Continuing our weekly chats, the Advocate staff tackled the topic of fake news, that scourge to lovers of truth everywhere! The chat has been lightly edited.
kristinpalpini (Kristin Palpini, editor): Let’s do this! So, Dave, wanna give a description of the topic?
dave.eisen (Dave Eisenstadter, web editor): We wanted to do this week’s chat on FAKE NEWS.
kristinpalpini: OK well done.
dave.eisen: I think one of my first questions about this is what counts as fake news?
kristinpalpini: Fake news has always been around, remember yellow journalism (101, people). Fake news is news that did not happen.
dave.eisen: I always get yellow journalism confused with muckraking, and muckraking is a good thing, right?
kristinpalpini: Muckraking is awesome. Yellow journalism is, well, Breitbart.
petevancini (Peter Vancini, staff writer): Right. There are shades of gray on this issue, but then there’s the blatantly false stuff.
kristinpalpini: Journalism that is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration. “Equating murder and dismemberment with smoking pot is the worst yellow journalism.”
dave.eisen: We need a new color for a new millenium.
kristinpalpini: Ugh, Facebook blue.
jlevesque (Jennifer Levesque, art director): Or Buzzfeed, yuck.
kristinpalpini: mmhmm
dave.eisen: Facebook blue journalism.
kristinpalpini: Yes!!!!!!!
dave.eisen: Not to be confused with true blue journalism.
kristinpalpini: We did it. OK, end of discussion.
I think the Facebook blue journalism has its roots in the internet’s birth and citizen journalism. When the internet sprung up suddenly everyone with a blog was a journalist. We embraced this because the more people who care the better. But then we got lumped in with all the fake and half-fake and blustering news. No wonder millenials hate the news; they put us all in the same pot.
petevancini: Right. Press credentials went out the window, and maybe that wasn’t a bad thing.
kristinpalpini: No there was def a good side to it. There are some blogs out there that are truly outstanding. But
petevancini: Definitely, but it’s led to this so-called “post-truth” era.
kristinpalpini: We never figured out how to separate news from trusted sources and Facebook memes where words don’t matter.
dave.eisen: I think the biggest issue now with this type of journalism, yellow or blue, is that it is so easy to consume now that people don’t necessarily look at sources.
hunterstyles (Hunter Styles, arts editor): Facebook’s fake news problem is also compounded by “professional Facebook users straining to build media companies … not the other way around.” That’s the way the NYT put it here.
Here’s the Stanford study on fake news.
kristinpalpini: Thanks H, I needed a good cry this a.m.
dave.eisen: Nice, while we were jabbering, Hunter was digging.
jlevesque: Haha, for real.
hunterstyles: The Stanford study found that 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website.
petevancini: Wow, that’s disturbing.
hunterstyles: “Many students judged the credibility of newsy tweets based on how much detail they contained or whether a large photo was attached, rather than on the source.”
petevancini: News organizations work so hard to establish credibility and journalistic integrity, and it’s worrisome that that doesn’t seem to matter to some readers.
dave.eisen: Yes petevancini. I think just as big a problem as fake news is that so many people see real news as fake. And I think that the major news outlets didn’t do themselves any favors during their election cycle coverage this year.
kristinpalpini: I’ve got a list of ways people can spot fake news … what do you all think?
It’s written by a news organization or website you’ve never heard of before.
It’s written by a news organization or website that sort of kind of sounds familiar.
If the article is reporting major news, like “Trump Emails Linked to ISIS Attack on Dunkin’ Donuts,” and the AP or Reuters isn’t reporting on it, as well, it’s probably BS.
The article doesn’t cite any sources.
The article is unbalanced.
The article contains “I” statements by the author.
The photo on the article does not match the story’s content.
There is no byline.
The article is obsessed with liberals, conservatives, and or referring to the mainstream media more than three times — only once if they use the term lamestream.
dave.eisen: What is the second one — that “kind of sounds familiar”?
petevancini: There’s also this handbook.
kristinpalpini: The second one is organizations such as psychologynews.com or something like that. You know, it sounds legit, but it’s bull. But we buy into this deceptive practice via advertorials. Oo shit I went there.
petevancini: There was an interesting story recently where some reporters tracked down the owner of disinfo.com, which is a liberal-leaning fake news site.
dave.eisen: Ah, Kristin, those ones are always fooling me when I’m trying to do legit research
petevancini: Ugh advertorials.
kristinpalpini: I guess a good rule of thumb is always look at the source and byline. Don’t be a chump reader.
dave.eisen: Is there a way to solve this? Can we make becoming informed fun?
kristinpalpini: Like, with puppets?
dave.eisen: You get an online rating. If you spend too much time reading fake news articles, you get a designation of “chump reader.” But if you only read true news, then you get a “savvy reader” badge.
kristinpalpini: lol Dave I can craft some.
petevancini: Haha, we don’t need no stinkin’ badges. OK maybe we do.
kristinpalpini: It’s true that we need to take responsability for the shit we put in our heads. I think establishing an organization of legit news editors who can certify news orgs would be good
hunterstyles: Pete, can you find that article on the disinfo guy?
petevancini: Yeah, so this guy sort of saw his disemination of fake news as a way to combat the spread of fake news on the other end of the spectrum. As if putting more bad info out there would achieve some kind of balance.
dave.eisen: I see what the guy is saying, fighting fire with fire, but I don’t think creating more false news is going to lead anywhere good. It just ebbs away at the idea of truth….
petevancini: Yeah, I worry that a social climate exists right now where some prefer to create their own reality that jives more with what they want the world to be like.
dave.eisen: So glad that we have snopes.com!
petevancini: Ha! Love that Snopes.
dave.eisen: Maybe snopes and politifact should start certifying news sites… but then who certifies them?
petevancini: Yeah, that’s another can of worms
hunterstyles: Another thing that, unfortunately, needs to be said: the only way you become discerning about something is to consume a lot of it. And most people don’t read hard journalism at all anymore. You can tell people to check sources and bylines and domain names while they’re reading news, but it’s STILL very hard to tell. Reading hard news needs to be a conscious daily practice. Most people used to commit to that practice as a means of improving themselves and staying informed within a common context (even a national one). That doesn’t mean monolithic news sources are “better” than blogs, etc… I just think our common interest in thinking analytically about what we read has atrophied a lot in the age of the echo chamber.
kristinpalpini: I agree, Hunter. Our news has shifted to editorial without much acknowledgement.
dave.eisen: Hunter, do you think that dynamic might change in the era of Trump? More people trying to inform themselves? Or do you think the opposite will happen?
hunterstyles: I think Trump has crafted the perfect meta-narrative about truth, which is that there is no objective truth, and no one can be trusted to report accurately. That’s why people follow strongmen, and end up supporting authoritarians
kristinpalpini: :shudder: Is the media helpless in this? Do we have the resources to continue writing the news and fighting to defend our existence?
hunterstyles: This happened yesterday: A Trump surrogate says there’s no such thing as facts.
petevancini: @hunterstyles agreed. I think we need to teach skepticism in elementary schools. A lot of smart people I know still don’t have a discerning eye for news. My man —> http://www.carlsagan.com/index_ideascontent.htm Bologna detection kit.
hunterstyles: Also, people have literally no idea, outside of journslists, what good journalistic practice and reporting ethics even are. How would they? It used to just be something you could trust because people were getting their news from papers that, more often than not, self-policed inaccurate or biased reporting. That’s still true, but those instituions are crowded out.
petevancini: Right! I think it’s up to us as reporters to better convey our methods to readers.
dave.eisen: Though years ago, in the time of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, there weren’t really authoritative news sources. Everything was yellow journalism at that time. Are we headed for another era of that, that we just have to claw our way out of?
petevancini: I hate to say it @dave.eisen, but I kind of think so.
dave.eisen: Pete, when you talk about methods, do you mean like saying — “Valley Advocate, the only source that actually spoke to …such and such… to get the story”?
petevancini: The public, I think, perceives that there’s been a breach of trust between them and “The Media” (the amorphous, monolitic institution). Because they don’t really seem to know who to trust.
dave.eisen: If only instead of having a monolithic media this country had a disconnected group of independent news sources. I think then we might actually have less biased coverage! /sacasm
hunterstyles: I hate to be pessimistic, but I can’t think of any way for the news media to get out from under the net Trump has thrown on them.
kristinpalpini: Us.
dave.eisen: Not to defend Trump, but I think we were going down this path before he threw his net.
kristinpalpini: Journalism has never been easy, it will continue to be that way.
hunterstyles: ALSO IMPORTANT: With an authoritarian president coming into office, we can’t just fact-check things that get said. Because more and more, people will be saying things they know not to be facts. Liberals in Germany were “fact-checking” Hitler’s claims about Jews. But Hitler didn’t mean them as facts. He meant them as the only possible justification for what he had already decided to do to them later. That’s why his claims of voter fraud scare me so much. We have to figure out what it means to re-claim the value of factual information. Because it’s the VALUE of that information that people aren’t grasping.
Nice uplifting rant by me.
kristinpalpini: The problem is deep and systemic, and starts in the womb.
petevancini: Agreed. Yeah, the media’s job has always been to speak truth to power no matter who holds that power.
kristinpalpini: The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
