Opinion: Fake news is everywhere

Fake news. We’re not only comfortable with the concept, some of us even crave it; don’t feel right without a constant stream of cues and facts – even though we suspect they’re a crock – to ‘inform’ us.

Need proof? Okay, try to have a conversation with a millennial. You could be explaining the meaning of life, but lose eye contact for a nano-second (or less) and you can forget it. Because Ol’ Gen-Why will have grabbed his or her phone and will be three thumb scrolls into a Stalkbook feed from Nobody Inc. And right there, you’ve lost them and social media’s dubious lure has won.

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Which, makes us all think that the whole fake news thing is a creation of the internet and virtual world. Nope, it’s been going on for decades. For as long as mass media has been around, in fact. And just to prove that I haven’t completely fuddied my duddies, I would like to name and shame a handful of other sources of misinformation, diversionary techniques and good old porkies.

I’ll start with lifestyle television shows. Aside from attempting to convince you that your life is a hollow sham if your backyard isn’t a perfectly manicured Garden of Eden, these televisual retirement homes for pensioned-off sports-folk and shouty, couldn’t-hack-it-in-the-real-world tradies, also paint a deluded picture.

I ran into a proper landscape gardener at a backyard barbie a few weeks back who professed a dark desire to kill the next person he saw on TV, hollering into a camera mic that an entire backyard makeover could be achieved in six hours. “Do you know what that does to our chances when we present a real quote for a real job?” asked my new landscaper mate.

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What’s this got to do with automotive mis-information, I hear you ask? Well, other than wasting an hour of airtime that could be better used showing cars being driven enterprisingly, not a whole lot, but it’s still part of modern crap-dusting.

Now, let’s talk old-school brochures. I found a beauty for the EH Holden, with a tag line that read, “Real excitement... every time you take the wheel”. It was true in a way, provided you accept the classical definition of excitement which includes the heightened emotional state brought about by the knowledge that you’re about to die. Seriously, if the cross-plies didn’t get you, the drum brakes would. The medium might have been ancient, but the twisted truth was as modern as tomorrow’s weight-loss website.

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It was just as irrelevant, too. Contemporary EH buyers who would have been much happier knowing the real truth; that there were 38 places on an EH where you could open a long-neck. If Bottle-O Racing was serious, they’d have had Frosty (now Lee Holdsworth) in a Supercar with a flop-moulded EH body.

And how about those fuel-consumption stickers on all new cars? The one on a Y62 Nissan Patrol suggests a combined consumption figure of 14.4L/100km. Having attempted unsuccessfully to drive one of these past a servo a couple of years back, I would beg to differ. And I know they’re only good for a comparison, but my brother-in-law, an otherwise intelligent chap (his relationship with my sister aside) was all bottom lip when his new car couldn’t match the sticker.

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But none of this can compete with social media for bald-facedness. And where there’s a bullcrap dissemination machine, a government of some sort won’t be far away. Whether it’s wire-rope barriers, safety cameras, speed kills, insurance companies pretending to be road-safety experts, any number of other statistical manipulations, PR snow-jobs or just good old-fashioned bullshit, our elected representatives have made fake news an industry.

No wonder they’re all clamouring for a cyberspace mountain top somewhere on the social-media spectrum to spread their latest mis-message. Know your market.