THE OTHER FAKE NEWS

Sir,

Ever since Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign began, the issue of fake news’ has been in the headlines especially with him accusing several media outlets of misinterpreting or fabricating stories about him and his presidential campaign.

When you realise that a free media has the power to influence public perception about political affairs in a country, one has to wonder which masters journalists who publish fabricated stories are serving.

However, there is another aspect to ‘fake news’ which, while seemingly inconspicuous, can actually alter the entire meaning of a story or even render it completely devoid of any meaning, whatsoever. By simply altering a few words or by omitting others from a story, that article can become something else altogether from what it was originally intended to be.

This kind of fake news may be a result of simple grammatical or spelling errors on the part of the writer or the people who are responsible for printing them, but they may also be deliberate actions, perhaps by people whose views differ from those of the writers, who tend to alter the story in order to mislead those who read it.

For example, if somebody wrote: ‘There will be a severe storm tomorrow’ and the person responsible for printing this then added the word ‘not’ (either mistakenly or otherwise) to the sentence, then people would not be getting the intended information.
This is like a soccer match in which the referee, who is not supposed to take sides, is actually a big fan of one of the teams that are playing in the match.

It raises the question of credibility of the referee who is expected to act in a professional and un-biased manner and not choose what is pleasing to him. If he were to take sides, then it would be pointless to even watch that match at all. Likewise, a story whose meaning has been altered is as good as reading a blank page. So, why waste your time?

Swazi Citizen

Post your comment

Your name:

Your e-mail address:

Add your comments:

Please enter the code you see in the image:

Image:

Code: