The News-Fakeism in Our Life
Op-Ed
In my trove of past and current information, the stories of the now-bygone socialism and the now-burgeoning capitalism are so tightly intertwined that even I can’t make head nor tail of them. The fact that the Marxist era of our existence was an ugly bunch of lies in our communist teeth is now known to the entire world. It has also been recognized that the former soviets have duly eaten their share of humble pie as a consequence of the regime’s historic demise. At that time of rubber-stamped means of mass communication, the news in general would be faked-up. Presently, in the epoch of universal freedom and ubiquitous democracy, the news still tends to be faked. The only difference is that back then, we all faked our belief in government-produced news because the punishment was otherwise imminent, hence we voluntarily succumbed to it. What is happening now is beyond regular human imagination: media continues to fake the news but with bigger literary subtlety and journalistic dexterity, and the public continues to succumb to it, only with a newly-acquired right to express its disbelief in the provided info, and object to it.
Both styles of feeding the news to people serve the same purpose: either to stay in power or to come to it. And the resultant headache hurts only the electorate and the governed.
Fake news is among the worst scourges of our time. On the other hand, it might work as a builder of life, because humanity has been making progress in the duration of the millennia as a consequence of its struggle between good and evil. Could fake news be one of the paradigms of that perpetual clash between darkness and light? It certainly could, but at this stage of an unbelievable human leap towards a source of improved existence, this dilemma has to be handled, and the lie, the flagrantly hurtful and destructive lie in the media, has to be stopped forever.
How? The way all the other details of our life are handled: by means of creating a pertinent law and then abiding by it. We usually suffer a cruel penchant for punishing a little child for breaking a plate and hiding it. Why, then, should a newsfaking journalist, breaking our hearts, get away with a lie which hurts society much worse than a kid with his or her minor prank and lie?
The current hearsay about the possibility of lowering the level of freedom of speech and democracy might contain a smattering of truth, but the prospect of containing the outrageously proliferating faked news is much scarier, especially if we continue encouraging the fake-mongers and rabble-rousers with our groundless tolerance.
Trying not to keep too far from the truth, I would admit that our court system, as it functions today, might not have enough nerve and capacity to hear the possible number of fake news cases, but we can always think of a ruse if we give a little strain to our brains. For instance, in America, they have a very complicated but extremely efficient law-enforcement system, including the court network, which contains several courts that have jurisdiction over specialized subjects, such as a court of claims, court of military appeals, court of customs and patent appeals, and a tax court. We could just as well introduce into the Georgian court system a special court of fake news appeals which will be designed to handle every presumable case of fake news and shamelessly mendacious journalist who has the temerity to lie to the worst possible detriment of this nation and its due development, in collaborative company with the rest of the world.
The proposal sounds like one of my regular tongue-in-cheek suggestions, but as the saying would have it, there is always a stray grain of truth in every deliberate joke. The new special court is not going to be a simple scarecrow, frightening away the fake-masters. If it works, it will be just another mile in the process of formation of the Republic’s genuinely independent court system, equaled to the American judicial Olympus.
By Nugzar B. Ruhadze