"Fake news" comes from an official source

"Fake News"? It's a real phenomenon — inaccurate, misleading, outlandish, incredible, mendacious — but out there.

Where does it come from? Turns out it's not just from frustrated, anti-social millennials sitting in their parents' basement in their pajamas or entrepreneurial Macedonian techies making a lucrative living by dreaming up wildly enticing stories that lure people to click on their social media posts. Fake news also comes from ... the majority leader of the N.C. Senate.

Phil Berger, the majority leader, has posted grossly exaggerated and mean-spirited headlines on his official Facebook page with links to actual news stories from legitimate news sources, including the News & Observer. Caught and challenged about his practice, which violated Facebook's terms of use policy, Berger was unrepentant, accusing Facebook of misinterpreting its own terms of use.

Any astute user of social media should recognize Berger's wildly accusatory headlines as unprofessional and beneath the standards of the news organizations his posts link to. But Berger knows that many people won't click on the link or read the actual headline, much less read the straight-news story without Berger's partisan twist to it. He knows the headline does its damage, accusing Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, of all sorts of malfeasance.

What is most disturbing to the legitimate news sources, such as the N&O, the Charlotte Observer and WBTV, is that they are listed as the source, the link, below the misleading headline. Experienced Facebook users will often check the source before clicking on a link. Berger's fake headline makes it look as though honest-to-goodness real news organizations (the "mainstream media") have the goods on the Democrats. Berger's fake news make its Democratic target and the news media both look bad.

For Berger, that's a perfect combination, a two-for-one score. No wonder he sees nothing wrong with fake news.

Sad and sorry presidential politics in social media

The presidential primaries had been settled for only hours before the attacks and counter-attacks began. I don't mean the presidential candidates or Democratic or Republican officials. I mean the people on social media passing along unfounded rumors and totally incredible (i.e., impossible to be believed) accusations about the "presumptive" party nominees.

Scrolling through Facebook (never a good place to get your news), I ran across a photo of Bernie Sanders holding up an obviously Photoshopped sign endorsing Donald Trump and what was alleged to be a news report (check the sources of these outlandish "news" items) claiming Chelsea Clinton had discovered that Bill Clinton is not her father. It reminded me of an unbelievably gullible woman who used to visit me at the newspaper office. She told me one day that Boris Yeltsen, then the president of Russia, was Bill Clinton's father. "Look at them," she said. "They look exactly alike."

Other social media posts are not quite so outlandish as these, but they are unapologetically harsh and mean-spirited in condemning the "other" candidate. Can we have a civil election in this atmosphere?

If there was ever a hope for a civil discourse and debate of key issues facing the nation and the world, that hope was quashed to dust by the Republican candidate debates, which focused more on political correctness, personal flaws and genitalia than on the major issues of the day.

Some of the fault lies with the news media, which increasingly sees news as entertainment with little concern for facts or seriousness, and with the American people, who have too little patience and too short an attention span to examine complex issues and serious topics.

Give 'em pablum; it's what they want.

The next big thing drags down communication

I can hear it now: "He's so old-school, why, he's still blogging!"

That was what occurred to me as I read that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook were coming out with a new form of digital communication, which Zuckerberg and others said would make email obsolete. I'll admit that I'm an email junkie. I'd much rather email someone than call them on the phone. Half the time you don't get the person you're calling, so you leave a message and hope they call you back — you hope at a time when you can answer your own phone, or they'll have to leave a message. Email is simpler. Your message goes in their inbox; they read it; they reply. What could be simpler or more efficient?

Now they're saying email is passe, obsolete, so yesterday! As I understand it, what Facebook is offering is some sort of combination of email, instant messaging and text messaging. I've done all of those, including video chat, but I still find email the most efficient and effective means of communicating. I use group emails to convey information about upcoming meetings, to make announcements, and to keep colleagues or relatives informed. It's a lot simpler than individually calling people or sending separate postcards.

Of course, there are those who haven't quite gotten the hang of email yet. I still encounter people who have email at home but only check their inboxes once a week or so. I can only roll my eyes. "Didn't you get my email?" "Oh, I haven't checked my email in a couple of weeks?" Do these people not check their postal mailboxes but once a week? I can't imagine that Facebook's shorter, more instantaneous sort of messaging would be appealing to them.

Although I've sent and received text messages, I don't find them very efficient or even rational. You're sitting there with a phone in your hand, but instead of making a call, you type a short message on those teeny-tiny keys. There must be some thrill to it that I'm missing. So what is it that Facebook is going to do to make this email/texting hybrid communication the latest rage? It arranges your messages and allows you to block anyone who isn't your Facebook friend. OK. Any good email program can filter your email to achieve that goal. Just what is new here?

Perhaps a greater concern should be the way that email, texting and whatever is next is pushing out thoughtful communication — the kind that people used to exchange in long, handwritten letters, which would show up years later in "The Collected Letters of ..." That's not going to happen with emails. The cell phone calls that begin with "where you at?" and the Facebook status updates that say "At home. Eating baloney sandwich" do not constitute a conversation. Any "new thing" that encourages still briefer, less thoughtful exchanges of meaningless (and misspelled) words is a detriment to culture, courtesy and understanding.

So here's hoping that Mark Zuckerberg's big new thing doesn't catch on. It's not like he needs the money.

In cyber age, I have no "friends"

I was on my university alumni association's Web page a few months back when I noticed a link to "My Page." I clicked on it and discovered the alumni association's in-house version of a social networking site, a Facebook or MySpace limited to alumni association members. On "my page" I found the message: "You have no friends."

I had to go to have the alumni association tell me that? And how did they know?

Of course, the "friends" the page referred to were not "friends" in the usual sense; that is, people you talk to face-to-face, confide in and call upon for advice and help. These "friends," of whom I have none, are the people who sign up to share your thoughts, photos and whatnot on social networking sites. I declined to get  involved in the alumni association's network, chose no "friends," and did not offer myself as a "friend."

A few years ago, I assigned a young reporter, fresh out of college, to do a story on social networking sites, including Facebook and MySpace. To my amazement, the young reporter was not familiar with either network and struggled with the assignment. We old geezers in the newsroom had assumed everyone  in college spent half their time on Facebook or MySpace. That's what recent adulatory news stories had indicated. Since that time about four years ago, Facebook has expanded beyond its college campus corral and is accepting members who do not have collegiate e-mail addresses. This has opened the network to older people who are using Facebook to reconnect with childhood, high school and college friends. They're "friending" (a new verb the social networks have launched) their old friends and catching up on their children and grandchildren. (Sometimes they also "unfriend" people they decide aren't worth keeping up with.) MySpace, meanwhile, has been in the news as an alleged haven for sexual predators and has signed an agreement to eliminate those dirty old men masquerading as teens.

My wife has recently posted herself on Facebook and has "friended" some high school classmates and reconnected with old friends (old in the sense of aged) from when we were young parents. She occasionally points out to me the comments or photos of people I know or knew, and she has frequently suggested that I, too, join Facebook. A reader of this blog even suggested that if I were on Facebook, I could promote the blog and gain more readers.

I'm still resistant. For all the joyful connectedness that social networking promises, I still find it artificial, especially for those folks who lay claim to hundreds and hundreds of "friends." Even the most extroverted and interdependent among us can probably claim no more than a dozen or so "real" friendships, not hundreds and hundreds.

And though I would enjoy retaining connections to high school classmates and others, I haven't made the leap into the ocean of connections in social networking, where I might drown in the sheer numbers. Reconnecting to high school classmates? I recently did that at a funeral, and it was real, not cyber.