I remember real fake news

Mid-1980s. Los Angeles. Public Access television.

I don’t remember the producer/director’s name. He was a pioneer in fake news.

On the screen, against a solid black background, you saw a medium close-up of a face. That’s all you ever saw. This person was being interviewed by a male voice off-camera.

The face belonged to an intelligent person. He seemed to be some sort of government official. His position was never clarified.

The interviewer asked him questions about some unspecified policy or US intervention abroad or brewing financial scandal. You never found out exactly what the issue was.

The face’s answers and comments came across as quite real and intelligent. For a full half-hour. But those answers were somewhat vague, so you could never figure out what the controversy/issue was about.

The whole tone of the show was serious and sober and penetrating—but nothing was ever penetrated.

Even though I knew what the producer/director was doing, I found the show a bit disturbing as the minutes piled up. The attitude of the talking face was…annoying. Get to the point. Tell us what you really think. Come on. Stop circumventing the real issue. Admit there is a serious crime.

In other words, don’t act like a government official who keeps deflecting questions, changing the subject, providing useless background.

After watching a half-hour of this, I felt myself reflecting on “real” news presented by “real” networks and realizing the con of the “real” news went deeper than I’d previously thought.

My habitual sense of reality was disrupted.