We live in the age of bullshit. It's all around us, stinking up the joint. Your phone is fucking full of it, and the amount of bullshit generated every day around the world is so great, if it was actually literally shit, the world would be constantly engulfed in a massive tsunami of faeces.
One of the unfortunate roles of the news media is to act as a filter for all this bullshit, weeding out all the crap that pretends to be news, and all the rubbish that is trying to get your attention. And if you think the big news organisations are doing a terrible job at this, you should see the main public e-mail inboxes for the large newsrooms - genuine gems of newsworthy content is outnumbered by spam, PR nonsense and all sorts of baffling bullshit.
Of course, there will always be conspiracy theorists who see this suppression of bullshit as suppression of free speech or other vital information, and will always be convinced that the entire media are being paid off by higher interests. (Which, if true, doesn't really explain the aging and decrepit vehicles on show in newsroom car parks.)
But journalists have to reject most of that kind of thing, because it's quite clearly bullshit, and if you fall down that conspiracy hole, you'll be left in the wilderness, mumbling that 9/11 was an inside job, or that Queen Elizabeth kidnapped and ate 10 Canadian children in the 1950s, or that Jack The Ripper was the Loch Ness Monster.
There is, fortunately, a growing awareness of the destructive and harmful impact of fake news, especially after this year in politics, even if the current debate hasn't really progressed beyond infantile name-calling.
It does, unfortunately, lead to things like absolute fucking dickheads using the 'fake news' label to discredit news reports of the latest awful atrocities in places like Aleppo. (Thanks for that hot take, you walking ballsacks full of pus. I'm sure the poor Syrian kids literally choking to death on blood and dust in bombed-out Syrian hospitals are gutted by the fact the conflict doesn't fit with your political ideology.)
But while there are vast amounts of people who won't believe anything anybody tells them anymore, there is always an insatiable thirst for investigation and truth, and uncovering of corruption, and some goddamn basic facts, and all the fake news in the world won't quench that.
In fact, the 'fake news' label has almost been over-used into incoherence in recent weeks, and it encompasses so much, from genuine satire sites like The Civilian and The Onion - which make no secret of the fact that they are total horseshit, and even manage to be occasionally hilarious - to stories about imaginary paedophilia rings in a pizza place, spewed out by malevolent Macedonian munters.
We just need to call it bullshit, because that's all it is. We all have different levels of bullshit acceptability, but in newsrooms, that level has to be real fucking low. Coming back to the indispensability of the bullshit detector, it's more vital than ever.
And it doesn't necessarily have to be fake to be bullshit. There are real issues of PR intrusion on the newspage, and just because something is going viral on social media doesn't mean it actually has any news worth. Sure, your cousin Phil might be amazed by claims that you can predict earthquakes based on astrological reasons, but you know it's bullshit, and editors should definitely know it's bullshit, and easy to ignore.
There is more than enough bullshit in the world, and the news needs to take some responsibility for containing its spread. It's hard fucking work, but that bullshit detector needs to be kept on at all times.
- Ron Troupe
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