"Fake news" is the slogan of the day. As a concept, it's typical: it has a grain of truth and descriptive value, but has been wantonly overused and twisted for partisan ends. Will you run into "news" that is based on simply false facts? Yes. Will you also see people using "fake news" to describe anything they don't like? Absolutely.
The heart of this is a surge of mistrust in the media. Some of that mistrust is well-earned, and some of it is promoted for political reasons — to cripple the press' ability to limit government power through questioning it. The press — including both nominally factual reporters and commentators — don't deserve to be trusted without question, and ought not be by a free people. People who write about current events, descriptively or (deliberately) persuasively, ought to be self-critical and think about why they are or aren't believed. That includes bloggers, who have an increasingly large role in public debate.
You cannot make people trust you or believe you. But you can work to be worthy of trust, and hope that the trust follows.
How could you earn trust, even as a commentator?
Focus on values. The best path to deserving trust is focusing on values rather than personalities or factions. Values can be principled; factions can't. Which values? That's up to you. What do you care about? It might be due process of law and equality before it, or limited government, or freedom of expression. If you are open about what values are important to you, open to discussing why those values are worthy and how heavily they should weigh in the balance, and open in your analysis of why particular policies promote or weaken those values, you can earn trust and credibility. If you focus instead on teams, and treat the virtues of one team as self-evident, you won't. The goal is not to persuade everyone or to "win." Some righteous values are unpopular and always will be. The goal is to offer the clearest, the best-supported, the most principled defense of the values you care about.
Question essentialism. Part of focusing on values is being skeptical of essentialism. Essentialism is the belief (for instance) that Trump is bad because Trump is bad and therefore things Trump proposes must be bad. Essentialism is the loudest voice in our political culture. The Koch brothers support that, it must be bad! That's a Hillary Clinton proposal, so it's liberal and awful! Essentialism is popular and persuasive with people who already agree with you, but to everyone else it's a signal not to trust you, because your analysis is nothing more than "red team is bad." Essentialism is also seductive, because it carries with it a feeling of belonging.
Asking who proposed a policy — or asking cui bono — can be a good starting point, but it's not an endpoint. The endpoint has to be an analysis of the act or policy, not just the source of it. Essentialism writes off a large segment of America — be it "conservative" or "liberal" — as irredeemable, and therefore abandons any effort to persuade those people that your values are the right ones, or that you are worthy of trust.1
Praise what is right. If you focus on values, you'll support policies that promote those values, even if you don't like the source. A politician you don't like will probably do some things right. Praise them when that happens. It's the right thing to do, it promotes the value you care about, and it earns trust.
Criticize what is wrong. People you support will make wrong choices that are bad for your values. Say so. Ignore party loyalists who complain you are "concern trolling." In fact, this ought to be your first priority. Start with the mote in your own eye. It's essential to trust.
Be skeptical. There's tons of misinformation out there. Much of it will support your views. Be skeptical. When you bite on a bogus story — and we all will — be forthright afterwards in noting that the story was false and you bit on it.
Promote knowledge. You have specialized knowledge of some sort. That knowledge can be relevant to policy debates. Support the debates by sharing the knowledge. Provide primary documentary support for the knowledge — in a world of easy hyperlinks, there's no excuse not to — and try to make the knowledge accessible. In other words, "here's the facts, and here are the sources of the facts, and here's how to read the sources" is preferable to "I'm right because I'm an expert." (Except on Twitter, obviously).
You can do absolutely everything right and some people will still belittle you because of who you are or what values you support. That's fine. Get over it. The goal isn't forcing people to agree. The goal is offering the best possible defense of the values you care about, and — hopefully — in the process earning trust from people who can be persuaded, from people willing to change their minds.
- I say question essentialism because it's probably not worthwhile or realistic to abandon it entirely. I'm not telling you to devote yourself to converting, say, white nationalists. I'm suggesting you question the categories of people you think are unreachable or inherently wrong. ▲
Last 5 posts by Ken White
- About Clark Being "Purged" From Popehat - May 24th, 2017
- The Dubious "Anthony Weiner's Accuser Was Actually Over 16" Story, And Why I'm Very Skeptical - May 22nd, 2017
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- The Elaborate Pantomime of The Federal Guilty Plea - May 8th, 2017
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This is a great post, but I'd like to gently push back on the "fakenews" framing it uses.
It's hard to argue that the term isnt being abused rampantly, but "fakenews" has a particular and straightforward real meaning: it describes a form of webspam that simulates a news site but stuffs it with entirely fictitious stories in which not just the presentation or spin but the underlying facts themselves are optimized for clicks.
People who suggest that Breitbart or Occupy Democrats are "fakenews" are abusing the term. But people who say that about "endthefed.com" or whatever aren't: those are sites where the stories are authored without regard to reality. If reporting that the skies were paisley and the rivers flowing red with pony blood would generate more clicks, that's what they'd report.
I don't think "fakenews" is all that important to the substance of this story and recognize that this is a tangential concern. I'm just doing my part to combat semantic drift.
This may be a little bit too black and white, but from my experience you know if you're on the right track particularly in questioning essentialism when the more inclined parties on each side of an argument have accused you of being in the pocket of the other.
I just want to know what these "press" sources are that have been bravely trying "to limit government power."
@THOMAS
Unfortunately I feel like we've already lost that battle. There was once a time where trolling was demarcate specifically within the bounds of serrupticiously attempting to get a rise out of someone. As the internet absorbed the mainstream of social media like facebook and the 24 hour news cycle it got co-opted and corrupted to mean basically anyone being hostile or disruptive in any manner (basically anyone disagreeing with the majority).
We've lost this term now much in the same way. "Fakenews" has been corrupted from clickbait advertising mills to literally any story people find to be disingenuous. Or how bullying has been corrupted from a concerted act of harassment with a power disparity to hurting feels.
As much as i want to fight it, sometimes it's more productive to accept that the term has been hijacked and write it off for its new, more disappointing definition just to facilitate the discussion.
I think we're too far gone down the path towards political essentialism. It's not just a way of casting political commentary, it's the worldview you'll find if you dig into the vast majority of people interested in politics. "The other team is bad" has become a closely held belief, like views on abortion, guns, or religion. The media has encouraged this on both sides, but it's gone way past the media now.
People are not going to change this just because it's bad strategy or it makes half the country not trust them. Asking them to is hopeless.
Ken, thanks for giving a name to the entire "-insert party, person, philosophy- is evil; therefore anything they espouse is evil" pandemic. Essentialism annoys me more than anything else on this list, because it kills any meaningful debate. It's the adult version of sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "La la la, I can't hear you" with the same level of maturity of the kids who do it in grade school.
Great post, and dovetails with one of my personal peeves (which is itself a symptom of essentialism). That is the tendency for some to start every opportunity for debate with "You're stupid for thinking X". Not a compelling argument, and defensiveness and anger are the predictable results, rather than any form of self-analysis that might lead to genuine discussion and opportunity for change.
There may have been times in the past where a stranger's shouts or criticism caused someone's views or behavior to change. Not many. If you want to hope to influence others, you have to start by building at least a minimal level of trust first, and the easiest starting point is by demonstrating that you're listening when they express their points of view, and respect that they may have reasons for holding them that are as valid to them as your's are to you.
Also, if you're not prepared to examine your own beliefs and behavior in the way you hope to persuade others to, you've got some work to do on your own before trying to sway others.
Uncritical essentialism is indeed the root cause of many problems. It's the great enabler that permits fake news to be taken as face value, and that opens the door to a lot of other paths to unreason. And it's one of the few times when "both sides do it" is literally true–and not just in purely political arenas.
Perhaps worse yet, it is binary. We are good; they are bad. And that loses the ability to distinguish between the gray levels of badness, between an economic conservative and an outright plutocrat, between a social conservative and a white nationalist, between an environmentalist and an ecoterrorist.
@Mike B, in my opinion it's worth fighting back against such subversions of language because to give into them impoverish thought and discourse. When a specific term become overbroad like "fake news", or a phrase becomes loaded with so much baggage that to say it is to truck in a load of other assumptions into the discussion (witness "racism" which has morphed from a straight forward term for a type of bigotry to something which at times more closely resembles a religious dogma and all that entails), it undermines our ability to name the things we used to have perfectly good names for, and thus our ability to discuss them.
That's why I always think it's worth fighting, one way or another. Giving in for discussion's sake is exactly how we lose the words to those who hijack them. I don't want to be stuck in a world where we can't talk about lions, linxes, or Scottish Folds because English only has "cat". We're already half-way there, let's not go farther.
As for the actual topic–trying to question essentialism is a very worthy goal. Very few people indeed are irredeemably evil, so it is good to consider what in their world view and what they support is worthy. Prepare to find an abundance. You don't have to leave converted or in agreement, but you can still bring back understanding.
Stellar f*cking post.
That is all.
Carry on.
Fantastic post, and sorely needed by a full-time political flack such as I. We all get into the game because of values (I continue to trust), but we are employed through factions. Most of us were unemployed and took a chance because we believed in a cause. We need to remember what we thought was worth being unemployed for.
The best and clearest ethics post of the year, Ken. Not just here, but anywhere. Bravo. I'll do what I can to persuade as many people to read it as possible.
Not necessarily true, when we're talking about TV commentators.
This entire Fake News thing is going down a very bad rabbit hole. Arguing your values backed up by citations is made increasing difficult. The juxtaposition of Fake News and Essentialism has created a world where citing the Washington Post is dismissed as fake by one group, and citing the Washington Times is dismissed as fake by another group.
The sad part is, they both have a point.
Great post. I agree with it entirely.
Of course nearly everyone adds the codicil "Unless you're writing about Ayn Rand, in which case anything goes."
And it does.
That's why its just advice to question essentialism, not discard it entirely. Sometimes ideas and people are simply bad and wrong and there's nothing to be done about them. Like Ayn Rand.
@seerak, @Malakyp:
If you make exceptions to avoiding essentialism, like, for instance, any one writing about Ayn Rand or anything identifiable as such, then you are outing yourself as discarding your values when it's convenient, and you will be seen as a hypocrite.
Ken wrote:
Amen.
To conduct oneself accordingly, one key is to recognize that some will never be persuaded. As Dean Swift's 1721 “A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Enter’d Into Holy Orders by a Person of Quality” observed:
To "get over it", one could do worse than cultivate the qualities that Reinhold Niebuhr beseeched for himself:
Excellent points! I do think many people judge people not based on facts, but rather perceptions and those views that come from others. I see many who simply don't make their own judgements, but rather they follow the crowd.
Fake news, filtered news, and partisan news that only gives people news they want to read, hear, or see. Journalism was built on freedom of speech and yet now many journalist suppress simply because they have a narrative or agenda. This is not journalism, its propaganda.
Agree with everything here.
Is there an agreed upon definition of "white nationalist"? I kind of interpret this as anything from a literal "white person who advocates political independence for a country" to Trump voter to KKK.
It tends to be used as a racial epithet in political discussions. I think it is just another instance of the mote (patriotic isolationist) and bailey (irredeemable racist) doctrine.
I don't want to drag this conversation down into the gutter.
#IBlamePutin.
More seriously, Mike B. nails it.
As Idries Shah said: There are never just two sides to an issue.
There has always been fake news, and the media has always been weaponized, but recent advances in transmission technology have created the opportunity for various factions to discredit their adversaries with much less effort than was previously required.
> Is there an agreed upon definition of "white nationalist"?
This is a great question. I think your first definition is correct but I suspect the term has been deployed dishonestly of late because it sounds reminiscent of "white supremacist", a very negative term.
There is nothing innately wrong with being a nationalist. Winston Churchill, FDR and JFK were all, arguably, nationalists. It's not even the opposite of being a globalist. One could be politically nationalist but economically globalist.
ZK:
I've been taking Political Science classes at my local university, and this sort of behavior can be incredibly depressing. A few weeks ago, a student was attempting to explain why she thought a specific policy was bad and decided that "It's just so typically short-sighted and liberal, it's ruining our generation!" was an acceptable critique. I have seen the same sort of antagonism from left-leaning students as well, Ken's example of Trump rings especially true here. The professors seem to have more or less given up on correcting these students, and I can't blame them. It's not as if they haven't been told time and again that "It's bad because it's bad!" is without value as analysis. I can only imagine how bad it is in majors where one isn't required to sit through lecture after lecture on proper argumentation.
Actually, it's about ethics in _____ journalism.
@OrderoftheQuaff
Eh, little bit of this, little bit of that.
It's easier than ever to find a story proclaiming that someone is a gay-cake-baking terrorist, it's harder than ever to block that person from publishing a defense of himself. Yellow journalism is still an issue, but I'd argue it's much harder to fool someone who doesn't want to be fooled.
The fact that so many people want to be fooled is more of a problem, people with "economic anxiety", people who ask how things could possibly get worse not realizing the question isn't as rhetorical as they think it is.
Things like pizzagate, the carrier deal and these russian rumours were litmus tests and the vast quiet majority of people reach sensible conclusions. When you're not allowed to not have either of two terrible choices, that doesn't mean most people believe in whatever's left.
Speaking of Fake News, I'd love to see an article, maybe a Lawsplainer that discussed liability for promoting fake news. I'm not thinking about the average anonymous Twitter person who retweets something, I'm thinking of the people like Alex Jones who make it up.
I would have said that someone like Jones was libel-proof because no one would take him seriously, but obviously, people have taken it to the point of going to Comet PingPong with a gun. Couldn't the owner of Comet PingPong sue the people like Alex Jones who deliberately promoted the crazy theory?
Cactus nailed it!
>> …but I'd argue it's much harder to fool someone who doesn't want to be fooled.
Therein lies the problem with the partisan (non)mentality and our current spectrum of news sources. Being a partisan has come to mean convincing that your party is the white knight while the other is evil. To be a partisan in today's political climate, you can't just 'want to be fooled,' the drive to be fooled has to be a top priority. Now, with dozens of 'news' sources instead of the handful that we used to have, every person that lusts after a delusion can find a person echo chamber that fits the set of delusions.
'Conservative' and 'liberal' have become empty words for the political right and left. They are no longer associated with any particular ideology.
Suz says December 16, 2016 at 7:24 am:
With very few exceptions that strongly depend upon other acts acts besides merely falsely spreading "fake news" (such as filing a false police report claiming that you witnessed children kidnapped and sold at Comet PingPong, or the like), there are few if any criminal remedies.
Anybody can sue anybody else for anything. The problem is staying in court after filing the suit.
Libel and related civil actions are the only bases for lawsuits that come to my mind immediately. Such actions are very dependent on the laws of the state jurisdiction where the acts or damage occurred. They are expensive for plaintiffs to prosecute, and offer limited remedies. I have no idea whether Comet PingPong would have either the financial means or the sheer outrage and resolution to maintain such a case despite the expense. But my WAG is that they wouldn't.
OTOH, Comet PingPong could truthfully advertize that their accuser Alex Jones also believes that the Apollo moon landings were faked. They could even offer a special "Alex Jones moon landing pizza", garnished with ground dry Parmesan "moon dust".
The US MSM is the biggest purveyor of "fake news" on the planet.
Witness the current "Russia hacked the election" narrative. If there is damning evidence of such, let's see it. None of this 'anonymous-sources-report-that-a-majority-of-intelligence-agencies-believe-that…' BS.
Remember The Cuban Missile Crisis? US Intelligence challenged Russia by presenting detailed evidence for all the world to see. That was back when Americans trusted the federal government and the MSM a lot more than they do now.
Even if the "Russian Hacking" story is 100% true (and they are almost certainly leaks which is different from hacking) the only result was that Hillary Clinton, John Podesta et al INCRIMINATED THEMSELVES IN THE EYES OF THE PUBLIC ONCE THEIR OWN WORDS AND DEEDS WERE MADE AVAILABLE.
Pathetic.
@Mercury
You have perhaps heard of Mitch McConnell or maybe John McCain? They've seen the classified evidence and it has convinced them.
Meanwhile, you're OK with the law being violated as long as you like the outcome. Good to know.
People keep saying this "fake news" is a new devastating thing. The current "OMG!" fad with even the average Joe on the street. I hear even people that normally track nothing political talking about it in everyday conversations like this is new and "Oh my god, did you hear about…"
People are ignorant of history. Look up "yellow journalism". This has been a problem for as long as news papers and probably even town criers and traveling minstrels have been around.
"But it's the scale, now!" No, sorry, doesn't hold up either. In many cases the newspapers engaged in the yellow journalism most associated with the news media at the time were monopolies. That is, they were the only news in town. Many towns, and even cities, only have/had single newspapers and the owners of them largely controlled the discussion of issues through them. These owners usually controlled more than a single paper or magazine, and in many cases they owned nation wide and sometimes international audiences thanks to being the only source of information inside and from certain areas.
These days it's actually *easier* to spot fake news because the same Internet that disseminates fake news also brings people the means to more easily verify that news, assuming they bother to check the sources (and as we've seen, many if not most people on the street are NOT willing or even care to know the truth). The problem isn't the "fake news", the problem is average Joe, despite the surface indignation, doesn't actually care to find out if what they are reading is fake, manufactured, biased, or reasonably true.
Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do about willful ignorance. These people are essentially lost to any meaningful conversation.
People can blame the "main stream media" all they want, but this is a cop out. It's a trope designed to dismiss anything that challenges their world view whether the story is substantially true or false. The real problem is no one even cares at the end of the day, and whatever comes from the news organization the person most likes and identifies with the person's world view is always going to be "more right" than the one they disagree with which is always going to be "wrong", regardless if it's a main stream source or a niche blog and regardless of any truth. It boils down to "my world view is right and yours is wrong and it doesn't matter what you say because your wrong". Until society gets over insular world views this is not going to change. Fake news is just the current whipping boy.
Ross says December 16, 2016 at 1:17 pm:
Even biased journalism is not necessary for fake news.
Orson Welles' entirely fictional The Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast in 1938 caused widespread panic, and a meelee with police at CBS studios, among many other things.
During the one hour program, events were portrayed that no reasonable person could believe could happen within only one hour. For example, a flight from Mars to Earth by the invaders, deployment of troops and destruction of cities.
Jack Parr (later a late night TV talk show host) then an announcer at a CBS Ohio affiliate station, sought to reassure listeners that the program was fiction. He was besieged by phone callers who were enraged because he was "covering up the truth".
According to a 2000 analysis by Justin Levine ("A History and Analysis of the Federal Communications Commission ’ s Response to Radio Broadcast Hoaxes,"
Federal Communications Law Journal: Vol. 52: Iss. 2, Article 3):
Orson Welles himself
Yet people believed the "fake news" that wasn't even news, and which announced its fictional nature several times during the broadcast.
As someone who tries to support all their arguments with original documents and sources, I am constantly dismayed by how often the MSM utterly fails at this.
I've literally written comments that are better sourced than a large number of the stories I have read.
@Tom Scharf
Yeah, it's a weasel word that is used to invoke the similar phrase "white supremacist" in the reader's minds, while at the same time — because of its convenient lack of definition — not requiring the burden of proof that would be expected when explicitly calling someone a white supremacist.
The phrase is thus very suitable for low-effort smears, which explains its quick rise to popularity.
There is a real problem with trying to describe any event as "fake news" and that is the maxim that reality is far stranger than fiction.
In recent years I have taken a somewhat Carollian approach to news in that I believe all of it is true – especially those parts that are mutually contradictory. In this way I avoid falling into the groupthink trap of immersing myself in an echo chamber.
So as far as I'm concerned, Putin hacked the DNC in order to hurt Hillary's chances at being elected because he knew that the Clinton Foundation was at the centre of an international child sex slavery racket.
I had a weird SMS (phone text) conversation with a brother who recommended I check out Alex Jones for alternative news. Someone I'd never heard of, and a bit like the term 'alternative medicine', 'alternative news' is something that heightens my skepticism. When I did a quick google on this guy, it returned that he was a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. When I told my brother that he was a Nutter because of that conspiracy theory, and so take what else he writes with caution, my brother then went full conspiracy mode, said he didn't know how the towers could be brought down. I said something along the lines that it takes months to demolish a medium size skyscraper in a controlled manner, with charges and that the US can't even lock down their servers, how would they stop many thousands of people working in the buildings not noticing the demo crew laying explosives, drilling, block elevators, etc. It requires the U.S. to be fiendishly good at blowing up buildings, but not as good as some slob called Alex Jones, or whoever, a bit of a contradiction. His reply wasn't, 'yeah, that makes me doubt my source', it was 'but what about building 7?'. I told him that neither of us are building engineers, and the guy, Alex Jones, wasn't either, so why did he doubt the people who have studied years to gain expertise instead of some guy who makes shit up?
I haven't received a reply. In my defence, I'm Australian so I hadn't heard of this Jones tosser. We have our own mountebanks here who think an opinion based on fervor trumps a life dedicated to a subject, sadly….
"fake news" is a coordinated propaganda effort by corporate media and the government to silence independent and alternative news sources. WashingtonPost promoted the website propornot, for example, that labels pretty much everything but the big corporate news outlets as russian propaganda and "useful idiots". How do they determine that? secret. Who runs the website? secret. Obama and Clinton even came out talking about the "scourge" of fake news, and Clinton blamed her loss on everyone else, including the "fake" news. As if she didn't pay off journalists and coordinate with the corporate media to intentionally create false stories and pro-clinton propaganda as shown in the wikileaks….
The liberal associate professor's list of "fake news" that was circulating? It contained many websites like the onion and other obvious satire sites, along with some horrible clickbait garbage, some of which was directly created by Google. They pair legitimate websites like 21stcenturywire.com with absolute garbage and say, "here, see? they're all garbage!" and it is argument by association in an arbitrary list.
Censorship has always gone hand in hand with intense propaganda efforts. How can people say that websites like activistpost are russian propaganda and fake news while nearly every corporate media outlet in the west has promoted the russian hacking conspiracy based on NO RELEASED EVIDENCE, just "anonymous" sources like that one promoted in the CIA article. It is literally all just rumor and they spread it around as if it is undeniable. Putin is even asking for them to release the "evidence" that all the press is claiming they have. Talk about fake news.
And what about the Iraq war and the CIA's "high confidence" report on WMDs? or Bentonite and the false link between Saddam and anthrax? I could go on an on about these things, also with the big media corporations literally shooting footage in studios and saying they are on the ground in foreign countries. Or them using pictures from a different war (or recently with Aleppo, a music video) in a different country to show what our current war looks like.
These are just a few of the reasons why people are leaving the corporate propaganda media behind, like NYT, CNN, BBC, NPR, WashingtonPost, HuffPost, VICE, etc. because they have proven untrustworthy, especially as revealed in association with Clinton thanks to wikileaks. And that is why they are fighting back, they are losing viewers and readers and, therefore, money. The government is losing support because the traditional propaganda techniques are failing. They are working on new pejoratives, new slogans, new talking points, framing the arguments better, and obfuscation of information parading as unquestionable truth.
So what is the phenomenon of "false news" and how it suddenly surged into existence? It is psychological warfare to create a false dual narrative of black or white, or good or bad. With us or against us.
A good article, but I think it's mis-titled. All the points are basically "how to be a good opinion writer." "Fake News" means fake or deliberately mis-interpreted facts. Fake news really isn't applicable to the guidelines posted.
Also, @M Says: "The Onion" and other satire sites absolutely count as fake news. The stories are faked for laughs rather than political persuasion, but they're still fake, and I've seen people post them as real stories. As such it is both technically and practically correct to put them on the "Fake News" list – albeit in the 'satire' section.
I remember a time when people used the word "hoax" to refer to alleged news stories based on fraudulent facts. Can we go back to that?
@Tom Scharf:
Yes, and it's very easy to look up. It hasn't changed in decades.
===
@ben:
A weasel word. *sigh* Christ, I hate it when people can't even Google. I'll quote to make it easy: White nationalism is an ideology that advocates a racial definition of national identity. Proponents of the ideology identify with and are attached to the concept of a white nation. It ranges from a preference for one's specific white ethnic group, to feelings of superiority, including calls for national citizenship to be reserved for white people. White separatism and white supremacy are subgroups of white nationalism. Separatists seek a white-only state, while supremacists add ideas from social Darwinism and Nazism to their ideology. Both subgroups generally avoid the term supremacy because it has negative connotations.
There's no "lack of definition" to the term "white nationalist". The term has been in use since the 1950s. The definition then is the same definition now.
===
@M: t contained many websites like the onion and other obvious satire sites, along with some horrible clickbait garbage,
I can think of three people at my workplace who think The Onion is real news and that the whole thing about it being "satire" is false. These same three people are also engineers.
21st Century Wire has issued articles stating that Pizzagate is real, down to the secret tunnels where they are performing Satanic sacrifices of children. I don't consider news like that to be "legitimate". Their recent "expose" on how neo-conservatism is the product of Trotskyite Marxist Jews seeking to eliminate Western Democracy doesn't give me confidence either.
(Neo-Conservatism is actually the product of the Project for a New American Century, which later became the Bush2 administration…and wasn't terribly Jew-influenced either, when you get down to the brass tacks.)
Activist Post isn't skewered as Russian propaganda. They're skewered as left-wing conspiracy-mongers. Here's why:
Headline: "200 Evidence-Based Reasons NOT To Vaccinate – FREE Research PDF Download!" (pseudoscientific bullshit)
Headline: "The Establishment’s Plan To Divide: Donald Trump, Fake News, And Russia" (Just read the first paragraph. If you didn't cringe, there's something wrong.)
Headline: "The Truth About Mandatory Vaccines"[153]
Headline: "How The Government Is Turning Legal Marijuana Into A Massive Surveillance State"
This blog post does not address the legal issue. Obviously current efforts by Congress to criminalize 'fake news' are scary from a First Amendment perspective, since as you say fake news is in the eye of the beholder. Ken, many of us want to hear you address that part of it.
I agree with most of what you wrote, Ken, there is one point I disagree with:
"Asking who proposed a policy — or asking cui bono — can be a good starting point, but it's not an endpoint."
I don't even think it makes a good starting point. By leading with that question, it really is being used as an excuse to dismiss the idea out of turn. The only point where it becomes remotely useful is once the analysis is finished, the idea is found wanting, and you are trying to understand the motive for the idea being presented. Even at that point, I think it's only of limited value.
As normal, a thoughtful and good read.
@AH: So, if you're reading an article about, say the effect of adding flax seeds to dairy cows' diets has on the nutritional content of their milk you don't think it's important for the writer to disclose the fact that he draws a paycheck from a food manufacturer that has recently launched a marketing campaign based around said dietary supplement (an example from the past week in my country.)
The question of who benefits is crucial. It's not the only crucial one, but it's not to be dismissed.
@Czernobog: if the study is performed properly, and is reproducible then it doesn't matter. If it was performed improperly and/or is not reproducible then it also doesn't matter. Who paid does not matter if the science is right. Who paid doesn't matter if the science is wrong. All that matter is the results.
It's not crucial. It's only mildly interesting, at best.
@AH: Have you been living under a rock for the past 50 years? It takes a long time for scientific studies to provide a 100% conclusive result on most issues, and interested parties use that ambiguity to advance their interests. There is no "The science is right/The science is wrong" in the real world. Just evidence and evidence to the contrary.
In Journalism, which is the topic of this discussion, it is essential to disclose such interests for the benefit of the general public. People don't have the time or the expertise to judge every study on it's merit. And when someone reports on the results of a given study failure to reveal that they have a vested interest in spinning it's results one way or another amounts to an attempt at duping the readers. These attempts are often successful. Which is why disclosure is crucial for the advancement of honest reporting.
@Castaigne
Well there's your problem right there. That "one definition" certainly has quite the range…
All the better for media to actually describe what they're talking about.
And BTW, when did this idea of "fake news" really take hold? Where was the screaming about "fake news" before November 7th?
Wonderful post. Thank you, Ken, for reminding us to aim higher.