Coda: Vignettes and “Fake News”

In the medium of the nineteenth-century newspaper, the vignette often operated as true genre, but that truth was moral or emotional rather than factual. In this final section, we want to suggest that understanding the nineteenth-century vignette might help us think about the contemporary phenomena gathered under the moniker “fake news.” In particular, we argue that content generated and spread by misleading social media accounts often follows the vignette’s form and its appeal to emotional, rather than factual, truth. The short prose structure of the vignette well serves platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, while the emotional payoff of the form drives users to share material easily and quickly, without the kind of scrutiny we might expect for conventional news. In contemporary terms, researchers speak of users’ cognitive biases, arguing that people give credence to stories in proportion to how fully a given story aligns with their previous political or social convictions. The more a story syncs with a person’s existing beliefs, the less skeptical that person will be about its claims.

To illustrate how the vignette form serves readers’ cognitive biases, we want to examine a single viral Facebook post and outline its connections to the nineteenth-century newspaper vignette. In June 2016, as the Trump campaign ramped up in the United States and three days before voters in the United Kingdom would vote on whether to leave the European Union, a British music producer named Tom Bradbury posted the following eyewitness report on his Facebook account:¹

The most perfect thing I have ever seen just happened on the replacement train bus service between Newport and Cwmbran:

White man sat in front of a mother and her son. Mother was wearing a niqab. After about 5 minutes of the mother talking to her son in another language the man, for whatever reason, feels the need to tell the woman “When you’re in the UK you should really be speaking English.”

At which point, an old woman in front of him turns around and says, “She’s in Wales. And she’s speaking Welsh.”

Perfect.

Bradbury’s story was widely shared (more than 14,000 shares on FB as of November 2017) and quickly picked up by a number of media outlets, both new and traditional.²

The story was even printed in the next day’s London Times. In this print version, perhaps, the similarities of this snippet to nineteenth-century vignettes are even clearer than in the context of Facebook. First, it’s very short: a fast snapshot of life. It’s dialogic, reporting an exchange between two speakers. The piece builds to a finale we could describe as both a moral and a punchline: “We’re in Wales. And she’s speaking Welsh” is an amusing comeuppance for a man we read as racist or xenophobic, and encourages readers to reflect on longer histories of immigration, nationalism, and multiculturalism. The story was, as Bradbury declares, “perfect,” particularly in a moment of political tension over the precise political issues the story brings into relief. We came across Bradbury’s post because it was shared quite eagerly by many people in our own social networks, including a great many academics who no doubt think of themselves as critical, even skeptical, readers.

In this story’s neat perfection it recalls the nineteenth-century vignette—far more interested in emotional truths than factual truths. Note that, as in those historical newspaper snippets, Bradbury’s post frames the story using some journalistic conventions, naming a precise(ish) location, “on the replacement train bus service between Newport and Cwmbran,” but offering only the broadest descriptions of its main actors: a mother wearing a niqab, her son, a white man, and an old woman. None of these people are named specifically enough for anyone to factcheck Bradbury’s story. Those few specific facts very soon came under scrutiny, as it appeared the bus Bradbury claimed to have ridden did not run on the day of his post.

Even more damning, soon social media users began connecting Bradbury’s story with another that had circulated just a few years prior. This version follows an almost identical formula, but is set in the American southwest, the language in question is Navajo rather than Welsh, and the immediate political context is fervor over immigration from Mexico in the US.³ In the face of these and other critiques, Bradbury maintained the veracity of his account (while admitting he might have confused the precise buses). Our point is not quite that this story is fake—though we believe it is—but instead that for many people its factual truth was beside the point. To gloss a typical response when someone seeks to fact-check a vignette, people reply “well, this is the kind of thing that happens.”

In this gloss, we distill the primary reason vignettes are so powerful and potentially insidious: they tell readers not about what happened, but about the kind of thing that happens. Vignettes play to our cognitive biases, offering a frame on which we can hang our political opinions, social biases, and prior, accepted narratives. If one glances through Snope’s continually-updated Hot 50 list of “top rumors Snopes readers are checking out right now,” one often finds many that, at least as posted on Facebook or Twitter, follow the concise structure of the vignette. It may be that both Bradbury’s story and the earlier Navajo story are in fact true, but they are structured in such a way that determining so would be nearly impossible. Pointing out the inconsistencies or absurdities of fake news leads people to retrench because such interrogation typically fails to address the emotional resonances of such pieces, focusing instead entirely on their least important aspect—which is to say, on the specific factual claims they make.

We highlight the examples above precisely because they challenge our own cognitive biases and (we suspect) those of many of our readers. We have cataloged a good many contemporary vignettes while doing this research and could cite examples of similar stories appealing to the biases of conservatives as well, such as one claiming to have overheard actors describing being paid by George Soros to protest against the Trump administration, or another hinting that Antifa was planning a “Civil War” for November the 4th, 2017. The emotions these stories draw most heavily from are typically fear, anger, and resentment, making such stories more perilous than many of the lighthearted vignettes we discussed earlier in the chapter. The form of the vignette is clearly as well suited to the internet as it was to the nineteenth-century newspaper. Studying the history of this genre can help us recognize its structure and affect, and become more critical readers when we encounter contemporary vignettes online.