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A story in The Conversation may be of interest to Soylentils:
"Fake news" is the buzzword of 2017. Barely a day goes by without a headline about president Donald Trump lambasting media "bias", or the spread of "alternative facts".
Many articles on the subject suggest that social media sites should do more to educate the public about misinformation, or that readers should think more critically about the sources of news stories before sharing them. But there are fundamental problems with this. First, there isn't a clear definition of what "fake news" really is. And second, it overlooks important aspects of people's psychological makeup.
"Fake news" can be classified in a number of ways and represented as a series of concentric circles. First, in the centre of the concentric model, we have actual fake news. These are the stories that we commonly see shared on sites such as News Thump and The Onion. These satirical stories are written for comedic purposes and are put together to entertain.
Next, we have propaganda articles. Typically, these pieces do not actually contain any real news value. They may, for example, detail an individual's past behaviour and suggest that that it reflects something about their current intentions. Alternatively, these pieces may contain some kernel of truth, but this may be twisted in such a way that it totally misleads audiences and misrepresents a story's true news value.
These propaganda articles take numerous forms. The Huffington Post, for example, included a caveat about Donald Trump's alleged bigotry whenever mentioning him in a story before the US election last November, while British readers will likely recall the Daily Mail's much-maligned attacks on former Labour leader Ed Miliband's late father in 2013, calling him a "man who hated Britain".
Finally, and occupying the outermost ring of the model, there are the stories that are technically true, but reflect the subtle editorial biases of the organisation publishing them. This reporting is commonplace within the mainstream media, through selective storytelling and politically-driven editorials. Whether this is reflected in the left-wing bias of The Guardian or the right-wing approach of the Murdoch media empire, this practice is less malicious and more a political interpretation of events.
There once was a precise word for the term "fake news" is trying to describe. Oh yes, it's "propaganda."
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday June 02 2017, @02:58AM
"I think you are seriously underestimating the shitshow"
You may be right. I really only have a vague idea how complex everything is under the ground in the major cities. A person would have to work in the system to really understand it. But, for something like fiber that doesn't use a lot of room to work it's magic, surely a lot of "conduit" already exists. Much of the excavated space belongs to the city anyway, so there would be no need to deal with private corporations to gain access.
I'm sure it's expensive, complicated, and time consuming, but there is ample proof that the corporations find the big cities to be highly profitable. They are all competing for the same customers within those confined spaces, after all. None of them want to compete for the less profitable audiances out in the countryside, despite the fact that there IS profit to be made here.