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Fake News

Mark 13.1-6
Until I saw this, I didn’t know who Jessica Rowe is. Apparently she’s a journalist in Australia, but I’ve seen the same advert - many many times - with a different face on it, someone I do know. For some reason I get a lot of adverts at the moment in which a man called Peter Jones, who appears on the TV programme Dragons’ Den, is pictured having a really rough day. He too has got a terrible black eye, worse than this one, and he looks really haggered, as though someone has set about him with a baseball bat.
But it’s not true. It’s fake news. We might not like them, but Jessica Rowe gets particularly upset with these adverts because she’s in them. One day she was looking at the Internet with her nine year-old daughter when her daughter said, ‘Mummy, what’s that?’ And it was this fake advert.
You and I are not celebrities so we will never feature in an advert like this one, but we can still be the subject of fake news. My Aunt rang me one day just to check whether I’d been mugged on my way to the airport in Manilla. When I assured that I was all right, she said, ‘So I assume you won’t need me to send £2,000 to the bank account specified in the email then?’
A friend contacted me to say, ‘You lucky person!’ When I was mugged on my way to the airport I only got as far as Lagos in Nigeria whereas you got all the way to the Philippines!’
Sometimes it’s not easy to tell, is it, which news is fake and which is real! We often say about strange events, ‘You couldn’t make it up!’ But sadly people do.
President Trump thinks global warming is fake news so he’s very reluctant to believe that global warming has a part to play in California's wildfires. Instead, he blamed the most recent ones on poor forest management. But that was fake news. The wildfires are occurring not in forest but in areas of scrubland, and while wildfires are a natural part of life in California, longer dry spells have made them more frequent, which also affects the kind of plants that grow back after the fires have burned out. Often, these new plants burn more easily. The real fake news can be very hard to spot!
Fake news isn’t a new problem. Jesus talked about it! But, thanks to the Internet and social media, there’s more of it about now. When I was growing up people often believed anything that was in print, because they assumed it had been checked by editors to make sure it was accurate. Even then this was a dangerous assumption, but now we have to learn to recognise when news might be false and know how to check it out.
Just because bad things happen, like the Temple in Jerusalem being destroyed, it doesn’t mean we should believe every report about bad news. As Jesus said, we must ‘watch out and don’t let anyone fool you!’

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