Hello All ! Following this very interesting discussion, I would like to ask if "fake titles" or "fake headlines" is a part of the fake news issue. Biased news headlines is not a new issue (http://umich.edu/~newsbias/he adlines.html) as many people don't bother reading the whole article, and also because the writer of the article is not always responsible of the headlines! *Regards, * *Yohanan Ouaknine * *PhD candidate * *Bar Ilan university, Israel* On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 10:53 PM, kalev leetaru < kalev.leetaru5@gmail.com> wrote:
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-inve rted-pyramid-and-how-fake-news-weaponized-modern-journalistic-practice/ ).
Kalev
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