and finally You just couldn’t make it up...


Chris Proctor finds that faking up is hard to do


I


know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help admiring the folk who make up fake news. It is a very particular skill that requires considerable imagination. The fact is, it’s terribly difficult to


make up things that are more remarkable than the truth. I prised open my laptop recently and, laying aside


my spectacles and moral sense, decided to have a crack at creating a few alternative facts (or lies, as they are also known) of my own. Where to start? I decided on Jeremy Corbyn. Predictable, you may


say, but I thought, as there are mountains of mistruths about him doing the rounds, this must be fertile ground. The downside is that it is difficult for the newcomer to devise a fresh angle; more seasoned mendacitists having already covered angles like folly, fundamentalism and fashion. But what about the f-word? (I mean, apart from those three.) Yes! Finance! It would be a genuine test of my sham newsgathering aptitudes if I could smear him about fiddling his taxes. There are few less likely candidates: the bloke even posts his expenses and tax returns on his website. Between May and August 2010, he submitted total parliamentary claims of £8.70 for an ink cartridge. What a debut challenge this would be! Minutes later, I had carved out a neat 250, and


leaned back in my chair to sip tea and contemplate a job well done. That was when I heard the radio in the next room. My mug, jaw, spirits and pen dropped as I listened to the metallic voice: “Questions are being raised about the tax affairs of the Labour leader …” My copy had been gazumped by some bogus or


possibly real news wallah! I listened in jealous disbelief as I realised I was not in the same league as the real professionals. They had placed a story on the radio more extravagant than ‘Pope bigamist shock’ or ‘Piers Morgan sane’. Had some arch manipulator conspired with a


conniving sub to secure the emission of this nonsense? Or was this nonsense genuine, unadulterated true news nonsense? I couldn’t tell. However, this did not worry me: it is apparently a


disability shared by 96 per cent of the population. A YouGov poll in February showed that a mere four per cent of UK adults could correctly identify whether a news story was true or fake. The market research company showed 1,684 UK adults six news stories, of which three were false and three true. Only four per cent could identify which was which – and almost half (49 per cent) thought at least one of the made-up stories was genuine. At last. Some encouragement for my new


employment. An inattentive and ill-informed audience is a great boost to a perfidious pen-pusher. Acknowledging my inexperience, I turned my


attention to Israel. It should be easy, I reasoned: most people will believe anything about the Israeli government. What could I accuse them of? What about saying they had stolen Trump’s idea of stopping anyone from entering the country if he didn’t like them? Would people swallow that? I decided to claim that the Israeli


government was considering excluding anyone who had ever called for a ban on Israeli goods. OK, it sounded fake, but I might get away with it. Too late! And this time I wasn’t outpaced by a


fellow fake fact fabricator. I was outmanoeuvred by the Knesset, who destroyed my fake news by making it true. You have to be pretty imaginative to come up with something more incredible than Likud. I delved into sport, coming up with the


ludicrous story that a Chinese team were going to offer Wayne Rooney half a million pounds a week to kick a football. The following day it emerged that he’d been offered twice that. I moved to literature and thought of claiming George Galloway was poised to become a writer of recipe books. It emerged he is planning to become a children’s author. I mean, who is supposed to be making things up here? I tell you, it’s not easy to become a connoisseur of the counterfeit communiqué. And when you have a year like 2016, when most of the truth was incredible, the job becomes almost impossible. We should applaud the efforts of those who fight fearlessly for falsehood.


26 | theJournalist


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