Faux Facting, and Its Exploding Popularity in the Anti-College Movement

A novel, semi-ridiculous, some-what cultural (usually negative), made-up word seems to make things collectively true. Once there’s a coined term (a/k/a neologism) — doom scrolling, phubbing, FOMO, quiet quitting, trip stacking, ghosting, gaslighting, mansplaining — its relevance grows exponentially (especially in the media). In 2019, journalist Rebecca Reid saw a “sad” post by Kendall Jenner, coined the term “sadfishing,” and then suddenly:

Behavioral specialist and researcher Cara Petrofes has since defined “sadfishing” as the “a tendency of social media users to publish exaggerations of their emotional states to generate sympathy,” …. She and her fellow researchers explored the social media phenomenon in a 2021 paper published in the Journal of American College Health, intrigued by its prevalence as a “maladaptive” coping mechanism among college students.

Made up term = “prevalence.”

Like sadfishing, faux facting is prevalent as a writing mechanism among journalists. “Faux facting” (I’m jumping on the neologism bandwagon) is the journalistic art of implying a fact when a fact isn’t really or fully there. This is especially true in higher education writing, where the media designs hazy, negative “facts” through one-sided stories, shallow research, and tactical framing.

One Story: A Universal Truth?

Faux facting often hinges on storytelling as truth. Assert the Earth is flat, and if you can find five people to tell their flat-Earth stories, you have a faux fact. In higher education, you see this with encompassing, “factual” headlines that are followed by personal stories as proof.

Take this higher education article for example: Gen Z is the new threat to the American college experience. In it, Business Insider’s Ayelet Sheffey quotes Gen Zer Sadie Shaw as saying:

It has been amazing for me to not be in debt. I have no student loans, like so many of my friends are in $100,000 in debt and student loans just to get a job that pays $60,000 a year.

While the article also contains data, Shaw’s story acts as the lede.[1] It’s the article’s all-important, powerful hook, one that standardizes Shaw’s situation and…