I'm confused about what "the rules" are for fake news. Once we a week we go to the supermarket, and lining the checkout aisle we see tabloids peddling what seem to be obviously false celebrity gossip stories, but presented as news. This has been going on for as long as I can remember - so, at least 30 years.
I guess we're supposed to be alarmed here because MSN was once not a tabloid? Not that I would know, I've never read it.
In this case it turns out to be true. But (absent fake news punishment) in general, you can assume that such a funny-sounding headline is completely bullshit, because legitimate news only hits such headlines by accident, whereas there are tabloid and celebrity gossip sites that produce such headlines on a daily basis.
More importantly, it's questionable journalism. It amazes me how much fluff the mainstream media pumps out. So much so that the real and actual news gets buried (read: most people end up under-informed).
The MSM events might be real, but that doesn't make it news. News has importance. News has relevance. But that text book definition a lot of MSM news is in fake not real news.
There was a big push to regulate the UK media's endemic lack of ethics after the phone hacking scandal, but apart from collapsing "News of the World" no real change was achieved.
(On the other hand, the Hutton Inquiry censured the BBC for reporting that turned out to be accurate, so ...)
Not only have tabloids been doing it, but all journalism--just look at the 1890s and how "fake" news was. The sinking of the USS Maine?
Also, look at state propaganda in the media in the 1930s and 1940s and even during Vietnam--the contrived Gulf of Tonkin incident as a means of generating public support for expanding the war to include mainline ground troops.
I have to conclude that all journalism is mostly lies and state propaganda is behind much of it.
I should add that I was a sports writer for a local newspaper many years ago and that gig was definitely an exercise in embellishment and outright fabrication at times.
What I find most egregious about the recent "fake news" bs is that now private Internet companies deign to tell you what is and isn't truthful information and we just watched how these same companies sided with one and only one presidential candidate. The problem was, even they couldn't carry that side of beef over the finish line!
I think what's happening isn't that suddenly they are posting fake news, but rather it has been fake news all along. Tons of celebrities have said how they've been misquoted or otherwise smeared by news for a very long time.
What's different today is that everyone has a smartphone where they can verify the facts of the story and discover that the news is fake.
The journalism crisis is self-created because they have been pushing a fake narrative and are now getting caught. Worse yet, in the face of getting caught they double down on going even further into their false narrative.
What is the boundary between what we consider "fake news" and news with a tiny kernel of truth somewhere in it (in this story it sounds like a semi-related laptop was infected with some malware) that is sensationalized to claim something much broader? I think that there are some pieces of news (e.g. meme-news that people post on social media sites, that would be similar to what one might read in a tabloid) that get automatically rejected by my BS filter a lot easier than something like the piece mentioned in the article, which was posted by a respectable journal.
We've had something similar for millennia, but back then fake news was called gossip or rumor.
The same phenomenon that causes these fake articles to go viral is the same thing that makes rumors and gossip travel so quickly through social circles. I think it comes from a need for self-preservation. Like 'ya that's probably not true, but I better pay attention just in case'.
The neat thing about social media is that it formalizes social circles such that they can become measured and analyzed. We might actually be able to get ahead of things like racist theories or fascist propaganda, but the technology is still in its adolescence.
This is not a new thing. The yellow-press journalism of the US happened well over a century ago, and indeed you have papers which talk about Elvis and aliens, which would meet my definition of "fake news".
The only thing that changed was the distribution method (i.e. over the internet/social media).
True, but then you have e.g. The National Enquirer and other supermarket tabloid style outlets. How would you criminalise deceptive fake news about Russia, Elections, Trump or Clinton, versus fake news about Elvis, Aliens, Hitler and Hamsters? Remember that the tabloids publish these false stories intentionally with the deliberate intent to try and convince the reader they are real. The authors know that Elvis is not alive and working in Burger King, but they say it anyway...
It's basically going to prove impossible to find a definition of 'fake news' that everyone is happy with. It can't just be 'Anything that some political group does not approve of' for instance, and it must be neither too broad (including all sorts of innocent publications, like tabloids mentioned earlier, foreign or historical propaganda, advertising that criticises its competitors, etc.) making it impossible to enforce, or narrow (fail to include certain categories of fakery) thus allowing loopholes and failing to accomplish anything.
But ... I think there are pretty good laws in place at the moment to deal with slander, libel, defamation and generally saying (or publishing) untrue things about people (or companies, entire groups of people defined by some shared attribute, locations, etc.) in a way that harms them (materially, or emotionally, maybe just potentially), and they actually deal with the situation where the intent is humour or parody. Too much of the time people have this knee-jerk reaction to X, something happening on the Internet, where they decide that the Internet-relatedness of this X makes it special (despite it being simply the age old problem of Y, but on the Internet) and demand a new crime of 'X' be created with incredibly harsh penalties like life in prison or death or billion dollar fines. But in general, it would suffice to continue to prosecute people for Y, just making sure that the Y-on-the-Internet cases also get looked at and prosecuted equally. I have no real problem with adding 'but on the Internet' as a qualifier to exiting crimes, in the same way as 'with a firearm' or 'while intoxicated' get tacked on as modifiers, increasing prison time and fines as appropriate, but this is almost never put forward as a suggestion.
So maybe we just need 'Libel, but on the Internet' to be prosecuted more often? Meh...
Yeah, popularizing the term "fake news" was a an impressively epic own-goal by traditional media.
And while I do agree that MSM fakeness mostly comes in the form of "technically facts, mischaracterized and cherry-picked," there is also a lot of just straight untruths as well, but laundered through anonymous sources. The effect is the same, in that you come away believing untrue things.
Another form of fakeness is "honest" mistakes (that always seem to coincidentally play into some popular narrative) that are hyped in headlines, but then only quietly corrected later, e.g., stuff like this:
Genuine question: Is it just me or the whole 'fake-news' concept seems like an excuse for ~old~ traditional (failing?) media to continue to act as gatekeepers of information ? I've seen an increasing number of alternative / independent journalists and websites being given the label of "fake-news site" recently and I'm a bit worried to see that trend continue.
Look at recent events if you need further evidence of this. The term "fake news" has exploded in just under a month in the mainstream media.
If my memory serves me, tabloids like The Enquirer have been sitting on news stands for as long as I can remember. So how did this fervor over "fake news" coalesce so quickly and uniformly?
Mainstream outlets move in lockstep with each other and these are the final, desperate death throes of an outdated and superfluous institution. Don't expect they'll go down without a fight though.
There is a huge difference between fakenews, like the "Denver Guardian" fake newspaper site that ran stories about HRC being involved in the death of FBI agents in order to rack up tens of thousands of dollars from impressions, and sensationalized news.
Every time this topic comes up, we have to tediously explain the difference, not because the difference is hard to understand, but because people seize on the name "fake news" as an excuse to attack the media. There's nothing wrong with media criticism, but you shouldn't write it in a way that obscures to readers what these stories are actually about --- webspam farms running entirely fabricated stories.
I guess we're supposed to be alarmed here because MSN was once not a tabloid? Not that I would know, I've never read it.
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