Unravelling the web of fake news, misinformation and polarised politics

Don’t let the media steer your priorities this year.

As we enter another calendar year (albeit on the Roman rather than the biblical calendar), what will be the central focus of our attention as a society, and as individuals? A delayed vote on the Brexit ‘deal’? Concerns over immigration? Climate change? The fortunes of our favourite sporting team? The next TV cooking competition?

We can be sure that the news media will be full of their own top priorities, all shouting loudly to draw our attention. Three days after Christmas, I ran a search on the name ‘Jesus’ on the BBC website. Among a multitude of news items, sporting fixtures and scores, entertainment, travel and so on, apart from a small amount of archived material, Jesus was barely mentioned: a late-night Christmas Day programme, an early morning Sunday radio show, and an upcoming Daily Service on 14 January. Nowhere else.

Yet, unless Jesus is at the centre of all that we think and do, our focus will be out of balance and our priorities skewed more towards worldly affairs and opinions than we might realise. In this fast-paced, media-driven culture we must be careful to check our priorities, even as Christians - that would be a good new year resolution for all of us!

Check Your Sources!

Personally, I have become more concerned than ever about the way the media focusses our attentions and dictates our concerns. We can be beguiled into thinking that the latest BBC news headline is the key issue in the world. But the choices of news editors can blinker us away from what might be God's priorities.

When I was a child I was brought up in a working class family and worked with my father on building sites, where I am glad to have come into contact with many ‘ordinary’ folk. I was impressed by the depth of understanding that they seemed to have of political affairs, debated hotly in the tea and lunch breaks. It was only in later years that I smiled when I realised that most were only expressing the opinions that they read in their daily papers, such as the Daily Mirror. Many of these workmen had their choice of newspaper in their pocket as they went to work.

Unless Jesus is at the centre of all that we think and do, our focus will be out of balance and our priorities skewed more towards worldly affairs and opinions than we might realise.

In conversations I have had this Christmas break, I was struck again by the way opinions across all social classes are still formed by the media. It was standard media opinions and the arguments of charismatic media personalities that were used by my non-believing friends to defend evolution against creationism, or LGBTQ+ ‘rights’, or to debate questions of our membership of the EU, or President Trump, Theresa May and so on.

"Check your sources!" is my constant cry against arguments that are too often based on no solid foundations. Certainly the mainstream media is not usually a primary source of truth, even if it is a primary source for opinion.

Steering Public Opinion

I read Andrew Marr's book, My Trade, recently and this confirmed my view of much corruption in the news industry: always seeking a headline (whether true, part-true or contrived) in order to make sales. Fake news is a new term, but it is not a new issue. Fake news or biased news reporting has permeated news media from its inception.

Not all is bad and rotting of course, but overall, the general public is often faced with a variety of selected ‘news’ stories that they cannot check and which are cleverly contrived to steer their opinion in a certain direction.

What we witness in the public arena is a power struggle for who shall govern our nation. The media has a legitimate place to hold politicians to account, but it has become a manipulating power that often weakens government instead of strengthening it. This adds daily to the corruption which is all around us - a corruption that is deepening because Jesus – the Truth - is no longer the central focus in our nation.

Generation Gap

Young people are not always as beguiled as older generations by what they see in the news arena. They have grown up in a world where you can no longer believe what you see. I discovered this from other conversations that I had this holiday season. These conversations made me wonder whether I really understand our younger generation who, through their own interactive and online communities, seem to be separating themselves away from a failing world.

The mainstream media is not usually a primary source of truth, even if it is a primary source for opinion.

The up-side is that many young people are thinkers. The down-side is that they are vulnerable and susceptible due to our cultural drift away from the Gospel message (which many young people have never heard). The nation is ripe for a youth-led revolution: but whether an uprising or a revival - it could go either way.

Jesus at the Centre

My challenge for 2019, therefore, is for us who know him to bring Jesus fully into the centre of our lives once more: to see things as he sees them and not according to worldly agendas that make no reference to him.

The Bible speaks so often, though sometimes in mysteries to be understood through prayer, about the days in which we live - days like the days of Noah or of Sodom and Gomorrah - days leading up to the return of Jesus, on which we need to be focussed more and more.

Perhaps, if Christians were to strengthen their focus on our Lord, then he may be gracious enough to revive us once more and through us speak truth to this needful generation. The days are urgent.

Negotiating an age of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts'. 

Why do politicians find it so hard to tell the truth – the plain, simple and unvarnished truth? I was sad to see our Prime Minister refuse to answer a simple question this week as to whether or not she knew about the failure of the test firing of an unarmed rocket from the Trident submarine when the issue of renewing the weapon system was being debated in the Commons last summer.

Four times she was asked and four times she made little speeches, but dodged the question. She did not tell a direct lie; she simply refused to tell the truth.

It sometimes seems as though politicians have a different definition of ‘truth’. Donald Trump, during his first week in office, has striven to convince the public that he is more popular than Hillary Clinton who gained 3 million more votes than he did. He said this week that he didn’t try to win the ‘popular vote’ but he could have won it if he had tried! Trump also claimed that Clinton’s vote was inflated by fraudulent voting, for which there is no evidence – but that doesn’t seem to matter to him.

Aerial photographs of crowds at the Obama (top) and Trump (bottom) inaugurations. Crowd sizes have been disputed by Trump.‘Alternative Facts’

Trump’s spin doctor lambasted the press for reporting that the crowd attending the inauguration was not as great as the one attending Obama’s inauguration, despite the evidence of TV pictures and photographs, which Trump said were doctored.

Trump’s team also contested the truth of the vast crowd that demonstrated against his inauguration last Sunday. They invented a new term for truth – ‘alternative facts’! Just think of that as a definition of ‘truth’ – surely facts are facts and ‘alternative facts’ are lies! It’s as simple as that: you either have facts or lies.

May Vs. Trump

Donald Trump and Theresa May are meeting today for the first time in an historic encounter. Trump has already likened Mrs May to Margaret Thatcher, saying that he expects her to be his ‘Maggie’. He is the kind of man who prides himself on his female conquests and this meeting will be a particular challenge that he will be desperate to win. He will be wanting our PM to like him! But how will she respond?

Perhaps an even bigger question is – can Theresa May tell the truth to Donald Trump? He has announced that he is quite happy for American security services to use torture to obtain information from men suspected of being involved in terrorism. But this is directly against our national values.

It sometimes seems as though politicians have a different definition of 'truth'.

Moreover, our legal system would not allow the use of information in a trial that had been obtained under torture. It could mean that US and UK security services would be unable to share information on security issues affecting our nations. So, should Theresa May, on her first visit to the new President, jeopardise their relationship by not telling him the truth about British values?

These are difficult areas of moral responsibility for politicians to handle and our PM is going to require a great deal of wisdom. So much depends upon the importance the respective leaders put upon handling truth.

Great Battle Raging

What we’re seeing here is indicative of a great battle for truth raging right across the Western world. Another example of this is fake news deliberately being injected into the media. There is nothing new in the attempt to deceive the public with false information and by twisting the truth. It was the technique used by Joseph Goebbels who masterminded the Nazi brainwashing of the German public to make the murder of Jews socially acceptable.

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, when we remember the greatest act of mass murder in the history of the world, which happened in the lifetime of many still living. Many in the older generation will remember the sense of bewilderment as well as horror when the first pictures were published of the survivors in Auschwitz when Germany was defeated. It seemed beyond belief that such incredible mass murder and cruelty could have been carried out by human beings in our lifetime. Gradually it emerged that it was not only Germans who were involved; most of Europe was complicit in trying to exterminate the Jews.

There is a great battle for truth raging right across the Western world.

The rise of anti-Semitism today in Europe and across the world, which includes the increasing denial of the Holocaust, is part of the battle for truth. It is part of humanity’s self-delusion about our own goodness and popularity which millions of young people are seduced into worshipping through social media. It’s like Donald Trump trying to convince himself that he is the most popular President the USA has ever had! Why are we human beings so reluctant to face the truth about ourselves?

Defining Truth?

To answer this question, we must first ask: where do we get our definition of ‘truth’? In countries such as Britain with a long history of Christianity, our social and moral values are rooted in the Bible where truth, integrity, faithfulness and loyalty are seen to be attributes of God. These define the standard of ‘absolutes’, or fundament values, which we aim to follow.
In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus made a seminal statement regarding truth. He said:

Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God. (John 3:19)

This applies to nations as well as to individuals. There is really only one standard of truth and that is the one established by the God of Creation which is part of his own nature. When ‘alternative facts’ are peddled as ‘truth’ in a nation; that nation is in dire trouble because nobody can trust the word of their neighbours, friends, family, colleagues, or government any longer. So, the whole basis of our human relationships begins to break down. This is what we face once we abandon truth.

Holocaust Memorial Day is an opportunity to face the reality of our unredeemed human nature and admit that we really need what only God can do for us – to bring about a basic change in our human nature through responding to his love and what he has done for us through Jesus.

There is a really only one standard of truth and that is the one established by the God of Creation.