“Let’s say I call myself the Institute
for Something-or-Other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the
Jews were entirely responsible for the second world war and the Holocaust
didn’t happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the
same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review
and so on.
“There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It’s all there: there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.”
—Terry Pratchett (1948-2015), author and journalist, in “Terry Pratchett predicted the rise of fake news in 1995, says biographer,” The Guardian, May 30, 2019.
Cartoon: Peter Steiner’s 1993 cartoon is The New Yorker’s most-reproduced.
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“There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It’s all there: there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.”
—Terry Pratchett (1948-2015), author and journalist, in “Terry Pratchett predicted the rise of fake news in 1995, says biographer,” The Guardian, May 30, 2019.
Cartoon: Peter Steiner’s 1993 cartoon is The New Yorker’s most-reproduced.
• Editorial Comment: Online, all ‘facts’ are created equal.
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