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Fake news is everywhere. The power of the press is said to be waning. And because the nation's most famous populist—the man with his sights on the presidency—can't trust the lying media, he says, he has no option but to be a publisher himself.
Oh yeah, and the year is 1896.
The would-be president in question is William Jennings Bryan. In an era before the internet, television, or radio, the best way to reach the masses is with newsprint. So, without the option of tweeting his grievances after losing the election to William McKinley, what does Bryan do? He starts his own newspaper. And he uses it to rail against "fake news."
I don't need to tell you a lot of this sounds weirdly familiar.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/the-fake-news-crisis-120-years-ago/513710/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 29 2017, @09:21PM
how long is the long run to you?
long run to me means after a series of exposures and bad episodes, people finally learn how to come to terms that what they want to believe isn't true just because skywriters on some blog put it in writing in the cloud.
i thought people knew the enquirer and the star and stuff were fake and were read for entertainment purposes. but it looks like if the place carrying the news isn't a known source of absurd fake stuff, people believe what they want to believe and this stuff gets past the filters.
i guess it works for native advertising too on a lot of people... it makes me doubt my fellow man.
anyway no doubt this affected the election, but i don't believe the fake news of a purely political sort had been a problem up until facebook and google started to exert control over what people read. it used to be people have to go to some crank website--but now it comes to the people, under the guise of legitamacy because our masters are profiting from its distribution and they wouldn't push fake stuff to us, now would they?
i guess we know the answer