Fakenews from HuffPo

[Dill]

(12-21-2016, 07:09 AM)hollodero Wrote: In fact I really wonder why the conservative right is not just as much against "fake news" as the left is. It really seems like a bipartisan issue. Only reason I see for that: The fake news are "right" as well, you share a common enemy (the left), so the enemy of my enemy... or something within these lines. I truly feel in the debate you kind of forget to condemn "fake news" and instead try to make the case of equivalency - which to me sounds like a false equivalency. HuffPost is not like the forged "mass rape and government cover up" stories. There are important nuances to the word "fake" that are not to be neglected. And you know that. So how comes?

This question is at the root of my disagreement with SSF, which began on another thread.  A number of mainstream (not "leftists") journalists responded to fake news when the story first broke by attempting to define it clearly and creating online "primers" to help people determine what is false and what not. My link in post #13 above is one example.

Right wing commentators, on the other hand, took a much different tack. They expanded the reference to include pretty much everything they don't like. E.g., a comment like Hillary's "deplorables" is called fake news by Sean Hannity, though, it was never presented as news.  Pollsters who put Hillary ahead of Trump the week before the election were also producing fake news, according to him. Rush says that is all CNN produces. They also called stories about the CIA claim that Russia hacked the DNC to influence the outcome of the elections "Fake News." So basically anything they did not like.

I do not find this a big mystery. For a week or so after reporters discovered that fake news producers had much more success with right wing audiences, there was near hysteria from Hannity, Rush and some other Fox commentators in the rush to call everything fake.  Once the definition was sufficiently expanded, EVERYONE was consuming fake news. It was no longer a right wing phenomenon.This is, of course, not limited to Fox.

A left-wing Paper like the Washington post shows its "bias" by reporting a CIA findings as news. Breitbart and American thinker report the CIA findings as "fake news."

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/12/12/cia-russian-hacking-story-sham/
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/12/fake_news_the_cia_says_russia_preferred_trump.html

That is one reason why I took care on this thread to define my use of the term. Also, I do not follow Fox in calling mainstream or garden-variety liberal journalists "leftists."