I think all of this talk about "fake news" in the abstract is unhelpful, because I suspect we all have something different in mind for "fake news." I mean, if

I think all of this talk about "fake news" in the abstract is unhelpful, because I suspect we all have something different in mind for "fake news." I mean, if there's a widespread belief that Secretary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor[0], widespread enough that it's turning up in response to random phone polling in the days before the election, that's a different category of "fake news" than "Restore hair growth with this one simple trick." If a tweet of some parked busses for a Tableau conference in Austin, Texas, can result in a tweeted claim by the President-Elect and a thread that runs for more than a week on cable news about "paid protestors,"[1] that's not the same as "Aliens take President-Elect for a ride on their flying saucer." These seem to be in a different category than the NY Times' in-retrospect-horrible reporting prior to the US invasion of Iraq. It's possible to be certain but wrong, and marshal evidence in support of your beliefs. In the case of the NY Times, that mistaken reporting was enormous, and the impact of it was enormous, but it is reasonable to think that others given the same information would have made the same mistakes. Lots of people did, in fact. In the meantime, 99% of the rest of NY Times reporting was accurate, as is usually the case. The two examples of "fake news" I linked seem ludicrous, and they're just the tip of the iceberg. Anecdotally, I personally saw claims about eight LGBT youth having killed themselves as a result of the election, but those claims seem to be unsubstantiated at best, and most like "fake news" from the other political side. It's not entirely a partisan issue. So yeah, Judith Miller's reporting turned out to be terrible. I'm not sure how that counters the fact that the so-called "fake news" currently being discussed is reprehensibly awful, and apparently effective. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13011496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13011496 [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/business/media/how-fake-news-spreads.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/business/media/how-fake-ne...