[Air-L] breaking news and fake news - the wash post's russian power grid hackers story

Robert Tynes nativebuddha at gmail.com
Sun Jan 1 12:29:10 PST 2017


Kalev,

Your points about the process of news making are worth considering. But conflating  what the Post did with a discussion of fake news is a bit off-base. The major difference is, despite conspiracy theories about major papers such as the Post, Post reporters do seek out the most empirically evident story possible. They do look for facts.

Fake news, on the other hand, seeks to deceive, and to persuade its audience towards more extreme ideological points of view.

And motives matter.


-Robert




> On Jan 1, 2017, at 2:48 PM, kalev leetaru <kalev.leetaru5 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm sure many of you saw the Washington Post's story on Friday that Russian
> hackers had penetrated the US power grid through a utility in Vermont and
> also the unraveling of that story over the following half day.
> 
> What is so fascinating about this case from a "fake news" perspective is
> that it brings into sharp relief once again A) how the mainstream media
> forms a trust echochamber in which once one outlet runs a story, everyone
> follows without performing their own fact checking, B) the absolute trust
> frequently placed in government sources as "truth", C) the lack of fact
> checking even at tier one outlets like the Post and the lack of
> transparency in those processes (while answering other questions, the Post
> declined for a second time to comment in any way on how it fact checks
> articles and the level of rigor it requires prior to publication), D) how
> once an article is published, even if it is retracted or substantively
> changed, how that is often not clearly communicated to readers.
> 
> I thought many of you would find of interest in particular the chronology
> of edits to the Post page courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback
> Machine and how it was almost a full day after the article had been
> rewritten that the Post finally appended an editors note acknowledging the
> wholesale changes - again points both to how newspapers now constantly
> rewrite their online articles over the course of a day or more and the
> immense power of the Archive in allowing us to trace those edits over time.
> 
> To me, perhaps the most interesting piece here from a "fake news"
> perspective is how often "breaking news" becomes "fake news" as major
> details change once more facts become available. Given that in this case
> the Post was constantly rewriting the article over more than 12 hours after
> publication, it also raises the question of how we leverage all of these
> initiatives that look at news rewriting to help flag when articles are
> retracted or heavily edited and communicate that back to the general public
> - the tools are all there, but in terms of helping getting that back to the
> public.
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-news-and-how-the-washington-post-rewrote-its-story-on-russian-hacking-of-the-power-grid/
> 
> 
> Kalev
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