Post-truth: That's All They Care About

The Yellow Press was new journalism that would change the character and appearance of the daily newspaper and enormously increase its mass influence. It had some distinguishing characteristics such as “headlines, in black or red, that ‘screamed excitement, often about comparatively unimportant news,’; impostures and “frauds,” such as “faked” interviews.”

Source: The Conversation

The Yellow press had pushed Spain and the United States into war in 1898 when in Maine, an explosion of a U.S battleship sank down. The truth of the explosion had come from a mine in the harbor. But William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer had published false articles and spread rumors about a scheme to sink the ship, which had increased tensions. It seemed like that using an incident or an issue to gain publicity, attention from the reader, and spread out the fake news is against the purpose of journalism.

Fox News Tucker Carlson recently raised an outrage among everyone when he claimed the January 6th riot as a peaceful protest. On his show, he released a footage of rioters inside the Capitol Hill. In the footage, the viewers could see there was no violence, people were acting calm and did no harm. WTF? Did Carlson ever look outside the Capitol Hill and what happened inside from other media outlets or the documentary on HBO? Everyone knew the January 6th was a riot and the darkest day of American history. A bunch of morons who called themselves "patriots" destroyed the American democracy. The whole world looked at it and shared their disappointment to the U.S. Now, Carlson said that it was a peaceful protest and blamed the media for lying about the January 6th. I don't like Carlson at all. I despaired him. But he made a good example of what I am about to say in this post.

A concept perfectly fits to the current event, not only Carlson but to Fox News. It's called post-truth.

According to Cambridge Dictionary, post-truth means a situation which people'd like to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, instead of believing on facts. It actually worries me a lot because it represents an era of fake news where people only believe on one side rather than listening to other side. That's what media is doing right now. There is no longer one media reporting two sides of a story. Now, they will pick a side, whether it is conservative or liberal, to report on. Fox News is a conservative network, so they will talk bad about the Democrats. CNN is a liberal network, so they will talk bad about the Republican.

So return to Fox News, we can see that the viewers who are conservative and Trump lovers love to hear what their hosts say on their shows, especially when they took aim at the Democrats. They don't care about if the news they heard are true. The more Fox News said bad about Democrats and good about Republicans, the more viewers want to tune in. And just like that, Fox News gain more viewership. That is so greedy. They put themselves into the brink of self-destruction because they keep lying and lying; then, right now, when Fox News is facing the lawsuit, they began to deny, blame, and try the best to show that they are clean and how much they hate Trump. Well, I think it is too late to do that right now. Yes, I understand why they had to do they are doing. They are conservatives so they must do anything to keep their belief and their opinion. They represent the post-truth era. Rather than digging in to find out more about the election result or invite experts, they sticked to what they thought and what they believed in. It accidently made the journalism look bad.