DiscussMormonism.com

It was mid-2016, and Buzzfeed's media editor, Craig Silverman, noticed a funny stream of completely made-up stories that seemed to originate from one small Eastern European town.

"We ended up finding a small cluster of news websites all registered in the same town in Macedonia called Veles," Silverman recalls.

He and a colleague started to investigate, and shortly before the US election they identified at least 140 fake news websites which were pulling in huge numbers on Facebook.

The young people in Veles may or may not have had much interest in American politics, but because of the money to be made via Facebook advertising, they wanted their fiction to travel widely on social media. The US presidential election - and specifically Donald Trump - was (and of course still is) a very hot topic on social media.

And so the Macedonians and other purveyors of fakery wrote stories with headlines such as "Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President" and "FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide".

They were completely false. And thus began the modern - and internet-friendly - life of the phrase "fake news".

Donald Trump's thumbs wrote:The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media.

MeDotOrg wrote:What I think is happening the gradual progression 'fake news' to 'the Fake News Media'. When you can get people to believe in 'the Fake News Media', is fake, you condition your followers to disbelieve that all news coming out of sources which are not friendly, because they are the 'enemy of the people' and their coverage is automatically 'fake'. Facts no longer matter, the source of the story matters.

That is an Orwellian view of facts. The irony is that the website that first uncovered the origins of the original fake news would probably be called a 'Fake News Website' by the President.

subgenius wrote:

MeDotOrg wrote:What I think is happening the gradual progression 'fake news' to 'the Fake News Media'. When you can get people to believe in 'the Fake News Media', is fake, you condition your followers to disbelieve that all news coming out of sources which are not friendly, because they are the 'enemy of the people' and their coverage is automatically 'fake'. Facts no longer matter, the source of the story matters.

That is an Orwellian view of facts. The irony is that the website that first uncovered the origins of the original fake news would probably be called a 'Fake News Website' by the President.

To be fair, when we witness the "Media" perpetuating "fake news" then it is not an Orwellian view but an increasingly realistic view...and then consider how reporters are being unveiled as fabricating news or fabricating facts to inflate their persona or the story. It is these notions that cast more doubt on the for-profit media sources than do the for-profit Macedonians.

I think your OP attempts to diminish the real, ad growing, problem in the evolution of modern media/news where facts are no longer "good enough".

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
― Hannah Arendt,

MeDotOrg wrote:(T)o blindly paint the vast majority of reporters as 'The Fake Media' is telling people to abandon their own critical judgement. Trust the President, it's the Fake News Media. Let him worry about what is true.

Tucker Carlson wrote:“If you’re looking to understand what’s actually happening in this country, always assume the opposite of whatever they’re telling you on the big news stations.”

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

— George Orwell, "1984"

Numerous reports have highlighted how fake news creators began targeting conservative readers after finding them receptive to stories that reinforced their existing worldview. As one fake news creator told NPR, "We've tried to do [fake news with] liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out."

In other words, liberals were slightly more predisposed to think critically than conservatives. As Stefan Pfattheicher of Ulm University put it in an email to me, conservatives "are less reflective in information processing, especially when information is consistent with [their] own worldviews."

Gunnar wrote:What makes it even worse is that conservatives are the most easily duped by fake news.

Some Schmo wrote:The right in this country is clearly more religulous, and hence, open to manipulation.