Denzel Washington’s Take On Fake News Is Something We All Need To Hear

The further into the ‘Digital Age’ we move, the more it impacts every part of our lives. No longer are we watching the news, or picking up newspapers for news.
According to Pew Research Center for Journalism & Media in 2015 weekday newspaper circulation fell 7% and Sunday circulation fell 4%, showing it’s greatest decrease since 2010.
As more people look to social media sites for their news, the greater power and responsibility these sites hold. Crazy, click-bait content has more power than the factual news found on these same sites.
According to a Graph created by Craig Silverman of Buzzfeed that documented shares, reactions, and comments from articles. Fake news articles outperformed the real news articles by about 1.5 million.
The ironic thing is, the more they read fake articles on social media platforms the less informed they actually are.
Actor Denzel Washington summed this up best in a recent interview with the Washington Post saying,

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read it, you’re misinformed.”
“So what do we do?,” asked the Reporter.
“That’s the great question,”  Denzel responds.

Denzel went on and continued,

“What is the long-term effect of too much information? One of the effects is the need to be first, not even to be true anymore.”

He then leaves the ball in their court saying,

“What a responsibility you all have, to tell the truth,  Not just to be first, but to tell the truth.”

He finally concludes,

“We live in a society now where it’s just first, who cares. Get it out there. We don’t care who it hurts. We don’t care who we destroy. We don’t care if it’s true. Just say it. Sell it. Anything you practice, you’ll get good at it. Including B.S.”

Denzel was the subject of a popular fake news story this year involving him in support of the new president elect. Denzel’s Camp quickly dismissed the article claiming everything in it was completely false.
The Damage was already done. The BBC reported that the story was shared over 22,000 times within a few hours.