Fake News, Mangoes and 70,000 Students

I am about to complete my final year of high school here in New South Wales, Australia, along with 70,000 other students.

As a parting gift, the New South Wales Educations Authority (NESA) decided to include an oddly basic and childish poem - "Mangoes" - in our English exam for us to analyse. Naturally, NESA made a right fool of itself as 70,000 students all took to the Year 12 Facebook discussion page and 'exchanged thoughts' on the poem.

Many a meme was created in the days to come, many of which were very entertaining.
But as we students were all happily procrastinating with memes...

All of a sudden...

News headlines began to appear

"Students Racially Target Indigenous poet"
"Indigenous Poet Racially Abused by Year 12 Students"

And they kept coming, from news outlets all over Australia (ABC News, 7 News, SBS, Sydney Morning Herald, News.com.au to name a few)

I think everyone in the discussion group collectively googled the poet, and yep, she was Aboriginal. The race card had been played by the media before we had even realised she was Indigenous. This only led to more memes and more discussion on the concept of free speech and 'fake news' which all was very interesting.

We realised the cause of the media's false interpretation; a meme picturing the "Infinite monkey theorem" - which, if you don't know, is the theory that if you have infinite monkeys using typewriters, some of their writing would turn out coherent. A picture of a monkey at a typewriter was labelled "leaked photo of Mangoes author." This particular meme was taken out of context and used as a means to label our dislike of the poem as racially driven. However, not only did we not know the poet's race, she hardly even looks Aboriginal.

Meanwhile however

Back in fake news fantasy land
More headlines appeared, but this time from outside Australia
Buzzfeed, The Guardian and Daily Mail had all jumped on the racist-labelling bandwagon.

To conclude, I just find it very amusing how the media is so quick to latch onto anything - like one misunderstood meme - and force their own story into it, accusing a whole cohort of school students. It is as if, for some reason, they are desperate to perpetuate the idea that widespread racism exists. Ready to pounce upon any tiny inclination of racism, true or untrue and blow it out of proportion.

They have reached a new low on this one.

Thanks for reading