This was first printed in AdNews February issue. To get it hot off the press, subscribe to the digital version of AdNews or the print edition here.
In 1807 Thomas Jefferson, then President of the United States wrote “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”
In late 2016, Mark Thompson, the CEO of the New York Times said “Whatever its’ other cultural and social merits, our digital ecosystem seems to have evolved into a near-perfect environment for fake news to thrive.”
How times change. Two of the more noted political events of 2016; the UK’s vote to leave the European Union and the United States Presidential Election have given new prominence to the idea of fake news.
As the first quote illustrates it’s hardly a new phenomenon and far from restricted to these two events. Governments, commercial entities and individuals have long created and disseminated news and opinion that Winston Churchill may have described as ‘economical with the truth’. So what’s new?
As is often the case in advertising two issues that have different technical definitions become conjoined. Last year it was ad fraud, a criminal issue and viewability, a commercial issue, the same can be said of transparency and disclosure. In 2016, a year of political surprise the issues of fake news and extremism in the media also became conjoined. The latter is clearly a matter of opinion.
A number of advertisers have very publicly withdrawn from Breitbart News Network on the grounds that it supported what has been termed an ‘alt-right’ agenda and that some of its content promoted activity with they did not want their brands associated. More surprisingly Lego took the same action in respect of the UK’s Daily Mail.
Fake news is not a matter of opinion, something either happened or it did not.
There are three aspects of the new bout of fake news that seem on the surface at least to have accelerated attention. The first is the role of social and search media and its unintended but inevitable ability to allow fake news to be published, promoted to specific groups and then shared widely.
The second is the reporting of fake news by real news outlets. The thesis goes that once an item is reported even as fake a simple screen shot or edit shared through social platforms can use the authentic source as an apparent validation of the fake one.
The third, and of greatest concern as marketing professionals rather than as citizens, is the incentives for the creation and dissemination of fake news. The calculus is simple. Fake news drives traffic, traffic equates to consumer attention, and attention creates advertising revenue. It’s a bad thing for sure and compounded by the (political) extremity of the fake.
The response to the fake news crisis has been loud. Google and Facebook do not want to be tarnished with the suggestion that their businesses benefit. Consequently both are rapidly examining the source domains of fake news and attempting to block them from their platforms.
In addition they are creating mechanisms for their respective communities to flag what they believe to be fake in order to suppress them algorithmically. The latter strategy illustrates the nuance in the topic. To suppress is not to eliminate and it’s an important distinction as truth in news has always been elusive. Neither platform has suggested an approach to the dissemination of fake, questionable or exaggerated news from established sources.
Extreme bias creates ratings and sells newspapers and is monetised by advertising sales. Disappointing as it is, one can only question the potential for the elimination of fake news in a world that seems distressingly comfortable with post-truth politics.
Despite this the economic crisis facing real news is challenging. The world is inevitably diminished if real reporters cannot be on the ground reporting real events with the support of editors and the discipline of fact checking behind them. This speaks to the societal role of advertisers and of the digital platforms that are inexorably increasing their share of the advertising pie.
For the former, news needs to be re-evaluated as a communication environment; perhaps we should call this ‘purpose driven media selection’? For the latter it may be appropriate to provide resources in the form of hardware and software to ensure that some costs of news collection are defrayed. More simply they might consider this; the most shared and most monetised stories come from authentic news sources. A way of decreasing the incentives to the bad guys is to increase the incentives to the good news. A simple adjustment in the revenue sharing model would go a long way. Amidst all this it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. The week after the US election saw the New York Times biggest net subscriber increase ever.
By Rob Norman, chief digital officer GroupM & chairman GroupM North America