[Air-L] ​fake news

יוחנן ועקנין yohanan.ouaknine at ois.co.il
Sat Jan 7 05:49:43 PST 2017


Hello All !
Following this very interesting discussion, I would like to ask if "fake
titles" or "fake headlines" is a part of the fake news issue.
Biased news headlines is not a new issue (http://umich.edu/~newsbias/he
adlines.html) as many people don't bother reading the whole article, and
also because the writer of the article is not always responsible of the
headlines!

*Regards, *
*Yohanan Ouaknine *
*PhD candidate *
*Bar Ilan university, Israel*

On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 10:53 PM, kalev leetaru <
​​
kalev.leetaru5 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Robert, that's actually one of the fascinating aspects of all of this - how
> you define "
> ​​
> fake news". If you dive back into the history of propaganda
> theory, you'll find some fantastic work on why defining "fake news" is so
> hard - the same set of facts can be used by well-meaning and earnest
> reporters to support wildly different conclusions. Paul Linebarger's
> classic "Psychological Warfare" offers a fantastic primer on this.
>
> If we define "fake news" as solely that news which the person writing it
> knew at the time to be solely and entirely false without any basis in fact
> and start looking at the legal definitions of things like "libel" then
> that's one avenue of approach. But, the discussion that's happening in
> journalism circles right now is really centering on a much broader
> definition of false and misleading news.
>
> Even on this very mailing list people have mentioned the alt-left and
> alt-right as "fake news". Some of that certainly falls into the category of
> outright libel, where the person writing it has posted elsewhere that they
> do solemnly swear that they know what they are writing to be exclusively
> false and devoid of any fact and recognize it to be libel. Yet, much of the
> alt-left and alt-right reporting that is being labeled as "fake news" is
> simply a highly partisan or skewed interpretation of a common set of facts,
> where if you talk with the reporters (and I've talked with several) they
> firmly stand behind what they've written and believe it to be solid
> journalism based on objective empirical fact.
>
> The difference is that when you turn to the Post/NYTimes/etc's journalism,
> there is an expectation of rigorous fact checking and a placement of
> "getting the story right" above "getting the scoop" and being the first to
> print. We all know that isn't always the case and that journalists take
> short cuts and papers make mistakes. But, the focus here is that we need to
> have more transparency on how the media functions.
>
> When papers like the Post and Times no longer treat their online stories as
> "print" and instead treat them as living documents to be edited over time
> and constantly rewritten, that raises all sorts of questions of how we
> trust and understand the information we consume, especially given studies
> on online sharing that show how much of what we share is shared based
> purely on the headline and lede, rather than a full careful reading of the
> entire article.
>
> Setting aside conspiracy theories, the bottom line is that we need much
> greater transparency in the journalism world - we can't just say "trust the
> Post" or any other outlet - we have to start thinking critically about how
> the things we take for granted like the inverted pyramid actually serve to
> enable and power false and misleading news (
> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/10/the-inve
> rted-pyramid-and-how-fake-news-weaponized-modern-journalistic-practice/
> ).
>
> Kalev

-- 
Yohanan Ouaknine 

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