Fake news is born from bias, raised by madness: Simon Lincoln Reader
Key topics:
Fake news resurfaces via Hamas photo, NYT, BBC, and Guardian misled
News24 fact-checker lied, ombud sanctioned, Basson interfered
NYT reporters show bias in books on McKinsey and Elon Musk
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I doubt there is a face across America, Europe or Africa whose chin isn’t dripping with fake news − even if the owners of the faces don’t exactly know it.
While we’re all fretting about tariffs, or civil war, or being the victim of some clumsy political hit squad, we didn’t appear to notice that fake news once again erupted from the bowels of Earth and started flinging itself across the globe indiscriminately. It was like a fake news Bukakke, only that implies there was something pleasurable about it. There wasn’t.
The first eruption was the old Hamas-information thing again. Elitist reporters portray themselves as supremely qualified, right-on, edgy, until − until − you throw a piece of Hamas information at them. Then, they don’t even bother to have their own verification units scrutinise it − they just publish, verbatim.
Hamas pulled a fast, fake Kevin Carter on The New York Times with a fake photo of a child who they claimed had been starved, and passed it on. The BBC and The Guardian both contracted it, and pretty soon the media scene in the US and the UK resembled what would happen if you dumped two sensitive men from London with monkeypox on a remote island inhabited by 200 previously un-contacted peoples.
Some days and objections later, in an obviously unnoticeable section, the NYT updated the article accompanying the photo with words to the effect of “suppose-we-should-clarify-this-child-suffers-from-preexisting-health-conditions-so-yesyes-sorry-about-that-one”. Like a supermarket product recall, Israel was then − again − obliged to remind the world that it should not be absorbing information from these kinds of outlets, which is entertaining for the rest of us, but must be exhausting for them.
Then there was the Akkerland crisis.
I don’t know precisely what his bosses at News24 told head fact-checker Andrew Thompson on his first day at work, but it’s reasonable to suspect it went something like, “Now Thompson, great to have you here, love is love and so on and so forth…but the one thing that you cannot do is lie”.
Hiring fact checkers
And what did Thompson do on the 5th of February, two weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration and editor Adriaan Basson’s triumphant claim that he would be hiring fact checkers sacked by the likes of Meta? Well, he lied − by omission it appears − but enough to warrant sanction from the Ombudsman. Worse, it appears that Basson tried to cajole the same ombud – Hennie Scholtz – to recuse himself from adjudicating.
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Until now the genetic sequencing of fake news generated by the likes of the NYT and News24 has not been mapped. I have a few theories.
To understand the kinds of things that exist in the heads of NYT reporters, one has to read the books they write. Not a rewarding exercise, but you’re welcome all the same.
Let’s start with When McKinsey Comes to Town, authored by NYT reporters Michael Forsythe and Walt Bogdanich, published in 2022.
This is a horrendous study of the world’s most unlikeable company that traces its roles across multiple scandals, controversies and injustices. It is neither badly written nor researched – but you can’t avoid a bizarre feeling at the end: the foundation logic of the authors, a perspective they can’t help shoehorn into every chapter, is just as loathsome as the revelations they emphasise.
One example is climate change: they’re happy that McKinsey produced extensive catastro-graphs and other snuff data (always Microsoft PowerPoint) indicating that we’d be underwater in minutes, but equally furious that McKinsey didn’t appear to believe its own research. Why is that, you wonder?
Then there’s Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, authored by NYT reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, published in 2024.
Timing was fortuitous
The timing was fortuitous, as Musk was embedded in the Trump campaign by the time the book hit the shelves. But, as per Forsythe and Bogdanich, Conger and Mac have accentuated personal gripes. It’s likely that both, being tech reporters, were beneficiaries of free verification check marks and thus entitled to a prioritised algorithm, so when Musk rocked up and defenestrated this routine, these two were suddenly competing with random edgelords and incels for prominence.
So they’re angry. Like Forsythe and Bogdanich, they’re charging on virtue, hinting that pre-Musk Twitter’s greatest accomplishment was to design company T-shirts emblazoned with the words “stay woke”.
Musk’s acquisition, both conclude − in the first pages of the book no less − was a travesty, and this goes on and on until you get the feeling that both authors debated prior to publishing whether to preface the book with a public service announcement: “now listen here you abhorrent peasant readers, before you read this, we want you to know that we are very progressive people, and that one or both of our fathers used to wander around the house wearing only fishnet stockings when we were infants”.
Which brings us back to the genetic sequencing: the parent of fake news is mad news. In order to blow the world’s socks off, these people infer, you need to be unstable, your thoughts vacillating between how you’re going to douse your latest story in social justice, and your annual two-week pilgrimage to the funny farm.
Now, any self-respecting media proprietor in South Africa should view News24’s ombudsman debacle as an opportunity. Get a visa, buy an economy-class ticket and a connecting train from Paddington to Somerset, where Koos Bekker hangs out at his country pile these days.
* Simon Lincoln Reader grew up in Cape Town before moving to Johannesburg in 2001, where he was an energy entrepreneur until 2014. In South Africa, he wrote a weekly column for Business Day, then later Biznews.com. Today he is a partner at a London-based litigation funder, a trustee of an educational charity, and a member of the advisory board of the Free Speech Union of South Africa. He travels frequently between California, the UK, and South Africa. All on his green passport.
This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission