Have you noticed that your 'fake news' is not my 'fake news'? Talking about 'fake news' seems to be everywhere, and it seems to be so partisan. Guess what? This is not new. Fake news is really yellow journalism. Yellow journalism is a term coined in 1890 to describe the tactics used by two competing newspapers in NYC to attract readers. These two papers sensationalized, enhanced, and tightly focused their news reports on only a portion of what actually happened in an event. The focus was often on the grisly, the bloody, and the titillating which was equated (often in the same article) with 'dirty immigrants', or 'the undeserving, lazy poor'.
Fake news (yellow journalism) has been resurrected by the electronic revolution. Think: blogs, Facebook, and partisan web pages, as tools to promote fake news. Scientists have taken on this new wave of yellow journalism. On March 9, 2018, Science published a large study about fake news. It's called "The Spread of True and False News Online". They discovered 'falsehoods' diffused faster than the truth, and political falsehoods spread faster and were more believed. A second article called "The Science of Fake News" is calling for an interdisciplinary study to try and understand it, and help people spot it.
A major point in both articles was the idea that ANYONE CAN SAY ANYTHING ON-LINE AND BE BELIEVED. It's especially true if the web site includes enough charts, graphs, and claims. For instance, a created website that LOOKS like a professional news organization can disseminate through social media (again, think Facebook or Twitter), make money by selling ads, and present outright lies as facts.
An example would be the claim that Pope Francis had endorsed Trump during the presidential election. The website which made the initial claim looked like a real TV station's website, but was a complete fabrication. The lie spread like wildfire on Facebook and was widely believed. As I like to say, Walter Cronkite is no longer looking out for us. There are no professional journalistic standards of fact checking, multiple sources, and just plain integrity being practiced by unvetted web news sources, particularly political news sources. Fake news looks very, very believable. It used to be called propaganda when the enemy was Communism.
The whole idea of objectivity, vetting news sources, fact checking, and obtaining more than one source before publication came about as a backlash to the spread of yellow journalism at the beginning of the 20th century. Suddenly, yellow journalism stepped beyond lurid crime reporting. It invaded the political arena contributing to the United States going to war first in the Spanish American War ('Remember the Maine'), and even more disastrously in entering World War I. Prior to the spread of the internet, our valid expectation as consumers of news was the news being reported was factual.
The scientists who wrote the articles mentioned above also found in their research that "people prefer information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs". They consider information that agrees with their beliefs to be more persuasive, and prior pre-existing beliefs actually stops people from fact checking information they agree with.
In my opinion, at least these studies are moving in the right direction. They are calling for more independent studies on the whole idea of 'fake news' or 'false news' (the Facebook preferred terminology), so we can figure out how to find the gold on the web and recognize the iron pyrite. (fool's gold).
Please check out my source material in the following website which will also link to other sites. I really like the 'cartoon' presentation which illustrates why we are certain the 'fake news' we agree with must be true.
http://earthsky.org/human-world/fake-news-mar-2018-article-science-calling-for-studies?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=b2091d6a56-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-b2091d6a56-394272581
