#100hardtruths

#11: real apologies for #fakenews aggravate its symptoms

In “20th Century Fox Gives Real Apology for a Fake News Campaign,” the chief executive of the public relations company Edelman engages in revealing doublespeak. He reflects upon the use of fake news in the industry, as well as in the recent, scandalous ad campaign for the movie A Cure for Wellness, for which 2oth Century Fox created fake health news from a fake newspaper (Salt Lake City Guardian): “It’s a very kind of perverse use of a genre that is really counterproductive.”

Extant faked image from the larger fake campaign, most of which has been removed from the internet.
Advertising and public relations—unlike the news or the governments that they pretend to report on in this campaign—have little to no obligation to truth-telling, fact-checking, well-being, or democracy for that matter. Their commitments are to their clients. All press is good press for products (and people as products) and the corporations that peddle them. Perverse manipulations of facts are the productive, counterproductive, and reproductive terrain on which the ad and public relations businesses—and the internet built on their revenues—thrive. The ad business, and the internet it and we produce by both clicking on ads and turning ourselves into advertisements that sell us to bidders for our attentions, is not and has never been an industry organized around keeping people well, nor has it pretended to be. Sapna Maheshwari elaborates on the deliberate, definitive, if potentially dangerous obfuscations of this 2oth Century Fox advertising ploy built from, as have been so many ads before it, a definitively “perverse” admixture of real and fake news:

An archived version of the [fake] vaccination article shows that it included real tweets posted by Mr. Trump in the past drawing a link between vaccines and autism. (The links is not supported by scientific evidence.)

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