When Fiction Becomes Fact: Sensationalized Reporting in the Modern World

On November 2nd, 2016, American far-right journalist Alex Jones reported on his website, InfoWars — which attracts 7.7 million unique visitors per month — that Hillary Clinton and other Democratic officials were sexually abusing children in the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant. Similar illegitimate platforms like Breitbart and HagmannReport publicized the same claims, effectively penetrating mainstream media. Less than one month later, Edgar Maddison Welch traveled from North Carolina to the nation’s capital with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a .38 handgun, and a knife, prepared to hold Clinton accountable. He thought his mission to be noble, claiming that it would require “sacrificing the lives of a few for the lives of many,” according to court documents. After firing three shots, Welch was arrested and sentenced to four years in prison. This infamous case became known as Pizzagate, and demonstrates how the endless quest for viewer engagement by journalists like Jones breeds ignorance, thereby increasing societal danger and polarization. 

In his novel, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness, Neil Postman describes disinformation as “information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.” Oftentimes, it stems from journalists correlating their success with high audience engagement, resulting in chasing ‘clicks’ or ‘scandals’ that may not always encapsulate the truth or are entirely false. Pizzagate is one of many instances that successfully altered peoples’ perceptions of reality and generated vehement mistrust of opposing viewpoints for virality. Others include an article by the online British Newspaper, The Exposé, which published false statistics about COVID-19 in the United States for the sake of widespread viewership and, consequently, revenue. In November of 2022, the paper claimed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed 118,000 children and young adults “died suddenly” since the distribution of the Coronavirus vaccines. The piece was republished across various social media platforms like Instagram; one post of the article’s screenshotted headline earned over 15,500 likes as a reward for intimidating gullible readers into risking their health. Together, these instances convey that inaccurate reporting is taking precedence over critical forms of journalism, and degrading the institution as a whole. To prevent this, journalists and society must collectively recognize that the truth is not always the most dramatic event that will generate high revenue. Rather, honest information promotes critical thinking and forces readers to examine a story from various perspectives. 

This proliferation of false news that stems from journalists amassing clicks also has an astounding polarizing effect on our society. A 2020 study conducted by Brown University acknowledged that the increase in political polarization in the United States over the last four decades is directly associated with the rise of 24-hour partisan cable news. Pew Research Center further proved this in a 2016 study; the analysis of 376 million Facebook users’ interactions with over 900 news outlets found that people tend to seek information that aligns with their own biases. This increases negativity, and, in some cases, hostility, towards opposing viewpoints, consequently fostering political polarization. As views become profitable, readers become customers to whom journalists must advertise. Thus, a click is no longer an endeavor into informative news, but instead a political product at the cost of full-breadth discovery and bipartisanship. As John Jost, co-director of the Center for Social and Political Behavior at New York University puts it, partisan news sources are “making money by energizing polarized audiences.”

In addition to these rather concentrated cases, dishonest reporting at the hands of technological metrics is posing dire threats to international politics. In her book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future, Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa describes how “impunity online naturally led to impunity offline, destroying existing checks and balances…I began calling it democracy’s ‘death by a thousand cuts.’” She points at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 as an example, arguing that the accumulation of nearly eight years of misinformation and lies issued by incentivized journalists led to the tragic war. When Russia annexed Crimea in May of 2014, the country undertook a massive disinformation campaign to advance President Vladimir Putin’s image and subvert his adversaries. According to Ressa, Russian news networks “viciously attack[ed] facts with its cheap digital army” through various claims, including that Crimea had consented to its annexation, for example. 

These same harmful techniques and narratives continued into 2022 as the war between Russia and Ukraine erupted, with reporters globally promoting ‘bad news’ for attention and polarization. NewsGuard, an acclaimed tool for journalistic credibility, has identified 358 separate Russia-Ukraine disinformation sites that have spread false narratives since the beginning of the war alone. In November of 2022, journalist Tony Cox published an article in the Russian state-controlled news outlet, Russia Today, that inaccurately posited that the Ukrainian military is dominated by neo-Nazi militias. Cox is credited as a “US journalist who has written and edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers” at the end of the article, inferring legitimacy around such ludicrous claims to the untrained consumer. This counter narrative that justified the invasion of Ukraine by Russia through clicks, then, also lent credence to it. Anyone armed with the internet has access to this inaccurate and potentially harmful information, revealing the need for hard legislation in the online realm; American-owned social media conglomerate Meta has amended its content policy six times alone since the inception of the war. These deficiencies, as showcased by the Ukrainian invasion, have the power to place the sovereignty of entire nations at risk. As long as society’s growing engagement with online journalism and social media remains unregulated, all platforms and their constituents hold the ability to construct new realities. 

The threat of disinformation and its ability to alter our perception of the world as we know it evades sociopolitical, medical, and geographic boundaries, making honest and objective journalism more vital than ever. Ultimately, journalists’ power lies in their agency to select the types of content our society consumes. They hold the ability, and, more importantly, the responsibility, to educate their audiences— not reaffirm their beliefs through flashy, superficial writing. As long as these pioneers ignore this core civic mission of journalism, America and our world at large will inevitably trudge along the path toward self-destruction.