‘F’ is for Fake

Aaron J. Brown is an Iron Range blogger, author, radio producer and columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune.

In 1973, Orson Welles produced a strange movie called “F is for Fake.” Loosely structured as a documentary about art forgery, the film attempts to explore the notion of what is real and what isn’t. The whole time Orson hovers through the shots, a corpulent, enigmatic shadow of his Citizen Kane days. He even satirizes the newsreel footage from that famous movie.

In “F is for Fake” Welles also re-imagines elements of his famous “The War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, the 1938 program that allegedly convinced some listeners that the fictional story of an alien invasion was really happening. Not surprisingly, the true story of this fake story causing real panic is, itself, partly fake — drummed up by Welles himself for self-promotion.

Fake art holds some surprisingly important connections to today’s so-called “fake news.” We experience art viscerally, emotionally. A great painting prompts a feeling upon first sight. That notion changes our minds forever. That is one part of how art is valued, but the other is supply and demand. Certain artists come to be seen as masters, their works exalted beyond the material cost of paint and canvas. Some art buyers will pay millions of dollars to cage up a piece of this magic in their living rooms or den. Perhaps they just want to lock it away, to know they have captured and consumed it.

All this means is that there is real financial incentive to make fakes and sell them to dolts who can’t tell the difference. But in the biggest forgery cases the victims are hardly dolts. They’re often very well educated and savvy in art history. The big auction houses hire detectives whose full time job is to spot fake paintings. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. And still sometimes the fake paintings fool them for years, decades or even centuries.

Some famous art we all look at is probably not what it claims to be, and we’ll never know.

So here is where we need to talk about news and information in the 21st Century. Your Facebook timeline is hardly a 16th Century masterpiece. It’s usually a parade of trash. But it is very valuable to powerful people, because you are one small part of a marketable audience. If you believe something you see, and act on it, you’re helping someone far away make money, take money, gain power or keep it.

Democracy thrives on truth. Autocracy generally traffics in lies. A democracy fed a steady diet of lies gradually becomes something other than a democracy.

Last month, a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appearing drunk and disoriented went viral on Facebook. It was fake. The author had collected normal footage of Pelosi and altered the speed to make her appear intoxicated and confused.

As this video was rather gleefully transmitted by Pelosi’s opponents, the big services that provide us our information — Facebook, Twitter and Google, for instances — couldn’t figure out how to handle it. Google ended up blocking the fake video, while Facebook said people could probably tell it was fake on their own.

Probably they could. But consider this. What if one part of our brain knows it’s fake, but the other part chooses to believe it anyway?

This is the central threat to all democracies today, ours in particular. Can we handle self-government if we are all too happy to believe things that make us feel good, even though they are not true?

In Finland, democracy has endured on the razor’s edge. Occupied for centuries by Sweden and Russia, Finland liberated itself in divisive civil conflict. They then survived as a western nation with the Cold War Soviet Union breathing down its neck.

Today, Finland is constantly bombarded by the same very real tactical Russian interference that has been documented in our recent elections and in the democratic processes of nations across the world. But rather than denying it, or casting blame, the Finns are learning to defend themselves in a world where falsities are weapons.

Eliza Mackintosh of CNN filed a special report on Finland’s efforts to spot and destroy fake news. Their program is aggressive, educational and it’s proven effective in reducing belief in documented falsehoods. Finland’s solution is not to close off information, but to train the whole country to spot signs of fake news and deceptive persuasion.

In school, students are shown fake videos — often the very same ones we see in our social media feeds — and shown ways to determine who makes the videos, how they may have been altered, and how to double check facts before re-sharing the video.

The results are evident. In 2018, Finland led all of Europe in media literacy, scoring a 76 on a 100-point scale — significantly higher than than the European average, and 5 points better than the next nation, Denmark. The United Kingdom scored a 60, while Italy scored 50.

Finland holds something we don’t, however. Mackintosh describes their sense of national unity, a desire to remain “Finnish” regardless of which political party is in power. Too often, America seems part of a zero-sum game, where political opponents are more reviled than hostile foreign powers.

Short of rekindling American unity, a noble goal worth considering, we could at least improve our ability to spot and reject the fake information fed to us every day, and the false emotion provoked by it.

Aaron J. Brown is an author and college instructor from northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. He writes the blog MinnesotaBrown.com and hosts the Great Northern Radio Show on Northern Community Radio. This piece first appeared in the Sunday, July 14, 2019 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune.