"Fake News"

By Wayne Brown
Perhaps the only positive thing Trump has done for the world is to raise awareness of the "Fake News" phenomenon. If the Republicans had run someone less visibly insane or if the Russians had not blatantly put their thumbs on the scale, this topic may have raised the alarms it has. The Brexit referendum raised similar issues on the other side of the Atlantic, but the two crises together have enlivened the debate considerably. The same goes for analysis of the 2008 financial crisis, which didn't just happen in America.

On a personal note, we "information junkies" need to be aware of the forces that pollute our access to information and silence those voices who are attempting to make their voices heard over the deafening sound of the misinformed crowd.

An excellent overview of this problem is from the London School of Economics. This report provides a comprehensive overview of the issue, along with quite a few specific recommendations. For the moment, I will study this report myself and recommend that my readers do the same. On another note, I strongly recommend the LSE podcast as a source of deep, meaningful information that does not always track the front page of the New York Times. This podcast is an example of information sources that are responding to the crisis by dramatically sharpening the depth, quality, and relevance of what they publish. Here are a few others I follow that you may find worth a look:



Each of these podcasts reliably opens new windows for me - new ways of thinking about the issues and new issues that I have been lost in the noise.

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