It happens every morning. We check our cell phone and we are faced with countless dubious messages, photos and videos that increasingly seem more credible. Some particularly catch our attention and we share them with friends and family. It may be a plot to overthrow a government, the death of a celebrity, or a cure for a terminal illness. We get carried away by emotion. Few allow themselves doubt. And fewer are looking for other sources of information.
The 10th International Congress of the Spanish Language (CILE), organized in Arequipa—that city at the foot of a volcano, on the southern coast of Peru—opened its discussions at the Mario Vargas Llosa Regional Library with a current topic that has sent newsrooms reeling: falsified or fake news. The panelists: Luis García Montero, director of the Cervantes Institute; Pepa Bueno, journalist and former director of EL PAÍS; María Moya, CEO of the company Prodigioso Volcán; Juan Aurelio Arévalo Miró-Quesada, director of the newspaper The Commerce; flanked by the moderators: Raquel Caleya, director of Culture at Cervantes, and Jordi Gracia, literary critic and columnist of this newspaper.
“Ideologies have convinced us that someone can walk through the sea without sinking. The difference is that now that becomes news,” said García Montero, who stressed that the big difference between informing and communicating is that in the former there is an attempt to testify to a truth while the latter is exposed to hoaxes. He also pointed out the need to defend the decency of journalists, who are in the midst of social networks and media outlets that fall into the hands of millionaires, who in some cases are willing to falsify the facts based on their interests. “I lie with the complicity of haste and I dedicate myself to manipulation. Journalists must refuse to fall into that rubble to continue telling people what is happening in the street. Throwing in the towel invites cynicism and turns us into dunghills,” he added.
Meanwhile, Bueno established that 2016 was a turning point in the profound change of the communication ecosystem in the world. He summarized it in three events: the victory of Brexit in Great Britain, the referendum on the peace agreement in Colombia and the electoral victory of Donald Trump in the United States. In each event, he explained, there were lies involved to obtain an end. And condescension of the press. Which has led to the existence of “alternative facts,” as White House advisor Kellyanne Conway later patented. The consensus about what is true has broken down.
“Lies have always existed. The novelty is the extraordinary capacity to spread lies,” he reflected. Bueno stressed that it is vital to explain to people the number of filters that a publication in a media outlet passes through, compared to the shortcut of lies that jump from mobile phone to mobile phone. “Those of us who have the job of honestly approaching reality are very alone,” he questioned.
In that sense, Arévalo regretted that there are more and more people who do not want to be informed, but rather affirmed. That is, they only consume those media that do not tell them uncomfortable truths, nor do they present scenarios that force them to rethink their convictions. He pointed out that, according to the Reuters Institute, Peru is the country that shares news the most via instant messaging. “Probably, we are the greatest disseminators of fake news in the world”, he ironized. For Arévalo Miró-Quesada it is key to revalue the role of the journalist as a professional who produces knowledge, with rigor and a vocation for service. “We have been very permissive with usurpers who feel like journalists for writing an article or speaking to a camera. A journalist is an information professional.”
At the It presents several interactive tests that retain visitors. “It is a projection in which we can see ourselves identified. It is the cognitive biases that mark our brain and make us trust more in what is close to our beliefs. The interesting thing is that not everything is lost. We can correct this problem and be actors in favor of the truth,” María Moya, one of the main managers of this exhibition, which will be on until the end of November, said optimistically.
Meanwhile, the essayist Jordi Gracia described the phenomenon of falsified news as a “real monster that undermines us below the visible.” He denounced that, in his view, big technology companies, allied with the main political power on the globe—call it the United States—are involved in “a militant and deliberate campaign to undermine the structural conditions for the survival of democracy in any country.”
Finally, wrapped in a space as significant as the Mario Vargas Llosa Library, García Montero remembered the integrity of the Nobel Prize winner in Literature to say goodbye to his column Touchstone, which he published in EL PAÍS, and then literature. “When he realized that he was beginning to fail and not control his rigor, he said goodbye to the readers. And he said goodbye very well. Personal decency is essential to not let oneself be intimidated and to be the first to monitor one’s degradation.”