You can’t go online these days without seeing someone screaming about #FakeNews. If you read the news at all you come across either someone defending themselves against a charge, accusing someone else of it, discussing the phenomenon, or simply expressing dismay over this entire situation.
Here’s my problem with the charge of fake news: no one is perfect 100% of the time and facts (usually) require context.
Pick a news site, any news site. I can guarantee they were wrong about something in the past 6 months. I can also guarantee that they ran a misleading headline in the past 6 months (usually the last 6 hours).
This trend of screaming Fake News at everything matters because the behavior pattern can apply to just about anything. Grocery store accidentally mislabels a product price? Fake News! Your favorite store opens 10 minutes late? Fake News! Your friends don’t show up to your party after RSVPing? Fake News! (Probably because you yell fake news at everything.)
The real question we should be asking is whether there is a trend behind the pattern of reporting from either an individual or news organization.
- Do their articles consistently only tell one side of the story? Partisan News!
- Do their articles consistently have misleading, eye-popping headlines? Clickbait News!
- Do they consistently only report what others have already reported? Late-to-the-Party News!
- Are they just reporting opinions instead of actual news? Hot-Takes News!
- Are they consistently misreporting stories and issuing corrections or retractions? Bad News!
- Are they actually making up stories for the purpose of misleading readers? Fake News!
- Are they writing stories that we personally disagree with but are still based on either fact or opinion? Real-but-we-don’t-like-it News!
Most “fake news” actually falls into the last bucket. People yell Fake News because it catches the ear and implies malicious intent. There is a sense of immediate dis-crediting that can happen when the label is applied. Worryingly, there really is Fake News out there that ends up in circulation without the tag because the finger pointing is going in the wrong directions.
Luckily, Fake News as a label is following a classic bubble pattern. The more legitimate content that gets caught up in the label, the less meaning the label has before it eventually loses all meaning.