‘Rumor’ is different from ‘fake news’

By Alex P. Vidal

 

“Fake news and rumors thrive online because few verify what’s real and always bias towards content that reinforces their own biases.”

—Ryan Higa

 

IT is believed that made-up facts and boastful dissimulators have been with us for hundreds of years.

But do we know our taradiddles from our ultracrepidarians?

Mayor Rhumyla Nicor-Mangilimutan of La Castellana, Negros Occidental is only one of the many public officials in the Philippines and in the United States who have been “misusing” the much-abused words “fake news.”

On November 24, the lady mayor reacted to the “rumor” that she had been suspended for 90 days.

She belied it and reportedly called the rumor as “fake news.”

“I continue to dispose of my duties and responsibilities as chief executive of this town,” insisted Mangilimutan as reported by veteran Negros journalist Dolly Yasa.

The mayor added: “Granting that my opponents filed a case, it will undergo a process, until then it remains hearsay.”

She continued to sign documents including their payroll, the mayor disclosed, blaming her political detractors as the ones behind the “suspension rumors,” added Yasa’s report.

The mayor apparently learned about the rumor from municipal employees she didn’t immediately identify.

 

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If it did not come from an official source and no one came forward to own it as the author, it definitely was a plain and simple rumor.

A rumor can’t be “fake news.”

Rumor is a currently circulating story or report of uncertain or doubtful truth. It is circulated as an unverified account.

Fake or bogus is something that isn’t genuine.

News is newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent or important events.

If the source of the false suspension order came from the media and was simultaneously reported in the print, television, radio, and news websites or the Internet, it becomes “fake news.”

The now-familiar words “fake news” have been habitually spoken with conventional monotony so many times in the past every time someone (in most cases disgruntled politicians) reacted to a negative story about him.

 

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Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and US President Donald Trump are among the prominent politicians in this generation who have verbalized “fake news” with utmost cogency and intensity to undermine the critical press.

We have also heard with rapid succession many politicians corrosively using “fake news” as a defense mechanism or to refer to a doubtful report or half-truths and dishonesty during the election period.

Even the social media giants have adopted contrasting approaches to the problem of dishonest campaigning.

In the recent US election, for instance, Twitter banned political advertisements altogether, while Facebook serenely allowed them to spread falsehoods and even threats of murder.

“Indeed, it is often supposed that the age of Trump and Brexit heralds something new: the political supremacy of the lie absolute, the cynical fabrication, the bot-netted virality of fake news,” reported UK’s The Guardian in an article entitled, “Before Trump: the real history of fake news.”

“But old words buried in the geological strata of the English language tell quite the opposite story, that made-up facts and boastful dissimulators have always been with us. To unearth and polish these fossils may act as some small consolation, while providing resources for expressive resistance to the ongoing omnishambles.

The age of post-truth, indeed, stretches as far back as we care to look, there never having been a golden age of transparency.

The ubiquity of fake news and scientific misinformation reportedly was already a serious problem for leading thinkers of the Renaissance.

Meanwhile, the mayor doesn’t intend to name her supposed political detractors who authored the rumor saying she will only pray for them.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, was a former editor of two dailies in Iloilo, Philippines)