For many decades, on the Thursday closest to April 1, the Muhlenberg College student newspaper has become a broadsheet of satire. Every article is written with Onion-style content told in a plain news fashion, a joke our staff looks forward to pulling every year. Now, that time of year has come again: our next issue will be our April Fool’s edition. Perhaps calling attention to the joke ahead of time spoils it, but this year especially poses some real concerns that need to be addressed before our satire hits newsstands.
These last two years, the rise of fake news has been no joking matter. Fake news has become a very real insult and a danger to a newspaper’s credibility — not because it actually says anything about the organization’s credibility, but because it diminishes the power of the press in the public eye. Fake news tends to fall into one of two categories: it’s either a dismissal by authority of disagreeable facts, or the deliberate creation of fabricated content to feed a certain mentality.
If anything, society at large is becoming distrustful of the media’s accuracy and ethical respects for the truth in general. And in the midst of this turmoil is our long-standing tradition to print a joke paper.
Unlike the purveyors of fake news, who promote their own viewpoint while stubbornly shutting out others, we do everything in our power to make sure that our audience is in on the joke. Satire, unlike fake news, lets the reader know it is fake by presenting an outlandish idea as reasonable—and in that way, creates humor. Our April Fool’s content would then qualify as satire.
And even though we’ve taken steps to avoid wrongful accusations of fake news, we’ve still encountered miscommunications. Last year we wrote a piece to make fun of the lack of parking on campus, and although we published it only in the April Fool’s PDF of the edition, some still believed it was true. Even though every one of our Op-Ed Editor Will Wamser’s pieces is satire, we have still received angry emails taking what he wrote literally, and his article on not vaccinating his kids (because he hates his kids) was actually picked up and shared by anti-vaxxer groups on the internet.
We intend to keep to our tradition and publish our most-read issue. But we recognize the larger risk. Even in doing the best we can, writing satire is a risk within itself of being misunderstood. And we recognize that.
Additionally, in the grand scheme of things, a single issue at a small liberal arts school once a year as a tradition isn’t going to gain national attention. But the need to address this beforehand as a warning, or a defense, says a lot about the larger concerns about the power the term “fake news” has gained in the last two years.
