ORIGINAL ARTICLES

Fake News in Media Art: Fake News as a Media ArtPractice Vs. Fake News in Politics

Hadas Emma Kedar1

# Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

AbstractFake news has become popular in the last few years and appears mainly in the form ofalleged news articles that spread via social media or as satire. However, fake news canappear in two additional manifestations: in politics—when falsehoods are generated bypoliticians; and as a practice of media art—by the activist-art branch ‘tactical media’.From the perspective of media art history, this article presents a comparative analysis oftwo case studies of each of these domains: the political case was a false statement aboutthe 2017 tax bill by US president Donald Trump, and the media art case was a falsestatement on BBC television in 2004 regarding corporate responsibility for the Bhopalindustrial disaster, acted by the art duo The Yes Men. The cases were compared fortheir tactics, motivations, purposes and rhetoric. The most salient difference reveals theproducers’ relation to truth: while in a ‘post-truth’ manner Trump ‘bullshitted’,distorted facts and disregarded truth, the Yes Men emphasized facts and exposed truth.This article concludes that fake news in politics is dangerous and that fake news inmedia art has an educational potential to fight fake news and promote criticaldeliberation.

Keywords Fake news .Media art . Bullshit . Post-truth . TheYesMen . Donald Trump .

Tactical media

Introduction

In the last two decades, the development of media technologies and social networks hasenabled the production and dissemination of information more rapidly and abundantlythan before. Yet it has also allowed the rapid and abundant spread of false informationand fake news. In recent years, ‘fake news’ has been recurrently discussed followingDonald Trump’s frequent use of the term during the 2016 USA presidential election

https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-019-00053-y

* Hadas Emma Kedarhadas.emma.kedar@gmail.com

1 Independent Scholar, Hamburg, Germany

Published online: 13 July 2019

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and subsequently as president. The Cambridge Dictionary defines fake news as 'falsestories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usuallycreated to influence political views or as a joke' (Cambridge Advanced Learner’sDictionary & Thesaurus 2019). The spread of false information, its methods and scalehave been the focus of recent fake news studies, determining that most engagementswith fake news are via social media—in particular Facebook and Twitter (Allcott andGentzkow 2017; Fletcher et al. 2018). Satire, however, constitutes a different type offake news. It contains humour to criticize the state of affairs and the mainstream media,mostly on late-night television shows or on satirical news websites. Fake news has afurther colloquial connotation of the kind that is used by president Trump to describenews reports which he does not like (Coll 2017). Differently from Trump, to discuss thedangers of falsehoods in the media I will refer to critiques of mainstream media at timesdelivering biased or inaccurate information. In this article I present two extendedmanifestations of fake news: the first derives from powerful people and politicians as amedium through which falsehoods are delivered, and the second situates fake news as apractice of media art.

First, Trump exemplifies what I name 'fake news in politics'. Parallel to his frequentuse of the term ‘fake news’, Trump has continually delivered falsehoods (TheWashington Post 2019), using various forms of intentional or reckless untruths. Onecan label his practice ‘lying’ (Shear and Huetteman 2017), but an overall label wouldbe ‘bullshitting’ (MacKenzie and Bhatt 2018). While a lie is a direct falsification offacts, bullshitting rhetorically bypasses facts. According to Frankfurt (2005: 33), theessence of bullshit is its 'lack of connection to a concern with truth.' This lack ofconcern with truth describes Trump’s conduct, which has been further observed byMcIntyre (2018) as a symptom of the current ‘post-truth’ era. Post-truth generallydescribes the tendency to base one’s opinions upon feelings rather than objective facts(Lexico Dictionaries 2019), and thus it undermines the basic communication compo-nents of objectivity and integrity—and perhaps threatens the overall status of truth.Second, media art offers a unique combination of artistic and socio-technologicalpractice and theory. Artist Julie Perini (2010:189) explains that media art is innovativeand collaborative, and aims at 'blurring the boundary between scientific research and artproduction'. Fake news is being used by media artists namely in the realm of tacticalmedia—a form of activist art using various media for socio-political critique. Byanalysing these two manifestations, I wish to explore the ways in which fake news isdifferent when it is used by artists than by politicians. To do so I will compare two casestudies: one by the American art duo The Yes Men and the other by president Trump.While I compare the cases for their tactics, motivations, purposes and rhetoric, theircommon ground is a false statement given in public: The Yes Men declared on BBClive television a radical bogus statement about a big corporation deciding to compen-sate the victims of the 1984 Bhopal disaster; and president Trump declared an exag-gerated false statement regarding his new tax bill.

With the notion that practices such as politics, news or art cannot deliver objectivetruth per se, I do not engage in the philosophical debate about the existence of‘objective truth’ but rather adopt McIntyre’s approach of 'respecting truth' (McIntyre2018: 11)—assuming that objective facts exist and are possible to prove or refute. Andso, to maintain the status of truth and the basic integrity of public deliberation—whichare threatened in the post-truth era—I argue that fake news in politics should be

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opposed and fought against by appropriate cultural means. The case studies I use hereemphasize the harm of fake news in politics and the educational potential of fake newsin media art. Comparing an artistic tactic to a political one is both refreshing andchallenging, and, moreover, reveals art to be potentially powerful and accountable.

Fake News Extended Manifestations

In the last few years, the most common manifestation of fake news is false stories thatappear on the internet and circulate via social media (Cambridge Advanced Learner’sDictionary & Thesaurus 2019). These stories appear on websites which mimic onlinenews outlets and contain articles presented as factual stories but are entirely fabricated.According to Allcott and Gentzkow (2017: 217), some websites contain a mixture offalse articles and factual articles—often with 'a partisan slant'; and other websitesdisguise themselves as news outlets, often titled as news companies embedded in theirinternet-domain such as cbsnews.com.co or cnn.com.de. Fake news websites have twoprimary motivations: financial and/or ideological (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017: 217).Whereas the ideological motivation can be propagandist, critical or partisan, thefinancial motivation is business driven and based on ‘clickbait’—a tactic designed toattract users to click on a sensational headline so that the website’s owners get paid perclick by their advertisers.

Another manifestation of fake news is satire. Within the genre of satire, fake news isoften a news broadcast or article presented humorously for political criticism andentertainment. Clearly one should distinguish a professional satirist from an amateurinternet user who spreads fake news jokes online. In some cases, an online satiricalstory which seems at some level credible can leak into the general onlinemisinformation—so that out with the satirical context the story can be mistaken forbeing factual (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017: 213). Nevertheless, in satirical contexts theaudience knows that the presenter is performing a role and that the stories arefabricated, exaggerated or lampooned. The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight areexamples of American satirical television shows which criticize current political affairsand mainstream media. Political satire as such challenges traditional journalism andreveals the media’s 'inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and failures' (Reilly 2012: 2).

The claim of ‘fake news’ is now infamously associated with Trump. However, whileTrump portrays news with which he disagrees as ‘fake news’ (Coll 2017), here it isused to describe biased, inaccurate, distorted, manipulated, partly true or false infor-mation delivered by mainstream media. Errors in news articles are commonly referredto as ‘false news’ by the media—perhaps to emphasize the accidental nature of themistake and to distinguish it from intentional fake news. Although exaggerated andharmful to general trust in the media, Trump’s claim does raise the question whethererrors in gathering and organizing information are merely false and innocent; orwhether the media should be scrutinized for recklessness, bias or misleading news.Following Eco (1990: 182), a false piece of news is not dissimilar to historicalforgery—which he refers to as a mere lie— 'a formally authentic charter, whichcontains false or invented information' (186). When the media deliver false news, itcan undermine common knowledge and the status of objective facts; and sincehistorians depend on news articles, it can also harm the authenticity of history writing

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itself. Ideally the role of the media would be a socially accountable information systemwhich is transparent, fact-checks and openly discusses disputable topics. Alas, contem-porary industrial news production portrays a different picture: the media is beingcriticized time and again for being distorted or propagandist (Chomsky 2002; Davies2008); false or unverified (Davies 2008); biased or commercial (Holiday 2013); or even‘infotainment’—information mixed with entertainment (Morone 2013:138). Further-more, journalists rely on sources which ought to be reliable such as witnesses, wireagencies, scientific and academic sources; and in particular they prefer to rely on‘official sources’—public representatives, politicians and their spokespersons—because they are more likely to deliver 'factual statements which are safe' (Davies2008: 118). When a source is poisonous—incorrect, biased, distorted—then the jour-nalist’s research is contaminated. As sources of information, should politicians be lessscrutinized than the media itself?

Fake News in Politics

It is crucial to distinguish a ‘fake news’ producer who is a citizen—an artist, a partisan,an activist—from a public representative since their roles in society are different, and sothe expectations from, and consequences of, their actions should be held to criticalscrutiny. Politicians can be exceptionally good at creating and disseminating false news.An early example for that was, inspired by the 1938 War of the Worlds satirical radiobroadcast, when Hitler and Himmler used a similar tactic to fabricate a Polish attack ofGermans. A top-secret SS unit fabricated an attack of a radio station in Gleiwitz andbroadcasted it via the radio. The next day, on September 1st, 1939, Hitler explained tothe Reichstag that 'Polish troops had attacked Germany,' and so the Nazis invadedPoland (Schwartz 2015: 161–162) —with catastrophic consequences. A contemporaryexample is from Trump’s rally speech in February 2017 referring to a terror attack inSweden. He stated: 'We’ve got to keep our country safe. ... you look at what’s happeninglast night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in largenumbers' (cited in Topping 2017). In reality there was no terrorist attack in Sweden thatnight, which means that Trump had probably misinterpreted or poorly understood apiece of information. The day after, he explained that he was referring to a Fox Newsstory about immigrants in Sweden (Ringstrom andMason 2017). This example presentsa misleading assertion that became news through the rhetoric of a politician. Even if thiswas an honest mistake, the audience exposed to such information from an authority asthe President of the United States, is likely to receive this as truth.

Further, in the post-truth era falsehoods by politicians can be delivered indirectly—often through bullshitting. Following Frankfurt, bullshit is a speech tactic or action toavoid lying (2005: 10; 49). In our post-truth era, bullshit is used by public represen-tatives and politicians in the form of sophisticated rhetoric to bypass truth and objectivefacts. I have watched video interviews with politicians (mostly American) andwitnessed a general shift in public debate: from whether a fact is true – to what feelstrue (e.g. Trump in his first month of presidency explaining his loss of popular votethrough millions of illegal votes—based on his feeling (cited in ABC News 2017)); andfrom objective facts – to ‘alternative facts’, a term coined by Trump’s White Housecounsellor, Kellyanne Conway to, perhaps, avoid telling a direct lie (Obeidallah 2017).Fake news in politics is particularly dangerous because a public highly exposed to

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misinformation from all media is likely to develop general uncertainty and mistrust, orto believe uncritically that which they ought to question. However, is it different when afalsehood is delivered as part of an artistic tactic?

Fake News in Media Art (Tactical Media)

The umbrella field Media Art (also referred to as New media art or Digital art)combines art with various cultural, scientific and technological practices and theories.Within media art, one practice which adapts the production of non-truth content istactical media—an activist-artistic approach that grew in the mid-1990s outside muse-um walls. It focuses on socio-political issues upon which it often acts in public sphere.Its tactics are usually short and temporary, using any media necessary such as theinternet, video, radio, television or billboards. Tactical media places itself outsideinstitutions yet it operates from within, appropriating media technologies and manip-ulating them (Apprich 2013). As Biafra declared: 'Don’t hate the media; become themedia!' (in Blais and Ippolito 2006: 125). In other words, tactical media artists use thevery same practices of power institutions – to subvert them.

Fake news is referred to here as a practice of tactical media. By the act of faking,according to some artists, art is able to express truth (Bichlbaum 2012; Catts 2018). Insome tactical media acts the artists directly fabricate news and distribute it, and in otheracts they forge information which later circulates as false news. One example is from2011 by Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev, a European art duo who created‘Newstweek’—an intervention act in several cafés around Europe. In each café theartists hacked the local WiFi, occupied news websites such as Der Spiegel and BBCOnline News, and altered their content, so that the customers found manipulatedridiculed news on their personal computers. This action was a commentary, not onlyon the growing fake news phenomena, but also a critique of the 'top-down distributionmodel' of corporate media and its manipulations of public opinion (Oliver and Vasiliev2011). Another example is from 2002 when the Viennese media art group‘monochrom’ was invited to participate in the São Paulo biennial as Austria’s repre-sentative. Because of the rise of the far-right Austrian government at the time—whichthe group resisted—monochrom decided to avoid direct representation and insteadinvent an artist named Georg Paul Thomann. The group members constructedThomann’s existence from a fabricated biographical book and an oeuvre website whichthey collaboratively produced. Then they sent a press release to newspapers announc-ing that Thomann would be the Austrian representative at São Paulo, and the news waspublished in several outlets as factual—though it was regarded with some suspicion.1

However, despite the group’s expectation that the hoax would be immediately revealed,the fiction that was Thomann was accepted by many as true (Grenzfurthner 2006).When it was finally revealed, it was crucial because only then could the critique ofAustria’s politics materialize: Austria that year had a non-existing artist to represent it atthe biennial.

How does fake news in tactical media differ from satire? Satirical fake news declaresthe pretence upfront—the viewers know that they are about to watch an alleged news

1 A newspaper article about Georg Paul Thomann representing Austria is archived here [in German]:http://www.monochrom.at/thomann/archiv/thomann-presse-19-02-2002.jpg.

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programme for the sake of critical commentary and entertainment; they are not beingdeceived. Yet tactical media fake news often use hoaxes, which according to Reilly(2018: 5) are primarily defined as an act of deception. Hoaxing aims to create full beliefin a certain occurrence in order to then reveal the truth behind it. A hoax in tacticalmedia seeks to induce the spectator to experience temporary belief and subsequentlymoral contemplation when the deception is revealed. By comparing their actions tosatire shows, Reilly (2013) claims that the actions of the art duo the Yes Men are moreeffective at creating social awareness because they shift 'from critique to mobilization'.The claim is that mere critique or satire cannot achieve the same results as can actions.In other words, tactical media focuses on doing instead of talking.

Case Studies of Fake News: Politics Vs. Media Art

The ‘Bhopal Hoax’ by the Yes Men

In 1999 the American artists Jacques Sevrin and Igor Vamos (also known as AndyBichlbaum and Mike Bonanno) founded the Yes Men whose work has focused ontopics such as social ethics, environmental matters and globalization. They use varioustactical media practices which mostly include impersonation and hoaxing such asperformative interventions in conferences, and fabrication of websites and newspapers.Sevrin and Vamos work with an international network of contributors from differentprofessional fields to use whatever media is necessary for each project. One of the YesMen’s first actions took place during the 2000 US election, launching the rogue websiteGWBush.com on which they published subversive and satirical content critical ofBush’s covert campaign. Another action took place during the US-Iraq war in 2008.Together with artist-activist Steve Lambert and dozens of volunteers the group wrote,printed and distributed a clone of The New York Times filled with ‘good news’ articles.The front page declared 'Iraq War Ends'.2 The aim of the hoax was not to talk about thestate of affairs with respect to the war, but to momentarily alter reality and stimulatepeople’s reactions to positive news.

Using a similar approach of altering reality, the Yes Men’s ‘Bhopal hoax’ (unofficialtitle) was initiated as a response to the Bhopal disaster of 1984, when the Indian city ofBhopal suffered a major industrial disaster. Toxic gas-release from a nearby UnionCarbide pesticide factory caused the deaths of more than 20,000 people and severehealth problems to many others. The Yes Men agreed with the Bhopal activists’ claimthat the compensation given by the American company Union Carbide—later acquiredby Dow Chemical—was insufficient. Another claim was that the abandoned factorywas still contaminated and was causing ongoing health problems in Bhopal. On itsbehalf, Dow Chemical repeatedly claimed that it carried no responsibility for Bhopalbecause Union Carbide was acquired by Dow with no liability for the disaster (BBC2004). To challenge Dow’s claim, in 2002 the Yes Men launched a rogue websiteDowEthics.org. The cloned website looked identical to Dow’s but contained subversiveslogans such as 'Dowkharma: Treating others as we would like to be treated'. Two yearslater, in December 2004, the BBC-World aired a special daily programme on Bhopal

2 To read the full newspaper go to http://nytimes-se.com/todays-paper/NYTimes-SE.pdf.

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20 years after the disaster. Looking for a comment from Dow Chemical, a BBCresearcher mistakenly landed on the rogue Dow website and sent an interview requestto the Yes Men. Confirming the invitation, the Yes Man Servin impersonated a Dowspokesperson and went on to appear on BBC live as Jude Finisterra (Fig. 1). During theinterview, Finisterra announced that Dow had decided to finally take full responsibilityfor the Bhopal disaster, recompense the victims and clean the contaminated site. Hedeclared:

...today I’m very, very happy to announce that for the first time Dow is acceptingfull responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe. We have a $12 billion plan tofinally, at long last, fully compensate the victims, including the 120,000 who mayneed medical care for their entire lives, and to fully and swiftly remediate theBhopal plant site... (BBC World 2004).

The announcement became headline news, especially on Google News (The Yes Men2006:179). Dow stockholders started withdrawing so that in Germany the share pricefell 4.24% immediately after the interview—a loss of $2 billion off Dow’s market value(Paterson and Bindra 2004). After approximately 2 hours, the hoax was finallyexposed; Dow announced that Finisterra was not their representative, and that theyhad not made any such an announcement. The BBC corrected the false news andapologized for their mistake.

The ‘Biggest Tax Cut’ by Donald Trump

The 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, graduated from the WhartonSchool of Finance and was a businessman for most of his career. According to Trump,in 2004 he was the largest real estate developer in New York. His assets includenumerous buildings, model agencies, private aircraft, gulf courses and casinos. Onhis official website it reads: 'President Trump has always dreamed big and pushed theboundaries of what is possible his entire career, devoting his life to building business,

Fig. 1 Still-shot from the ‘Bhopal act’, interview with Jude Finisterra (performed by Jacques Servin) on BBCWorld, The Yes Men, 2004

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jobs and the American Dream' (Donald J. Trump Official Website 2018). A similarpoint of view is presented in the opening of The Apprentice (2004), a reality businessshow which was hosted by Trump, in which he narrated that Manhattan is a tough placebut 'if you work hard, you can really hit it big.'3 Trump values hard work and financialsuccess, and journalists and media critics consider him a skilful user of social media(Lovink and Servin 2018; Parkinson 2015).

At the beginning of his presidency in January 2017, Trump proposed a new tax planthat would cut tax expenses for citizens and companies. His Republican Party support-ed the bill, claiming that 'the tax cuts for businesses and families will unleash invest-ment, spending and growth', and Trump claimed further that this plan will benefit inparticular the middle class and small businesses (BBC 2017a). But the DemocraticParty and other critics opposed the bill, claiming that it would only increase the gapbetween poor and rich, and that it would be particularly unbeneficial to future gener-ations (BBC 2017a). With his social media skills and Party’s support, Trumpcampaigned for the tax plan to pass in the Senate. Like a campaign, it combined actualdata and distorted information, but carried the recurring statement that attracted themedia’s attention: ‘the biggest tax cut in history’ (later Trump added ‘in U.S. history’).For example, in October 2017 he tweeted: 'Working hard on the biggest tax cut in U.S.history'4 Fig. 2.

Various journalists and scholars thoroughly demonstrated Trump’s claim to be falseby comparing it to other tax cuts in US history, and finding at least four bigger cuts(BBC 2017b; Jacobson 2017; Kessler 2017). Fact checking PolitiFact, for example,found six tax bills that had cut taxes more than Trump’s had (Jacobson 2017). Yet,Trump has continually repeated the claim in speeches, interviews and via social media.In a Fox interview he said: '...we’re bringing the corporate rate down from 20% to 35%.That’s a massive– this will be the biggest tax cut in history, in the history of our country'(Trump 2017) (Fig. 3). Two months later, after the tax plan had passed, Trump’sFacebook posted: 'Biggest Tax Bill and Tax Cuts in history passed in the Senate'5

(Fig. 4). He similarly tweeted: 'The United States Senate just passed the biggest inhistory Tax Cut and Reform Bill'—this tweet alone has reached more than 190,000engagements (likes, comments, retweets).6 The falsification of this fact generated falseinformation and it can be assumed that the campaign had its influence on publicopinion. The Washington Post, for example, claimed that the number of supportersfor the bill had doubled since the end of 2017 (Kelly et al. 2018). Since it was firstclaimed, the ‘biggest tax cut in US history’ has not been refuted or corrected by Trump.

Comparing Trump and the Yes Men

President Trump and the Yes Men come from different fields of practice: politics andmedia art. They differ in their ideology: Trump is a capitalist, conservative andnationalist, whereas the artists are humanist and critical of the harms of globalizationand capitalism. Yet, the common ground they share is in the similarity of their ‘fake

3 Transcribed from the opening of The Apprentice (2004): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx9cMuMb2pk.4 Donald Trump’s Twitter@realDonaldTrump, 25 October 2017, 04:35 AM.5 Donald Trump’s Facebook, Donald J. Trump, 2 December 2017.6 Donald Trump’s Twitter @realDonaldTrump, 19 December 2017, 10:09 PM.

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news’ practice, both delivering a false statement which had major implications:Finisterra declared that the company Dow would compensate the victims of Bhopaland end their suffering, and president Trump declared that American citizens wouldhave the biggest tax relief in US history. Despite their different backgrounds, both theYes Men and Trump share an intelligent use of media technologies, skilful performanceand convincing rhetoric, and both seek to promote ‘good news’. Trump campaigned forthe tax bill in the spirit of ‘the American dream’ and the Yes Men promoted justice forBhopal based on ideologies of social justice. Further, both producers have vastexperience with fake news and deception: the art duo has based its entire oeuvre onhoaxes and trickery; and by April 2019 Trump had a count of no less than 10,111 ‘falseor misleading claims’ (The Washington Post 2019).

However, what is essentially fake in each act? Fake is defined by the inherentsimilarity to the original which it forges, as Eco explains: 'Something is not a fakebecause of its internal properties, but by virtue of a claim of identity' (1990: 181). Thus,to analyse a fake, one should look for the original—the real, ‘authentic’ object.

Fig. 2 Twitter screenshot: ‘the biggest tax cut’, Donald J. Trump, 25 October 2017, 04:35 AM

Fig. 3 Still-shot from Fox Business interview with president Donald Trump in the Lou Dobbs Tonight show,mentioning the ‘biggest tax cut’, October 2017

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Evidently, the speaker himself is fake in the Yes Men’s case but not in Trump’s; and inboth cases the announcement is false, but in a different way. Trump’s announcement isincorrect, exaggerated; the authentic claim is that this is not the biggest tax cut in UShistory – there are proven data of bigger tax cuts in previous governments. Thus, thefake element in Trump’s statement is the data. In the Yes Men’s case, the announce-ment that Dow would accept full responsibility, compensate the victims and remediatethe plant site was untrue – and when the hoax was revealed, Dow stated that theinterview included ‘entirely inaccurate’ information (cited in Wells and Ramesh 2004).However, on examining all the data presented by Finisterra in the full BBC interview(e.g. previous Dow-spokesperson’s statement, Union Carbide’s financial worth, theirbusiness actions, the legal deal with the Indian government) – they were all true facts.Thus, the fake element in the Yes Men’s act was not the data contained in theannouncement, but rather the company’s position regarding the data. The authenticobject was the real position of Dow which was that they were not responsible for theBhopal disaster, would not compensate the victims or repair the plant. In their words,Dow 'has neither a connection to nor legal liability for the tragic events of the 1984 gas

Fig. 4 Facebook screenshot: ‘the biggest tax cut’, Donald J. Trump, 2 December 2017

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release' (cited in BBC 2004). The difference here is between falsifying an assertion andfalsifying a fact. While the Yes Men may have disrespected the company, Trumpshowed no respect for the objective facts.

After Dow refuted the false announcement and the hoax was exposed, Servin wenton to recap the hoax, explain their aims and present the truth in a later interview.7 Toexplain their work the Yes Men coined the term ‘Identity Correction’, according towhich one should 'speak a little lie that tells a greater truth' (Bichlbaum 2012: 60). Or asServin said in a recent interview, all of their fake actions 'were never really fake, not forlong—the whole point was to reveal them and arouse laughs and insight' (Lovink andServin 2018). The Bhopal hoax was meant to be revealed. The statement was falsifiedso that the original Dow’s position could then be emphasized—through ‘laughs’ theviewer achieved ‘insight’ into the callous actions of the company. While the exposureof the hoax was integral to the act in the Yes Men’s case, distortion was the goal inTrump’s assertion. Trump kept repeating the claim ‘the biggest tax cut’ even after beingproved wrong throughout and after the bill’s campaign, resorting to bullshit to claimsomething with ‘big’—rather present the truth. One can assume that his intentions weremotivated by political propaganda and self-promotion rather than informing the public.While the Yes Men intended to raise questions of social justice, Trump intended toinflate his record to increase his approval ratings.

Frankfurt (2005: 18) claims that the bullshitter’s intention is not to deceive theaudience but rather to portray a positive image of himself. Trump indeed drawsexcessive public attention to himself. Chomsky (2018) claims that when the mediafocuses on Trump’s falsehoods and controversies, the entire attention goes to Trumpinstead of his policy making—and so crucial decisions are being made in the back-ground with minimal public attention. The Yes Men, too, were criticized for attractingattention mainly to themselves. Research which analysed the Bhopal hoax’s effect onthe media’s agenda following its revelation revealed that it did not increase the media’sattention to injustice. Examining over a hundred newspaper articles from 2 years beforeand after the hoax, the research concluded: 'Instead of attracting attention to the plightof the victims of the disaster, [The Yes Men] succeeded only in attracting attention tothemselves' (Robinson and Castle Bell 2013: 365). Both critiques point merely at themainstream media’s focus, but these media navigate the public’s attention. If bothassessments are valid, while Trump’s self-attention sabotages democratic deliberation,the Yes Men’s throws attention onto the need to support democratic deliberation. Inother words, Trump and his (mis)conduct distract the public from being criticallyinvolved in its own state of affairs, and therefore undermines the idea of democraticdeliberation. The Yes Men may have attracted much attention to themselves, but thatattention did not interfere with their call for socio-political activism, critical thinkingand moral discussion.

In retrospect, the Yes Men reflected that: 'Much as we try to convince ourselvesit was worth it, we cannot get rid of the nagging doubt. Did we deeply upset manyBhopalis? If so, we want to apologize'; and they also expressed regret that theBBC’s credibility took a hit (The Yes Men 2006:182). In contrast, one cannot find

7 To watch Servin’s interview on Channel 4 search for FLASHBACK: The Yes Men Explains Dow Chemical/Bhopal Disaster Prank (2004) on YouTube.

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any expressions of self-reflection or responsibility by Trump for his falsehood.Since his presidency he has made more than ten thousand false or misleadingclaims (The Washington Post 2019)—but, correspondingly, has also delivered trueand factual claims. Whether intentional or not, this reckless mixture of true andfalse information coming from such an authority can confuse the public aboutwhat a fact is—which can more radically lead to ubiquitous societal mistrust andgenerally undermine the status of truth.

To examine the producers’ relation to truth, I adopt Frankfurt’s explanations of liesand bullshit. While a ‘lie’ is a basic component of all types of deception (e.g.misleading, falsifying), Frankfurt distinguishes it from bullshit. He argues that botha liar and an honest person—by either presenting or mispresenting the truth—mustpay heed to the truth. The bullshitter, in contrast, deceives through pretentious claimsand disregards the truth altogether; he does not care about describing real datacorrectly but 'just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose' (Frankfurt2005: 56). When Trump pretentiously distorted the data, did not correct his falsehoodand maintained his claim, he was mostly bullshitting. In the Bhopal case, however,the falsehood was revealed soon after and there was no intention to bullshit: this wasa hoax. In fact, following Frankfurt’s definition, the Yes Men seemed to have lied intheir act—with great respect to the truth. The liar must know what he believes to betrue and 'in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under theguidance of that truth' (Frankfurt 2005: 51–52). To construct their hoax, the Yes Menresearched and presented accurate data regarding Bhopal and Dow. They designed aperfect lie so that when exposed it could create a truthful discussion about the positionof Dow—its policy and ethics. Dow’s ethics as appeared on their actual websiteincluded phrases such as: 'Ethical behavior is everyone’s responsibility', and 'Dow’spolicy is to be lawful, highly-principled and socially responsible' (About Dow 2001).In their act, declaring ethical statements in that spirit, the Yes Men exposed acontradiction between the principles presented by Dow and its actual conduct. Inorder to raise ethical questions about the corporation’s social responsibility, the YesMen had to lie—but it was a temporary lie. While the liar rejects the authority oftruth, the bullshitter disregards it altogether – and thus bullshit is a greater danger totruth than lies are, according to Frankfurt (2005: 61). Trump used bullshit, directingthe public’s attention to him whilst disregarding the truth, while the Yes Men used atemporary lie to expose and amplify the truth. The Yes Men deconstructed truth inorder to reconstruct it – while Trump simply obstructed it.

The Educational Potential of Fake News

In January 2019 the Yes Men spread another fake newspaper, this time the WashingtonPost with the headline 'Unpresidented: Trump Hastily Departs White House, EndingCrisis.' The newspaper included articles about the alleged departure of president Trumpdue to women-led massive protests around the USA and about the worldwide celebra-tions to follow. To declare their intentions, the last page consisted of a semi-manifesto,written on behalf of the human race, demanding the return of justice and democracy.Referring to the period since Trump had been elected as president, it claimed that'crazed misfits', the politicians who brutalize our society, should be incarcerated and

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that we, the people, should 'take back the power we’ve handed over to [them].'8

Following these critiques, I assert that Trump’s falsehoods, self-attention and self-promotion harm the status and integrity of the leader’s role. His use of bullshit andlies, instead of informing or allowing rational deliberation, threatens the very basicnotion of truth and objective facts. Should we not accept bullshit as more dangerousthan lying?

Whereas lying in politics is a misconduct, lying as an artistic practice turns the tableson fake news. While a direct lie is used to mislead and alter truth, and bullshitting andlies are used to ignore truth, the artistic lie is used to expose truth. Both artists andpoliticians have the tools, access, talent, intelligence, framework, social awareness andlegitimacy to act in public, and they both aim to influence public opinion. But certainly,the purposes and consequences of delivering falsehoods by politicians and by artistsradically differ. While the politician’s purpose is to maintain his political interests oftenwith disregard to reality, the artist’s purpose is to hold a mirror to society and reflect onits reality. This is an educational act. I believe that artists, like educators, carry a socialvocation and have the skill to self-reflect, and can be entrusted to perform thepotentially dangerous practice of fake news. More specifically, media art has therelevant technological tools and imagination needed for creation and action. It is aliberating process with which, using whatever media is necessary, can provoke debateand alert the audience to upcoming or existing threats (Blais and Ippolito 2006: 231;Perini 2010: 183). When the Yes Men created the Bhopal piece, they made the vieweractive. Their action provoked reaction from direct and indirect participants—the BBC,Dow, Bhopal activists—as well as the viewers. The viewers who were exposed to thehoax may have found out who Dow was; what had happened in Bhopal; or what theBhopal activists’ demands were. Like a talented educator, the Yes Men raised questionsrather than gave answers, so the viewers had to be critically engaged to comprehend theact.

Media art and its bold use of technology, media, performance and public interven-tions, can expose and oppose the corrupt conduct of politicians who use the samepowerful tools. It takes much effort, risk, skill and knowledge to work from within apowerful system to oppose it. Critical commentary, protest or satire are often notenough to do so; thus, politicians and leaders who disregard the value of truth andfacts, must be opposed by their own means—assertive rhetoric, provocative perfor-mances, fake news. While the common practices of fake news usually aim to misleadfor as long as possible, tactical media fake practices aim to be exposed for reflection,ethical and critical deliberation and educational edification—and this use is noble. In anera of post-truth, bullshit and fake news, further tactical media acts are required toundermine or limit their power and embolden critical thinking. As opposed to fakenews which spreads confusion and mistrust and undermines the status of truth, fakenews as an art practice has the educational potential to fight fake news; it can fosterurgent critical discussion over the state of truth and, perhaps, how to recognize what istrue from the false.

8 To read the full newspaper go to https://democracyawakensinaction.org/static/img/unpresidented-washington-post.pdf.

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Acknowledgements This work was written with the professional support of Prof. Dr. Ana Peraica and Dr.Alison MacKenzie.

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