Good news, bad news, and fake news. Going beyond political literacy to democracy and libraries

Date14 January 2019
Pages213-228
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2018-0074
Published date14 January 2019
AuthorJohn Buschman
Subject MatterLibrary & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet
Good news, bad news, and
fake news
Going beyond political literacy to democracy
and libraries
John Buschman
Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey, USA
Abstract
Purpose Library and Information Science (LIS) has seen an explosion of responses to fake news in the
aftermath of the 2016 US election, political in nature, eschewing neutralitysupporting democracy.
The purpose of this paper is to trace the definition of fake news, the challenges, the rootsof recent respondes
to fake news, notes that the theoretical understanding of democracy must keep pace with these efforts.
Design/methodology/approach Conceptual analysis of the LIS literature concerning fake news and its
underlying themes; unpacking of actually existing democracy, re-linked to LIS practices.
Findings Democracy does not require a space cleared of distorting claims but spaces suited to
grappling with them, a c all to address fake news , and not simply a matte r of clearing up informa tion
sources; librarians should prepared to engage at the next level. Libraries stand for the proposition that
there is more-true information which is worth accessing, organizing, etc., and for inclusion. Whether
explicitly politica l or not, the imaginative us es to which libraries a re put do enrich civil socie ty and the
public sphere. Librari es help to counter fake news both th rough specific educative acti ons aimed at it and as
broadly educative ins titutions with a coher ent notion of their rela tionship to informati onal discernment
in democracy.
Originality/value LIS discourse on fake news has value, and references democracy, but assumes a set of
traditional relationships between informing, libraries and democracy. This paper goes at both the lesser role
of informing and highlights the (arguably) greater social role of libraries in democratic society.
Keywords Democracy, Misinformation, Public sphere, Fake news, Disinformation,
2016 US Presidential election
Paper type Conceptual paper
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of
foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity [] (Dickens, 1973, p. 3).
Introduction
Library and Information Science (LIS) has seen an explosion of analyses of and responses to
fake news in the aftermath of the 2016 US election: Library Quarterly published two special
issues on the Aftermath: Libraries, Democracy, and the 2016 Presidential Electionin July
and October 2017 with a dozen articles featuring fake news and about that many more on
related issues; Reference and User Services Quarterly published about a dozen articles
featuring fake news in Spring 2018 on Trusted Information in an Age of Uncertainty;
Open Information Science has issued a call for papers on the topic (CFP Fake, 2018); the
Winter 2017/2018 Progressive Librarian reprinted three American Library Association
(ALA) documents responding to the fake news climate along with four related papers on the
post-election profession. LIS conferences have been active too. The 2017 Charleston
Conference hosted a number of fake news themed sessions, and the ALA gave a highly
attended webinar on combatting it (Rose-Wiles, 2018). Fordham University Library
sponsored a panel on libraries and the post-truth erain June 2017 among many others
(Librarianship, 2017; see also CFP ACRL/NY, 2018; CFP ACRL/NJ, 2018).
It is in short a time of good news,bad news and fake news. There is arguably a widespread
assault on the basesof social discourse, democraticpolitics and information/evidence(the bad
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 75 No. 1, 2019
pp. 213-228
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-05-2018-0074
Received 13 May 2018
Revised 23 October 2018
Accepted 23 October 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
213
Good news,
bad news, and
fake news
news), but theprofession has responded vigorously(the good news). The paper willproceed in
inverse orderof the listing in the title with a usefulexploration of what is meant byfake news
to begin. If nothing else, this will provide the baseline of the challenge facing LIS. The Bad
News section will explore the depth of this phenomenon further deepening our
understanding of the challenge. The good news will be further expanded in exploring
contemporary efforts to define information literacy as political literacy. The paper will then
turn to the intellectual bases of those efforts, which now need to be consolidated by a deeper
understanding of contemporary democracy and democratic society: what do libraries do in
actually existing democracy?[1] A thorough description and theory is of course beyond the
scope of this paper, but a sketch will be offered drawn fromcontemporary democratic theory
and other sources, followed by a brief conclusion.
Fake news: toward a definition
If we have set our collective sights on it, we should be able to delimit what it is LIS is
opposing. What then is fake news? Widely used definitions –“news articles that are
intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers(Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017,
p. 213; see also Lazer, 2018) are too limited to capture what is actually going on. They
disregard both a pluralism of methods and the new environment of fake news that fake
news itself makes. Pope Francis (2018) has interestingly helped expand public dialog about
it in his message for World Communications Day:
In general, it refers to the spreading of disinformation [] It has to do with false information based
on non-existent or distorted data meant to deceive and manipulate the reader [] serv[ing] to
advance specific goals, influence political decisions, and serve economic interests. [] [It] is
captious, inasmuch as it [] appeal[s] to stereotypes and common social prejudices, and exploit[s]
emotions like anxiety, contempt, anger and frustration. [] Untrue stories can spread so quickly
that even authoritative denials fail to contain the damage. [] [M]any people interact in
homogeneous digital environments impervious to differing perspectives and opinions.
Disinformation thus thrives on the absence of healthy confrontation with other sources of
information that could effectively challenge prejudices and generate constructive dialogue.
There are terms and concepts here that need some unpacking. First, at the core of fake
news is disinformation: it is information (some true, some false) that is purposefully
misleading, and often as not meant to mask a situation instead of generating false beliefs
(Fallis, 2015) or, non-existent or distorted data meant to deceive and manipulate. Second,
misinformation is uncertain, vague, or ambiguousinformation, or not entirely accurate
(not necessarily intentionally so), or true enough depending on the context (Cooke, 2017,
p. 213). Misinformation is more charged in our new and captious environment. Former US
Secretary of state Clintons private e-mail server is a classic case: there was clearly
misinformation as explanations were incomplete, sometimes inaccurate and details
dribbled out over time; the story was surrounded by a swirl of disinformation bogus
accusations about all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama
Administration”–that were appeals to prejudices and emotions that led to the chants of
lock her up(Carroll, 2017). In other words, fake news now includes creating an
interpretive environment around misinformation. Third, political actors have hijacked
the term and sought to redefine it as [] any reporting they dontlikeand promoted the
notion that a report qualifies as fake news if it requires a correction [thus] attach[ing]
malicious intent to [] mistakes that inevitably appear in good-faith(Borchers, 2017).
Fourth, ginned-up stories of no import about crowd size at a rally or a handshake with the
Polish first lady(Graves, 2018) also figure in here. This both a method and an
environment: bullshit, which is invariably produced in a careless or self-indulgent
manner;thebullshitter []is[] trying to get away with somethingand it involves a
214
JD
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