When 'fake news' is information you don't like
'Fake news' should refer to something fake, rather than something you don’t agree with
Objectivity is impossible to achieve. We all have our biases, and on top of that, we all have brains that work to confirm those biases, and to undermine the impact of information that could change our minds. We are of course not helpless in the face of misinformation — we can remind ourselves to read and think about dissenting views, we can debate issues with friends from different parts of the political spectrum, and most importantly perhaps, we can remind ourselves that discovering our own errors is an essential component of triangulating on the truth. In all of this activity, though, we have poorer prospects of success when we fail to call things by their proper names, or share the same understanding of a term. You might know that “post-truth” was named “word of the year” by Oxford dictionaries. But does that word mean that the speaker doesn’t care about the truth (whether she says something true or not); that nobody cares about the truth; or that we are no longer able to discern...
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