Some might see the difference between a news-style satirist and a peddler in fake news as rather subtle. Superficially, both are presenting “false” narratives, which on the surface have the appearance of truth. However, writers of satirical news, as seen in The Onion, The Beaverton, and my own website The Unger Review, never intend to dupe anyone. There are clues – sarcasm, exaggeration, irony – that nudge readers in the direction of seeing it for what it really is. In other words, like a good magician, we may never reveal our tricks, but we also never claim to have any supernatural powers. This is clearly distinct from those who write fake news, which I define as deliberately deceptive news, written for political, economic, or trolling purposes. These folks are charlatans and we should all stand united against them.
So I was a little taken aback this afternoon when I read David Segal’s puff piece in The New York Times about “mentalist” and “psychic” Uri Geller, who catapulted to fame in the 1970s for his apparent ability to bend spoons with his mind. Geller presented this skill not as a magic trick, not as an illusion, but as a real supernatural power. Magician and skeptic James Randi thoroughly debunked Geller decades ago, but to this day the spoon-bender still has followers who really believe he has psychic powers. Even some of the magicians who sought to discredit him and point out his fraud at the time, don’t bother anymore. Some have now made peace with the fact that Geller still denies his sham. “I think the world is aware that if he’s fraudulent,” says Andy Nyman, “there are bigger lies and bigger frauds out there that are far more damaging.”
Segal then segues into a comparison with “digital deep fakes,” suggesting that ’70s-era charlatans like Geller are nothing compared to the potential deception now offered on the web. While this is true on some level, I also find it a bit of a red herring that deflects criticism from a man who Randi and others exposed as a fraud long ago. “Digital deep fakes” are indeed a problem, especially a political one and, in many ways, yes, they’re worse than spoon-bending trickery, but they also don’t delude people into believing in supernatural abilities. In this regard, people like Geller, and faith healers like Peter Popoff who Randi also exposed as a fraud, are far more problematic or, at the very least, they’re a different kind of problem. Geller’s fakery shouldn’t be downplayed simply because Segal can find some other unrelated deception that appears, to him, to be even worse.
The article is polite to a fault.
“If Mr. Geller can’t actually bend metal with his brain — and civility and fairness demands this “if” — he is the author of a benign charade, which is a pretty good definition of a magic trick. ”
Geller’s charade is hardly benign. It’s about much more than duping people with a “spoon-bending” trick. Between 1978 and 1995, the US government wasted upwards of 20 million dollars investigating the psychic claims of Geller and others. Far worse than the wasted time and resources, however, are how Geller’s claim presents false hope that psychic abilities like this really do exist, and that has all sorts of real world consequences, from the belief in faith healing to the increasing attraction of pseudo-science.
Equally problematic is Segal’s notion that in order to be “civil and fair” we must always couch our skepticism of Geller with the word “if”. According to Segal, we must never be too emphatic in our dismissal of this man’s supernatural abilities. Must we be polite about fake news, too? What about the digital deep fakes that he derides? If we have to be civil and fair about the claims of Uri Geller, then surely we also need to be civil and fair to creators of deep fakes. Have we now officially arrived at an Orwellian (or Trumpian) point in history where every lie must be phrased as only “possibly” untrue?
I believe in civil discourse, and I’d even call myself a postmodernist in the sense that I believe we need to be aware of how our own biases and backgrounds influence the way we see the world, but I certainly don’t believe that “fairness” demands that we lie. It doesn’t even demand that we’re open to the possibility that a lie might be true, which is what Segal seems to ask us to do. Being polite about charlatans presents more problems than it solves.
(photo credit: David Parry PA Wire/CC)