 Hi, I'm Bob Sullivan. And you're looking at a picture of one of my favorite metaphors, the golden spike. Even if you don't remember this image, it's probably lodged somewhere deep inside your consciousness, at least if you attended primary school here in the US. This is a picture of the installation of the last railroad tie that connected the first transcontinental railroad across the United States. The moment that east and west coast were connected, sort of. It's also a metaphor for projects, as in, hey, are you done with that last copy of it? That's the golden spike, right? I can press publish now. But this moment, this image, is not what it appears to be. If you had a good history teacher, you probably know that too. So why am I showing it at a talk about fake news? Well, some people argue that this photograph was, in fact, the very first occurrence of fake news, the modern kind anyway. One can argue that the thing which finally unified America set the stage for tearing it apart. Let me explain. When Americans now complain about the proliferation of fake news, I believe they mean a lot of different things. The way it was initially used during the 2016 election cycle was to identify bloggers who were making big money by writing obvious falsehoods as clickbait, such as Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump, push a headline like that out on the world, trick hundreds of people into sharing it, and earn thousands in ad dollars, all from a basement in Macedonia, great business. Today, the phrase is often shorthand for news stories that you just disagree with. And it's a dead end road, a phrase that I'd love to burn from our lexicon, particularly because I think it might be the single most powerful phrase in the realm of digital propaganda. This single two word expression turns off the minds of otherwise thinking people across the planet now. So I think it's worth talking a bit about its deeper origins, talking about how we made the wrong turn that led to this dangerous dead end. In fact, the street that led to this dead end was lined with what could be called pseudo events. 60 odd years ago, historian Daniel Borstein coined the term pseudo event in a book called The Image. It lamented modernity's turn away from authentic experiences like traveling, which were being replaced by TV programs about traveling. In a way, Borstein was the first to cry fake news. In journalism, a pseudo event is pretty easily recognized. A press conference is a pseudo event. Most of the time, nothing actually happens at a press conference. People just talk in front of cameras. An event, a real news event, is a traveler being detained at an airport or a person being laid off. A pseudo event is a person, a spokesperson talking about a travel ban or a commentator talking about unemployment. Or a pseudo event could be a Russian typing Facebook comments from Moscow. Smart people, marketing types of companies, political handlers, propagandists figured this out and began to master the pseudo event, the dog and pony show. Call a bunch of folks into a room, promise a big announcement, hold up a chart or a sad child or a puppy, and you can dominate the headlines for a day. The real news isn't a press conference about legislation. It's the back room bargain that pushes a proposal past 50 votes in the US Senate. It's not a CEO promising to reform a company's misbehaving ways. It's the secret memo from legal, which instructs customer service agents how to continue misleading customers. Situ events aren't necessarily nefarious. They're often the product of mechanics. The Golden Spike in Utah was just such an event, why? Taking a photograph in 1869 was hardly a trivial affair. It had to be staged. Of course, as you'll recall perhaps from high school history, that photograph suspiciously omits many Chinese workers who did most of the hard work of laying rail over the Rocky Mountains. Situ events, therefore, are easy to manipulate. Anything that's staged is easy to manipulate. These necessary mechanics make pseudo events very, very easy to manipulate. It should be obvious that pseudo events rose in power and influence right along with the rise of visual media. There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this perhaps you've considered it. Like making photographs in 1869, making television is very hard. Getting cameras set up, checking audio levels, ensuring clean transmissions. I'm just making up a guess here, but I think it's fair to say that making TV is often 90% mechanics and just 10% journalism. This is why when you watch cable news, you see almost the same thing day after day. Person speaking at podium, person speaking at desk, other people talking about all of this talking, that's the easiest and cheapest way to make TV. Talking about the unemployment report is easy. Going to Scranton, Pennsylvania to talk to someone who was just laid off is hard and it's expensive. Naturally, that means plenty of news doesn't get covered on television. Instead, TV is dominated by pseudo events and the easy visuals they provide. This plays into the hands of folks who are good at manipulating easy visuals. I'll let you decide for yourself who those people are. But if you call what you're watching on TV, fake news, I'd like to offer you an alternative name, pseudo events. They're easy to spot. As you watch or read, simply ask what actually happened? If it's just a person speaking, probably nothing has happened or whatever it is already happened. The back room bargain was already struck. The victim was already injured. One politician calling another politician a nasty name. That's not news. That's the ultimate pseudo event. And of course, the ultimate distraction. But up in the ante on this problem was the birth of 24-hour news, first on cable and then on the internet. Always on news creates a voracious appetite for pseudo events. There's a massive void in time which needs to be filled. Into this void steps power hungry people who know how to make things sound like news, who know how to mass produce pseudo events. Think of pseudo events as the bug in the software and politicians or propagandists as the virus which exploits this bug, this vulnerability. A friend of mine, Lisa Napoli, recently wrote a great book called Up All Night about the birth of CNN. She was there at the time. And it's a great primer on the problem of 24-hour news. When you feel like all the news you see on TV is commentary, this is why. You're seeing a string of pseudo events. Don't get mad, don't get distracted by the emotional content of this discussion. Distill for yourself, what has actually happened. Change the channel or read something with actual news in it. Just a quick example of how things could be different. When I started out as a cove reporter covering city hall and school boards in New Jersey, I made a decision early on that cost me a few headlines but I think it made me a better journalist. City council members love pulling reporters' side and insulting members of the other party. A 30-minute interview might sound, a 30-minute interview might include 29 minutes of insults and one mention of a new road project. Initially, I did what all young journalists do and all teenagers and health parties do. I breathlessly ran to the opposition and said, did you hear what he said about you? How do you respond? And so the cat fight was on. My ink, my paper and my words hijacked by the manipulators. As I grew up and grew into the profession, I learned to ignore the 29 minutes and get back to discussion of the road project. I was literally no fun. Some politicians just stopped talking to me but in the end, I think I serve the readers better and I've tried to take this lesson with me for the past 25 years or so. Insulting someone is just a pseudo event. Building a road, building a wall, well, that's news. These days, I think a lot about the impact of technology and what the impact is having on journalism and on democracy in a larger sense. I'm a visiting scholar at Duke University examining this topic for many angles. Among the most obvious, whatever I'm telling you now about journalism and pseudo events, about the role that TV and then 24-hour news played in fueling pseudo events, about how easily they're exploited. Well, that's all exponentially more true about social media. Facebook's currency is pseudo events and fake news. The more fake, the more pseudo, the more algorithmic juice. You all know this, you feel it. You've seen how years of work by groups like this by people like Hari Hirstie to secure elections and election technology is being used right now by others who simply want to undermine confidence in elections and in democracy. Fake news hurts the most when it's close to home. Sudo events, as Borstein feared, have replaced real life for some people. There aren't great, easy or obvious solutions to this problem, but I do believe talking about pseudo events can at least put a seed of doubt in the minds of people that what they see on TV and online, not only is it possibly propaganda, it's almost by definition propaganda. By definition, it's not real, a pseudo event. If we can get people to stop watching TV programs about travel and start traveling, that would be a great start. Maybe they can go see that Golden Spike in Utah for themselves. If we can get people to stop tweeting and posting and start engaging with the real world over real problems like roads and immigration and housing and voting, well, that would be even better. Thank you.