniff Out ‘Fake News’

By CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA | Reporter

Close to 80 Palisadians filled Palisades Branch Library meeting room on Tuesday, May 8, for the “Fake News: And The Modern Consumer” panel discussion led by Maryam Zar, Pacific Palisades Community Council chair.

Joining her at the table was John Harlow, editor-in-chief at the Palisadian-Post, Bill Bruns, editorial advisor to Palisades News, and Terry McCarthy, president and CEO of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.

Each panelist elaborated on the toxic and wildfire-like spreading of misinformation and how readers can distinguish real information from the manipulation of facts.

To set it aside from previous media scandals, or past political candidates sense of “truthiness” or righteous gut instinct about facts, Harlow tried to define fake news.

It was, he said, “Russia’s internet-based sustained campaign of political falsehoods calculated to weaken Western confidence in its institution for its own geopolitical advantage.”

Bruns pointed out the United States has produced its own home-grown fake news machines, creating, for instance, bogus endorsements for political candidates in Arizona.

“These days we get a glut of information over the internet … and so just as long as people are able to churn out content it seems like the veracity of the content has become secondary,” said Zar, a former foreign correspondent and contributor to Huffington Post.

“That probably, essentially, is the reason why we’re faced with the challenge we are today, which is that we’re not really sure if what we’re reading is accurate or not.”

McCarthy turned the spotlight on Russian media: “They sit in these troll factories in Moscow or Saint Petersburg and jam people’s inboxes here in the U.S. They’re smart enough to understand which buttons to push,” he said. “They’re very big on race issues and people get very upset about race issues here and the Russians understand that.”

The former foreign correspondent for ABC news further pointed out the importance of understanding the difference between fake news like the Pizzagate scandal—a fake story alleging a pizza store in Washington, D.C., of human trafficking—and biased news that take real facts out of context. Or even old-fashioned errors.

Harlow mused that even after a man shot up the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor and learned no abused children were being held there, the shooter still believed that “something” had happened there—a mindset that is resistant to adapting to facts if they clash with a pre-set world view.

And that could apply to both conservatives and liberals.

As the panelists took questions from the audience, it was clear that Palisadians actively involved in taking the required “fact checking”—using alternative sites and resources to source and verify digital screeds, which sound like they could be true, but still smell “off”—to stem the lies.