Robert, that's actually one of the fascinating aspects of all of this - how you define "fake news". If you dive back into the history of propaganda theory, you'll find some fantastic work on why defining "fake news" is so hard - the same set of facts can be used by well-meaning and earnest reporters to support wildly different conclusions. Paul Linebarger's classic "Psychological Warfare" offers a fantastic primer on this. If we define "fake news" as solely that news which the person writing it knew at the time to be solely and entirely false without any basis in fact and start looking at the legal definitions of things like "libel" then that's one avenue of approach. But, the discussion that's happening in journalism circles right now is really centering on a much broader definition of false and misleading news. Even on this very mailing list people have mentioned the alt-left and alt-right as "fake news". Some of that certainly falls into the category of outright libel, where the person writing it has posted elsewhere that they do solemnly swear that they know what they are writing to be exclusively false and devoid of any fact and recognize it to be libel. Yet, much of the alt-left and alt-right reporting that is being labeled as "fake news" is simply a highly partisan or skewed interpretation of a common set of facts, where if you talk with the reporters (and I've talked with several) they firmly stand behind what they've written and believe it to be solid journalism based on objective empirical fact. The difference is that when you turn to the Post/NYTimes/etc's journalism, there is an expectation of rigorous fact checking and a placement of "getting the story right" above "getting the scoop" and being the first to print. We all know that isn't always the case and that journalists take short cuts and papers make mistakes. But, the focus here is that we need to have more transparency on how the media functions. When papers like the Post and Times no longer treat their online stories as "print" and instead treat them as living documents to be edited over time and constantly rewritten, that raises all sorts of questions of how we trust and understand the information we consume, especially given studies on online sharing that show how much of what we share is shared based purely on the headline and lede, rather than a full careful reading of the entire article. Setting aside conspiracy theories, the bottom line is that we need much greater transparency in the journalism world - we can't just say "trust the Post" or any other outlet - we have to start thinking critically about how the things we take for granted like the inverted pyramid actually serve to enable and power false and misleading news ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/10/the-inverted-pyramid-and... ). Kalev On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Robert Tynes <nativebuddha@gmail.com> wrote:
Kalev,
Your points about the process of news making are worth considering. But conflating what the Post did with a discussion of fake news is a bit off-base. The major difference is, despite conspiracy theories about major papers such as the Post, Post reporters do seek out the most empirically evident story possible. They do look for facts.
Fake news, on the other hand, seeks to deceive, and to persuade its audience towards more extreme ideological points of view.
And motives matter.
-Robert
On Jan 1, 2017, at 2:48 PM, kalev leetaru <kalev.leetaru5@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm sure many of you saw the Washington Post's story on Friday that Russian hackers had penetrated the US power grid through a utility in Vermont and also the unraveling of that story over the following half day.
What is so fascinating about this case from a "fake news" perspective is that it brings into sharp relief once again A) how the mainstream media forms a trust echochamber in which once one outlet runs a story, everyone follows without performing their own fact checking, B) the absolute trust frequently placed in government sources as "truth", C) the lack of fact checking even at tier one outlets like the Post and the lack of transparency in those processes (while answering other questions, the Post declined for a second time to comment in any way on how it fact checks articles and the level of rigor it requires prior to publication), D) how once an article is published, even if it is retracted or substantively changed, how that is often not clearly communicated to readers.
I thought many of you would find of interest in particular the chronology of edits to the Post page courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and how it was almost a full day after the article had been rewritten that the Post finally appended an editors note acknowledging the wholesale changes - again points both to how newspapers now constantly rewrite their online articles over the course of a day or more and the immense power of the Archive in allowing us to trace those edits over time.
To me, perhaps the most interesting piece here from a "fake news" perspective is how often "breaking news" becomes "fake news" as major details change once more facts become available. Given that in this case the Post was constantly rewriting the article over more than 12 hours after publication, it also raises the question of how we leverage all of these initiatives that look at news rewriting to help flag when articles are retracted or heavily edited and communicate that back to the general public - the tools are all there, but in terms of helping getting that back to the public.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake- news-and-how-the-washington-post-rewrote-its-story-on- russian-hacking-of-the-power-grid/
Kalev _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/ listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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