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From Breitbart:
Another day, another very fake news story from the network President Donald Trump has identified as "very fake news."
CNN's Thomas Frank on Thursday evening published what would have been considered an explosive report if remotely true: One anonymous source told him both the Treasury Department and Senate Intelligence Committee are probing a Russian investment fund with ties to several senior finance world leaders close to President Trump. Only problem? Both Trump administration officials and those close to Senate GOP leadership say it's simply untrue.
The retraction from CNN:
On June 22, 2017, CNN.com published a story connecting Anthony Scaramucci with investigations into the Russian Direct Investment Fund.
That story did not meet CNN's editorial standards and has been retracted. Links to the story have been disabled. CNN apologizes to Mr. Scaramucci.
According to BuzzFeed News, CNN has responded by actually requiring executives to review stories:
CNN is imposing strict new publishing restrictions for online articles involving Russia after the network deleted a story and then issued a retraction late Friday, according to an internal email obtained by BuzzFeed News.
The email went out at 11:21 a.m. on Saturday from Rich Barbieri, the CNNMoney executive editor, saying "No one should publish any content involving Russia without coming to me and Jason," a CNN vice president.
At least now we'll know who to blame.
[Ed Note: I debated leaving this in politics or dropping it to the main page. I opted for the latter because politics or not, the prevalence of "fake news" is one that we deal with on a daily basis from our respective social media feeds to all the major broadcast and cable news networks. How are we to tell what is "fake" and what is actually (relatively) "true"? The main stream media all put their spin on everything. A right slant for some, a left slant for others. Is the truth somewhere in between, or is it a story that we aren't getting becasue the mainstream media is so intent on telling their narrative that we the people are getting the shit end of the stick regardless of where we get the so called news?]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 27 2017, @03:32PM (14 children)
This is "Unsubstantiated News" and is not worthy of being reported.
"Fabricated News" is news that is deliberately falsified.
"Biased News" is factually correct news that is framed in a particular way, which ranges from subtle to deliberate framing of a particular narrative.
I dislike the term "Fake News" because it is applied to all three of the above, often inappropriately.
(Score: 4, Informative) by looorg on Tuesday June 27 2017, @03:57PM (8 children)
Overall I find issue with the whole "Fake news" thing, I still have not found a good definition of it. There used to be "none" but now there is barely a day without it. It seems to overall just like definition, or at least one that everyone can agree with. So everyone involved just seems to label anything they don't like or that contradicts them as fake news stories. Trumps fake news isn't CNNs fake news isn't FOX fake news etc. Perhaps it's now even about the "news" in itself but that the publisher of said news has lost, and is somehow trying to regain, the narrative of the story or whatever opinion in large it is that they want to purvey.
Fake or fabricated news to me is still those magazines in the store with stories about celebrities alien love children, Elvis sightings and such things. That is fabricated "news". Which in turn is different from what CNN is peddling, or trying to, which is just agenda driven drivel disguised as news and if someone hadn't called them out on it they would never had retracted this, they tried to send it out there to see if someone would bite but they didn't so this was about to blow up in their face. The retraction was just, or became, preemptive damage control.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 27 2017, @05:30PM
Those are obvious examples to normal people, but there are political news stories that are entirely fabricated (1). Unsubstantiated news (such as this story or others: 2) is functionally equivalent to "fabricated news" because trust in journalism and the media in general is incredibly low.
People fall for these stories because they employ motivated reasoning, which will bias them to only be skeptical of stories that do not fit their beliefs.
Equating "biased news" with "fabricated" and "unsubstantiated" news dilutes the term "fake" and further entrenches people in their motivated reasoning (any story that I do not agree with must be fake).
1. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/11/17/purveyor_of_fake_news_says_he_targeted_trump_supporters_influenced_election.html [slate.com]
2. https://www.theroot.com/report-donald-trump-hired-prostitutes-to-pee-in-beds-h-1791134341 [theroot.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Tuesday June 27 2017, @09:42PM (6 children)
The best definition of fake news that I've seen came in a presentation by Tom Nichols (cf. https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=19197&page=1&cid=500514#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] for details).
He said:
Source: https://www.c-span.org/video/?426290-1/tom-nichols-discusses-death-expertise [c-span.org] (at approximately 1:27).
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 28 2017, @02:39AM
This is it:
(Score: 2) by G-forze on Thursday June 29 2017, @09:18AM (4 children)
I think the original Fake News was some Romanian kids setting up a fake news site and filling it with outrageous (but fake) news stories, in order to get as many visitors (and thus ad impressions and clicks) as possible. It didn't have anything directly to do with influencing the public, just plain old profit.
If I run into the term "SJW", I stop reading.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday June 29 2017, @06:30PM (3 children)
Fake news is not [wikipedia.org] new [politico.com]. Nor is the use of it for commercial purposes.
Why is it that few seem to have even a fragile grasp of history [wikipedia.org] beyond five years ago?
Sigh.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by G-forze on Tuesday July 04 2017, @09:01PM (2 children)
Of course there has always been lies and propaganda fed to people around the world. But this time around, the term "fake news" (as opposed to agitprop or whatever) started to get used because of those romanian teens. Or do you seriously think Trump is referencing agitprop when shouting about "fake news"?
If I run into the term "SJW", I stop reading.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday July 05 2017, @12:22AM (1 child)
Yes. As a matter of fact, I do. Demagogues have always loved to lambaste the press or anyone else they want to cow.
Read a few history books, friend. Trump is using an old and quite unsavory playbook.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by G-forze on Wednesday July 05 2017, @06:57AM
Ok, fair enough. I myself think you are giving the guy way too much credit. I don't think he could even pronounce the word.
If I run into the term "SJW", I stop reading.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Tuesday June 27 2017, @09:11PM (2 children)
...and more often than not by Breitbart, who all but single-handedly invented fake news (#pizzagate) and then somehow managed to redefine it to their advantage (at least to the masses who've long since turned their brains off apparently).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 27 2017, @11:38PM
I find #pizzagate especially disturbing. It was as though it was an actual turning point. When I looked into it, I found something on Reddit I think that basically sounded like timecube. I couldn't believe that people honestly believed it. People had started to take the internet seriously.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Wednesday June 28 2017, @09:20PM
Decades ago I saw the predominant newspaper of one of America's top 100 cities routinely and shamelessly prints obvious and blatant lies. For example after an election that had (let's say) 45% for "A", 49% for "B", and 6% for the third-party candidate(s) they would simply discard what they didn't want you to know and declare that the vote was actually 48% "A" and 52% "B". This also sustained the illusion of majority rule by boosting "B" over 50%.
When challenged with actual numbers from the Elections department they would either ignore it or bury a retraction in fine print on page 93 behind the obituaries.
Now maybe that doesn't fit your finely-crafted definition of "fake news". No true Scotsman etc. But those in the "news" business have been lying, slanting, or spinning since forever because they like to tell themselves it is their place to decide what everyone else is supposed to think and do.
P.S. This is not intended to be a defense of Breitbart in any way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 28 2017, @07:05AM
I think most people here would agree that "Evidence shows moon landing faked." would be a headline worthy of the title of fake news. Yet what if they showed things [youtube.com] such as what appears to be the flag waving in wind after an astronaut runs by it? There are very viable reasons why this isn't what it seems to be. For instance, the astronaut might have actually touched the flag while hopping by it - or disturbed the ground around it somehow. But it could also be evidence of a faked scene.
It's not really 'fake' so much as unsubstantiated. You see, substantiation and verification is exactly what separates 'real news' from 'fake news'. What CNN published was indeed fake news. And given 3 people lost their jobs over this, it is likely that this is only a fragment of the story as CNN, among other companies, now regularly runs unsubstantiated stories which are later shown to be false. For instance they've also [cnn.com] had to apologize for posting staged photos/videos from Syria once it became 100% evident the media was faked. Other times they stage [youtube.com] "wonderful scenes" and simply ignore the footage [youtube.com] showing it was fake. CNN is absolutely fake news, and this is just yet another example of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 28 2017, @07:51AM
The fact that anyone can claim with a straight face that that actually believe "fake news" means anything other than what you call "fabricated news" astounds me. Clearly the person coining the term didn't think about bad faith interpretations of it or would have been more careful in their wording. Trying to keep it short, perhaps "hoax news" would have been a clearer term, but the people calling CNN "fake news" are clearly not acting in good faith, so I doubt any attempts at better wording would have helped all that much.