Category Archives: Fake News

Amitava Kumars new novel, A Time Outside This Time," often feels like something other than a novel. The narrator, Satya, is a professor and writer very much like Kumar, though we never get to read his new novel, Enemies of the People, based on the many untrue stories that surround us and threaten to destroy us.

Kumars book doesnt quite fit into the booming category of autofiction, in which authors including Olivia Laing, Jenny Offill, Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard transfer their own lives and often their own names to autobiographical fiction.

Its not just that Kumar differentiates his protagonist with a fictional name and fictional novels, but that he largely forsakes plot, spending more time melding journalism into his work. Time is suffused with his musings on where fiction fits into our brave new world of truth and lies. I use what is called real life to craft my fiction, he says. How is it different from fake news?

Kumar, 58, came from India in the 1980s as a student; he is the author of more than a dozen books, fiction and nonfiction, including the novel Immigrant, Montana, and an English professor at Vassar College.

Theres a fraudulence to the traditional novel, Kumar says. So I share with the reader that theres art in this artifice and vice versa. I was trying to make my writing feel as fresh as blood on a bandage.

Satya is fictional but contemplates real events, from Donald Trumps lies to killings in India. He also frequently cites experiments he has learned about from his wife, a psychologist.

My editor said, I want to meet your wife," Kumar says with a laugh. "But shes not real. Im married but not to Vanni.

When Satya references Barack Obama quoting Ernest Hemingway and the importance of writing one true sentence, its both sincere and a feint. Even Kumar slips up during our video interview, saying, I Sorry, the narrator before admitting the line dividing them can feel quite fine at points.

Story continues

One similarity between Kumar and Satya is clear: They agree that A novel is better than the news. He spoke with The Times about technology, Trump and truth; our conversation has been edited.

The lies and rumors, what you call bad fiction from governments, gains more traction through social media. How responsible is, say, Facebook, for the spread of these falsehoods and their consequences?

I quote a study that says whenever theres a blackout and Facebook is not available theres a lower possibility of riots taking place. And WhatsApp is a Facebook-owned company and dangerous rumors and political falsehoods are spread so quickly using WhatsApp in India. Its the main purveyor of fake news.

I think we should hold these corporations accountable. Why has there not been a systematic interrogation of the norms that have determined that this app can become a conduit for murder the very technology allowing me to see and talk to you right now could be responsible for us getting killed.

Is it just the technology or is it also human nature?

Social media does make things worse, but human nature is worse than social media. [Another cited study found] that bots spread fake news at the same rate as they do true news, but human beings spread fake news six times faster than true news. Thats astonishing. An MIT researcher wrote to me to explain, Fake news is novel. Im like, Yo man, that word is for what I do.

Much of your book recounts true or at least real-life incidents of ethnic or religious violence and government lies. The studies you cite are also real. Why did you feel you needed to mix journalism and fiction to get at the truth?

I read a novel by Olivia Laing called "Crudo." While someone is getting married a character looks at their phone and says, "Steve Bannon has resigned." I thought, "Thats the world were living in." Theres a massive assault of information, the world is coming at you so fast and in such crazy ways that I must think about how we search for some sort of order in this chaos.

I hope my book inspires people to ask, What is fiction? and Why are your lies and propaganda not fiction but this book is fiction?

Your narrator tells the reader, I cannot change your mind. If you cannot change peoples minds, why write?

No, I cant change your mind, but I want you to know that there is a book. The names and the stories of the dead are in here. Every one of those stories is real and they are written down and will not be forgotten. Writing allows me to keep a record that brings some order to this incredible chaos and allows us to remember, because its not just attention spans it is memory being wiped out by a continuous deluge of information. Writing becomes a way for me to slow-jam the world.

Why is slowing things down important?

I forget the name of the person who was killed three days ago because I remember only the name of the person who was killed yesterday, and I will forget this guys name because tomorrow there will be another killing. My book becomes a way of remembering.

Can a novel at least help readers understand their own biases? Or are the people who are unwilling to open their minds not reading a novel like this anyway?

I cite an experiment in the book [in which] older people who were given plants to take care of did better and lived longer than those who were given plants but told the attendants would take care of them. Its about being engaged or passive.

If people would write a log every day while they read this book, would the quality of their engagement change? Would we have slowed things down enough for them to think? And if they did that instead of passively watching fake news? In the spirit of the book, I do think it would work.

Tell me one true sentence.

[Laughs.] At the end of the book, I wrote, A lot of life is left in a man being killed before I tell the story of a man lynched in India. The first anniversary of a lynching was coming up and I thought Id write something about him, just to remind people what happened.

The most depressing thing for me is watching these videos of Black men being killed by the police or in India the lynching of people who are rumored to have eaten beef.

The sentence is about the human being erased in that moment.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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A writer of true fictions on social media, fake news and 'slow-jamming' the world - Yahoo News

Facebook is the platform with the biggest problem when it comes to disinformation and fake news, a European Union-wide survey has found, but it is also the platform identified by respondents as the one they most often use.

The survey was conducted as part of a new project involving seven European civil society organisations including the Irish group Tasc that aims to counter Euroskepticism and the creation of distrust by way of disinformation.

The survey found that 55 per cent of respondents had voted in the most recent European Parliament elections, and that a similar percentage felt that the impact of the EU had been positive.

Only eight per cent of respondents felt the union had had a negative impact, with 25 per cent feeling its impact had been both positive and negative.

Facebook was the medium most regularly accessed for information, being cited by 68 per cent of respondents to a question that allowed for the identification of multiple platforms.

Digital newspapers were second (67 per cent), followed by television (61 per cent), Instagram (60 per cent), and YouTube (56 per cent).

Print newspapers and Snapchat came in at 11 per cent, and other forums such as Reddit, at 8 per cent.

When asked what platforms they believed had a problem with disinformation, Facebook, at more than 80 per cent, came substantially ahead of Instagram and Twitter, both at slightly more than 50 per cent.

Next came television, digital newspapers, YouTube, TikTok and online blogs, all of which were in the 40 to 50 per cent range.

Almost sixty per cent of respondents felt that the EU is under threat, with 20 per cent feeling it wasnt, and a similar figure saying they didnt know.

Nationalism and detachment from European institutions was identified by almost 30 per cent as the biggest threat, with slightly less than ten per cent identifying immigration.

During a presentation in Dublin on Thursday, representatives from groups in Italy and Greece noted that in their countries only eight per cent and five per cent, respectively, of respondents cited immigration as the main danger facing the EU.

Across all countries, 73 per cent of respondents said they felt privileged to be a citizen of the union.

The survey had 989 respondents, was conducted online, and was distributed through the civil societies involved in the EU-funded CommEUnication Youth Engagement for Communicating the EU.

The average survey respondent was 26 years old, and the education level of those who responded was very high 40 per cent had a bachelors degree or diploma, 28 per cent had a masters degree, and 25 per cent were in university, the Dublin presentation heard.

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Facebook is platform with biggest fake news problem, survey respondents say - The Irish Times

Auto Expert John Cadogan has unloaded on the Mainstream Media for betraying the public with fake news:

Heres the money quote:

This subversion of the news happens in the nightly news and the mainstream media more generally. Like Gerry Harvey huge advertiser, right? He could therefore probably go out and sponsor the fricken Taliban or sell the shitsville harbour bridge to the Chinese and throw in the Opera House for all we care. And thered be a complete absence of fake news media criticism.

Im pointing to the depth of comment control in play under the big top in the media

This really is an informational cancer, where the facts dont matter and the vested interests do

I was attacked yesterday by some subscribers for airing similar grievances from independent journalists Avi Yemini and Rukshan Fernando.

Lets get real. Independent outlets like Michael West, Real Jordies and MB only exist because the MSM has turned into swill.

Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.

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Why the MSM betrayed you with fake news - MacroBusiness

I use what is called real life to craft my fiction. How is it different from fake news? Novelists with a great gift of imagination have invented situations, often quite simple and uncomplicated ones, that you can never rid from your mind: a family undertaking a long, tortuous journey with the corpse of a family member in a coffin to the dead womans hometown (William Faulkners As I Lay Dying); two men on a train, each one wanting to kill someone, propose that they exchange murders and thereby have an alibi (Patricia Highsmiths Strangers on a Train); a woman is on her way to buy flowers for a party she will host that night (Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway); a young man arriving in a city to collect his fathers ashes and going on a drug rampage that sends him into a nightmarish spiral (Edward St Aubyns Bad News).

During his last week in office in January 2017, President Barack Obama gave an interview to a book critic from The New York Times. Obama told the interviewer that his daughter Malia had read Ernest Hemingways A Moveable Feast and was captivated by the writer describing his goal of writing one true thing every day. (All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.) When I read the interview, Trump had been president for two days, and I think the idea for this book was born then.

I began keeping a daily journal, but instead of writing the truest sentence, I noted down a revealing lie. The US president was lying every day but falsehoods, I noted, could be from anywhere in the world. Heres one from my country of birth, India: In the days prior to his retirement from the Rajasthan High Court, Justice Mahesh Chandra Sharma said that the cow should be declared the national animal of India because hundreds of millions of gods and goddesses lived in that sacred animal. The cow is the only creature, the judge opined, that takes in oxygen and also emits oxygen. He also extolled the virtues of cow urine.

The other day a friend posted a few lines from a poem by the radical Hindi poet Gorakh Pandey on Facebook. He was aiming to describe the situation in India under Narendra Modi. I read the extract and that same morning sat down to translate it. In my writing journal, I noted in the margin that this extract could serve as my novels epigraph:

King said it is night, Queen said it is night, Minister said it is night, Guard said it is night. This happened right This morning!

What is the opposite of a rumour?

A scientific fact, of course.

But once you start thinking of rumours as stories, which they are, it becomes clear that accounts offered by scientists about their experiments are also stories.

One researcher publishes a study showing that chimps will eat food given to them and not necessarily want to share it with other chimps, and therefore we should conclude that we are born selfish; a different researcher finds that chimps will help other chimps open a door even when they themselves cannot see the bananas strategically placed on the far side. Those inclined to engage in further storytelling go on to say something about the presence or absence of altruism across the species.

We are always telling stories. Because we deal only with stories, in literature, in history, or in science, the simple distinction between truth and lies is a naive one. Any story ought to be surrounded with other questions. Whose story is it? What ends does it serve? Does it affirm or contradict other stories?

But till that happens I want to ask scientists to clarify one thing.

On the BBC show Top Gear, a discussion about driverless cars led to conversation about an experiment that was supposedly about self-preservation. You can watch this episode on YouTube. Jeremy Clarkson, the shows host, says that scientists conducted an awful experiment in which they put monkeys and their babies in a box and heated the floor. When the heat became unbearable, all the monkeys picked up their babies and held them in their arms. But when the floor got hotter, till it was absolutely unbearable, the monkeys put the babies down and stood on them.

I have a few questions.

The main one is: Did it really happen, this experiment? Where and when?

These are perhaps silly questions. But they remind us that there are many ways to respond to a story. And I havent yet processed what the uproarious laughter of the studio audience meant when Clarkson was done telling his story about the monkey experiment.

I also want to pose a more important question: Did all the adult monkeys act in unison, picking up or putting down their babies as one body?

Were there those or, for that matter, just one that changed their minds?

Or hesitated just a bit, looking at the other monkeys, with bewildered gray-brown eyes? Or, if you allow me to be sentimental for half a second, did an adult monkey, after standing on her baby for maybe a minute, pick it up to offer comfort? And, before putting it down again if indeed all of this even happened give the doomed baby a last kiss?

Loud fans in places such as Cincinnati, Ohio, or Des Moines, Iowa, or Mobile, Alabama, had found the freedom to behave like frat boys on a Friday night. Republicans were greeted with chants of USA! USA! There was a spike in assaults against Blacks and Muslims and others who, to Trump loyalists, looked like outsiders. The Womens March took place in Washington, D.C., on January 21, the largest single-day protest in the nations history. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) declared its readiness to challenge Trumps executive orders and witnessed a spike in membership as well as donations.

The New York Times published an ad to highlight the fight over truth, which ended with the words the truth is more important now than ever. The online Merriam-Webster dictionary also took up the good fight; after Trump aide Kellyanne Conway described false statements as alternative facts, Merriam-Webster sent out the following tweet: A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality. (On January 22, 2017, when I saw that tweet, it had been liked 55,914 times.)

One of the residents at the villa is a filmmaker from Connecticut. Her name is LeeAnn Wendell. She shared a bit of her work with us last week, and I got from her this quote that came from Pier Paolo Pasolini: I dont believe we shall ever again have any form of society in which men will be free. One should not hope for it. One should not hope for anything. Hope is invented by politicians to keep the electorate happy.

I wrote down Pasolinis words because I imagined my editor asking me a question when I sent in the manuscript. Whats your point? I plan to quote Pasolini and say, Point? I dont have a point. No uplifting message certainly. We are fucked.

(The residency was shut down when dire reports began to come of the deaths from a new virus. I left and later learned that one of the staff was an early casualty. I had missed an opportunity. There was a researcher there who chattered gaily in Italian with the waitstaff. Her name was Anna Duranti. Her collaborator was a very polite, very serious Chinese social scientist named Li Qinglian. The duo was examining the carbon footprint of fashion in two cities in China, one on the coast and one inland. Li stayed silent during meals unless addressed directly, to which she responded with a monosyllable and an apologetic smile, but Anna could be heard saying things like Did you know that in order to produce a cotton shirt, up to 2,700 liters of water are needed? That is exactly what I overheard her ask and she laughed when I made her repeat it so that I could write it down. Trump would go on to call it the Chinese virus and the kung flu. In India, the Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare would say that if people took the step of absorbing the suns rays for ten to fifteen minutes between 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., they would build immunity. The Indian newspapers carrying this statement mentioned a BBC report that cited experts who said that exposure to the sun is completely ineffective against the virus.)

Excerpted with permission from A Time Outside This Time, Amitava Kumar, Aleph Book Company.

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What have fake news and lies got to do with Amitava Kumars new novel? Everything - Scroll.in

Syracuse University Professor Jennifer Stromer-Galley has been studying social media before it was called social media. Five years ago, she laid out a simple three-point plan to help stem the tide of misinformation on Facebook. Today, those three recommendations remain relevant after a former Facebook employee revealed internal documents that indicate the company was lying about its progress against hate, violence and misinformation on its platform.

Stromer-Galleys plan, outlined in the piece Three ways Facebook could reduce fake news without resorting tocensorship and published by The Conversation, had these three recommendations to fight misinformation.

Option 1: Nudging

One option Facebook could adopt involves using existing lists identifying prescreened reliable andfake-news sites. The site could then alert those who want to share a troublesome article that its source is questionable.

Option 2: Crowdsourcing

Facebook could also use the power of crowdsourcing to help evaluate news sources and indicate when news that is being shared has been evaluated and rated. One important challenge with fake news is that it plays to how our brains are wired. We have mental shortcuts, calledcognitive biases, that help us make decisions when we dont have quite enough information (we never do), or quite enough time (we never do). Generally, these shortcuts work well for us as we make decisions on everything from which route to drive to work to what car to buy But, occasionally, they fail us. Falling for fake news is one of those instances.

Option 3: Algorithmic social distance

The third way that Facebook could help would be to reduce the algorithmic bias that presently exists in Facebook. The site primarily shows posts from those with whom you have engaged on Facebook. In other words, the Facebook algorithm creates what some have called afilter bubble, an online news phenomenon that hasconcerned scholarsfor decades now. If you are exposed only to people with ideas that are like your own, it leads topolitical polarization: Liberals get even more extreme in their liberalism, and conservatives get more conservative.

To schedule an interview with Professor Stromer-Galley, please contact Ellen James Mbuqe, director of media relations at Syracuse University, at ejmbuqe@syr.edu or 412-496-0551.

Stromer-Galley is the author of Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age and chief investigator for Illuminating 2020, a website dedicated to helping journalists cover US political campaigns. The website provides an interactive database for easy and quick tracking of what candidates are saying on Facebook and Twitter through campaign accounts and paid ads. She is also the Senior Associate Dean for Academic and Faculty Affairs, and Director for the Center for Computational and Data Science at Syracuse Universitys iSchool.

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How to stop misinformation on social media - Syracuse University News

Ive been contemplating for a long time the disconnect between news outlets and their audiences/readers.

You know, this is the whole Fake News thing and mistrust of the media.

Ive taken a stab at explaining how this paper, particularly, approaches news reporting versus the publics understanding usually misunderstanding of the purpose and meaning of what they read.

Its not been easy to write about this topic, despite my deep concern about it. People are reading things and it is eliciting a reaction different from what was intended. People are reading a news report and getting riled up because they think the news outlet is trying to tell them something they dont think is true.

The media reports that the provincial government wants everyone to have a card proving they have received a COVID-19 vaccine. Some many? most? members of the public perceive that as the media outlet says you should have a card proving youve received a COVID-19 vaccine. But its not the media telling you that, theyre telling you what the province has mandated. But everyone perceives it as the media outlet and the reporter telling you what they want to happen. Its the old shoot the messenger syndrome.

I think the essence of the problem is that people expect and/or believe that news reporting is advocating something. Or should be. But thats not the case. In its purest form, news is just news reporting something that happened or is happening.

But people expect a story to be doing something and, consequently, they think that every story is actively pushing for a certain outcome or point of view. As opposed to just telling you that someone is saying something, doing something or advocating something.

Thats the nub of the problem. When you read a news story it will say Premier John Horgan says, Blah, blah, blah. (not an actual quote). What were telling you is what John Horgan (or anybody else) said.

But people perceive it as reporter Alistair Taylor says, Blah, blah blah. You need to read it more closely. Again, its not Reporter X saying something, shes just quoting the subject who made that statement.

There is such a thing as advocacy journalism but thats not what most reporters are producing plus advocacy journalism is biased, its advocating for a certain outcome or belief. In mainstream media, advocacy journalism falls under the umbrella of opinion and is usually dressed up as a column, an opinion piece that is the view of the writer. What youre reading here is a column, an opinion piece and its labelled as such.

Now and this is the exception that many people believe proves the rule there are instances of journalists deliberately pushing an agenda or deliberately or mistakenly but those are clawed back as soon as its pointed out.

So, when a reporter writes that the Living Oceans Society wants fish farms out of the Broughton Archipelago, many people read that as the Campbell River Mirror wants fish farms out of the Broughton Archipelago. This is a crucial misunderstanding of journalistic process and the source of a lot of misunderstanding and strife.

We are the medium (get it, media?) through which the news reaches you. We didnt say a northbound pick up truck swerved out of its lane, crossed the median and collided with a southbound semi truck. The police did. We tell you what the police tell us.

Its hard for this to not sound patronizing but the level of misunderstanding is alarming and, sadly to us in the media, baffling. I heard the phrase many years ago People read what they want to read and Im sad to say its often true.

Another aspect of this is that if what we write doesnt say what you want it to say, then its biased, incorrect and, God forbid, fake. Sorry people, but youre going to read things that you dont agree with. That doesnt make them wrong.

In the end, were just presenting to you information whether it be a quote or from some other source (document, file, eyewitnesses) that weve collected to support the point of the story youre reading.

If its the writers opinion, well tell you. Otherwise, look at the source and understand that its the sources actions, opinions or wishes that are being presented to you. In the best case, scenario, well present the other side of the argument but thats not always possible in the same piece (but it often is) but at some point, the other side or sides of the argument will get put on the public agenda. And well report that.

Im such a cynic, of course, that even having explained this now, I dont believe it will change anybodys mind or lead anybody to any greater understanding of the mechanics of news reporting but I feel I have to try.

journalism

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Is it fake news or is it just news you dont agree with? columnist - Campbell River Mirror

Donald Trump and his then-running mate, Mike Pence, embrace as they shake hands after Pence's acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Mary Altaffer/AP hide caption

Donald Trump and his then-running mate, Mike Pence, embrace as they shake hands after Pence's acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

Former President Donald Trump continued to champion the lie that he was unfairly stripped of office in the White House race against President Biden, saying Wednesday that the "real insurrection" happened on Election Day 2020.

"The Unselect Committee of partisan Democrats, and two very weak and pathetic RINOs, should come to the conclusion after spending many millions of dollars, that the real insurrection happened on November 3rd, the Presidential Election, not on January 6thwhich was a day of protesting the Fake Election results," Trump said in an unfounded, conspiratorial statement.

The deadly January insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was egged on by Trump in the waning days of his single-term presidency, with protesters some of whom waved anti-American flags storming the Capitol building in an attempt to stop the certification of Biden's election victory.

High-ranking lawmakers, including then-Vice President Mike Pence, had to be evacuated to safety as some of the protesters threatened violence, including chants of "Hang Mike Pence," against those inside.

Trump's statement comes after Pence, himself a major target of the insurrectionists' ire, attempted to downplay the bloody riot as little more than a protest by rightfully aggrieved Americans.

"I know the media wants to distract from the Biden administration's failed agenda by focusing on one day in January," Pence said during a Monday interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity. "They want to use that one day to try and demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans who believed we could be strong again and prosperous again and supported our administration in 2016 and 2020."

After Trump left office, Pence had tried to distance himself from Trump about the insurrection, saying he and the former president would never see "eye to eye" about the day.

Pence's new comments come as many Republican officials are rallying behind Trump and excusing the behavior of some on Jan. 6. Crossing Trump is seen as politically problematic for Republicans seeking relevance and want a future in politics.

Pence, who establishment Republicans had initially hoped would serve as a counterweight to Trump's most brash instincts, ultimately came to serve Trump loyally in the White House and beyond, as did much of the party leadership.

In the Monday interview, Pence said he and Trump had parted amicably after the insurrection and that he and Trump have talked "a number of times" since leaving office.

Trump on Wednesday praised Pence's Hannity interview, claiming it "destroys and discredits the Unselect Committees [sic] Witch Hunt on the events of January 6th."

He added, "It will continue anyways, however, because the Fake News doesn't want to focus on Afghanistan, Russia, Taiwan and China, the Border, inflation, and a failing economy."

Trump continues to stoke speculation that he could run again for the presidency in 2024. This weekend, he is heading to the early state of Iowa to give a speech.

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Trump continues to lie, says 'real insurrection' happened when he lost election - NPR

A TIME OUTSIDE THIS TIMEBy Amitava Kumar

It is February 2020. Satya, the narrator of Amitava Kumars new novel, A Time Outside This Time, is at an artists residency on an island in Italy. Like Kumar, Satya was born in Bihar, an eastern state in India, but has lived for much of his adult life in the United States. Troubled by the election of divisive leaders in the two countries he calls home, Satya has traveled halfway across the world to this idyllic villa on a hill to work on a novel, Enemies of the People. What is the book about? It is a report, he writes, from the world of #fakenews.

Satya is among the novelists who went through a crisis of faith after the 2016 presidential election. Ever since the former White House adviser Kellyanne Conway dropped the phrase alternative facts on TV, some American fiction writers have wondered if all they are doing day in and day out is make up lies. Satya, too, is skeptical about the power of the imagination in a post-truth world. Just as a new virus named Covid-19 is going around, he is busy trying to transform a lifetime of journal entries, scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, and descriptions of a few psychological experiments relayed to him by his wife, Vaani, into what he hopes will be a referendum on facts. When he isnt working, he is either reading 1984 George Orwell was also born in Bihar or on Twitter. Satya is the Hindi word for truth, vaani for voice: This is the sort of novel where even the characters names are preeningly literal.

The problem with Satyas crusade against misinformation is that too often he is just passing on breaking news alerts. The truths he espouses are factual, not emotional. Vaani is blandly introduced as a psychologist who lives in the world of experiments. Husband and wife seem to talk about nothing but research models of cognitive behavior; a casual conversation about their 9-year-old daughter telling lies becomes a freshman primer on positive and negative reinforcement. Satyas earnestness is grating. While reporting on tensions between India and Pakistan in 2001, he deems his own prose untouched by jingoism and honest about the cost of war. He imagines firing back at audience members who ask annoying questions at literary festivals with a question or two of his own: Whom did you vote for? Have you done any worthwhile reading? He has convictions, but no precision, and the story doesnt remotely test his beliefs. In the absence of self-revelations, there isnt much to keep you turning the pages.

Was it Orwell who once wrote that an autobiography can be trusted only if it discloses something disgraceful? Halfway through the novel, Satya stops working on Enemies of the People. He becomes an information junkie, obsessively noting down the days headlines in India and the United States, shoring up fragments of an essay on the art of literary fiction and lies. Reality has obviously overwhelmed the novelist in Satya, and yet we get scarcely any sense of his inner turmoil. The plot consists of him mostly lounging around the opulent villa, giving in to fits of complacent despair. Do you remember the days immediately after Trump took office? he reminds the reader at one point. When some residents leave the island because of the pandemic, he claims that as much as we fear the virus, we ought to be worried about the killer inside us.

The book reads like a mash-up of two genres: autofiction and the post-apocalyptic novel. Except that the apocalypse here is just the news, which Satya follows online from the safety of the villa, and later, when lockdowns are enforced everywhere, from his house in upstate New York. Kumar writes supple sentences, but Satyas reflections are too vicarious to sustain interest. His provocations arent startling enough; his thoughts can quickly lapse into a trite but well-meaning op-ed. You cant help feeling that the novel lacks precisely the humanity that Satya demands from our leaders, an inherent and sometimes disquieting proximity to other lives.

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A Novelist Reports From the World of #FakeNews - The New York Times

To be or not to be?

Is it fake news or real news?

Do we believe the facts in the stories we read and then share the bogus contents with unsuspecting family and friends?

When pondering such agonizing questions while reading stories on social media, one often wonders. I know I do.

If your inquiring mind wants to know the truth, I encourage you to check out Not Real News: A look at what didnt happen this week, compliments of the Associated Press.

The weekly article is a roundup of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week.

None of these are legit, the Associated Press writes, even though shared widely on social media.

Which, of course, creates quite the conundrum.

From politics to all things COVID-19 (and everything in between), the AP doggedly sorts out the falsities.

Duping the public, however, has been around for a century or more.

Publishing fake news began in the early 19th century in earnest when newspapers began writing exposes and larger than life stories to increase circulation.

In 1835, the New York Sun published a series of six articles claiming that an alien civilization lived on the moon.

The astronomical observations were supposedly made by astronomer Sir John Herschel.

It was called the Great Moon Hoax. Duping the public, for sure.

These days, fake news has a life of its own. It is a 24/7 circulating quagmire of things that didnt happen.

And let me tell you that each week, a lot of things didnt happen.

Want the truth? Long for the real scoop? Tired of being hoodwinked?

Not Real News: A look at what didnt happen this week. Social media, beware!

We are making critical coverage of the coronavirus available for free. Please consider subscribing so we can continue to bring you the latest news and information on this developing story.

Alvia Lewis Frey is a columnist for the Pharos-Tribune. Contact her at alewisfrey@aol.com.

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Alvia Lewis Frey column: A look at what didn't happen this week in fake news - pharostribune.com

MINSK, 4 October (BelTA) In the interview with the TV channel CNN Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko pointed to numerous misrepresentations in the questions of journalist Matthew Chance, BelTA has learned.

At the very beginning of the interview, the journalist mentioned some overused fakes about human rights violations and the use of force by law enforcement officers during last year's events. It became clear at that moment that Matthew Chance's objectives were not to ask questions and get answers to them. In violation of the rules of journalism, he suggested that Aleksandr Lukashenko should use this interview as an opportunity to apologize to Belarusian people.

No, I would not like to take this opportunity. If I would, I would do that through the Belarusian media. They do their job well. What is the point of doing it on CNN? I do not think this is even a relevant question, and in principle I have nothing to apologize for, and the latest events in Belarus are a testimony to that, the president responded.

However, the journalist kept insisting. He spoke about the conditions of detention citing information from the internet and some human rights organizations instead of reliable and credible sources.

The head of state answered that there is not a single detention center in Belarus that could compare to Guantanamo, or those bases that the United States and Great Britain set up in Eastern Europe: So one learns by comparison, hence my answer to your question - I do not think you will come out looking any better.

As to our detention centers, where we keep those accused or those under investigation, they are no worse than in Britain or the United States. I can guarantee you that, Aleksandr Lukashenko said.

Speaking about human rights organizations, the Belarusian leader noted that one should not always trust them. For example, human rights organizations in Syria accused Syrians, Russians and others of using biological weapons. You even showed this, then it turned out to be video manipulation. Yet, human rights organizations were involved. So maybe in Belarus, too, you are being prompted by these human rights organizations, Aleksandr Lukashenko said.

Although the CNN journalist listened to the answers, he continued to persistently repeat the same set of fake news that are spread by the opponents of the government. One of them is about those killed in the 2020 riots. I know that special equipment was used on 8 or 9 August when those people controlled from abroad attacked our police on the barricades, the head of state said. As a result, one of active participants of the riots was injured and the president was informed about that incident. But it was not the case of the police going somewhere to find and kill this person. That was not what happened. He came to kill them. He was an ex-con, by the way, pardoned by me, Aleksandr Lukashenko said.

As for other deaths mentioned by Matthew Chance, those were nothing but deliberate attempts to put the blame for everything on the authorities, the Belarusian leader is convinced. You can hang anything on this period - some died of COVID, some died of asthma, some had cancer. And our protesters put all of them on the same list. Then you read the list and were happy because it was what you needed, the president said. Aleksandr Lukashenko recommended that the journalist get to the bottom of it, and offered his help if needed.

I suggest you discuss concrete facts, and not the views or statements of some dubious human rights organizations. Everything that you have just said is fake and fantasy. I guarantee you it is fake and fantasy, the head of state said.

It is not appropriate for a channel like CNN to quote all kinds of lies from the internet. Someone must have wanted you to do this, that is why I would not advise you repeating it all, Aleksandr Lukashenko said.

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Lukashenko responds to fake news in interview with CNN - Belarus News (BelTA)