9 ms·

Look at recent events if you need further evidence of this. The term "fake news" has exploded in just under a month in the mainstream media. If my memory serve

Look at recent events if you need further evidence of this. The term "fake news" has exploded in just under a month in the mainstream media. If my memory serves me, tabloids like The Enquirer have been sitting on news stands for as long as I can remember. So how did this fervor over "fake news" coalesce so quickly and uniformly? Mainstream outlets move in lockstep with each other and these are the final, desperate death throes of an outdated and superfluous institution. Don't expect they'll go down without a fight though.

gnarbarian 10y ago
The whole FUD campaign regarding "Fake News" is comically hypocritical in my opinion. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent article calling them out for it: https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactured-fake-news-that-msnbc-personalities-spread-to-discredit-wikileaks-docs/ https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactur... Edit: Ironically, that post was doing great until it got flagged. Edit 2: It has been unflagged Edit 3: Flagged again.
- sydd 10y ago
  Great article. Although I wonder why it fails to criticize Trump's side...
  - xkcd-sucks 10y ago
    Probably because the people that read the intercept already think poorly of trump, and the article had a word limit
  - gnarbarian 10y ago
    You could also say the opposite about every Washington Post article released since the election.
  - andrepd 10y ago
    I can't fathom why an article calling the fake news phenomenon an FUD campaign would fail to critizice Trump's side... Seriously though, the article is comically bad. It oozes bile and anger and it's so comically and blatantly one-sided it's almost funny in a so-bad-that-it's-good way.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- leephillips 10y ago
  Greenwald's "excellent" piece is itself fake news. It deliberately misrepresents the reporting done by Kurt Eichenwald about the leaked emails. We know it's deliberate because he's distorted the story the same way in the past and it's been pointed out to him. Eichenwald did not claim that the leaked information was false, but showed, to a high degree of certainty, that Trump campaign staffers were working with Russian disinformation operatives. It was an amazing story.
  - gnarbarian 10y ago
    "showed, to a high degree of certainty, that Trump campaign staffers were working with Russian disinformation operatives." Can you show me what warrants a high degree of certainty for that claim? Because as far as I know there is no evidence for this beyond the tenuous circumstantial nature of Clinton's dirty laundry helping Trump, and a Trump presidency is less likely to start a war with Russia.
    - leephillips 10y ago
      I was talking about Eichenwald's reporting that is pointed to by Greenwald. You're quoting my reference and commenting on it without having read it.
    - RCortex 10y ago
      Not the piece above, but here it is. This article has a lot of links/sources on how Trump's campaign statements and Russian propaganda are almost word-for-word identical, and in general complementary. This is from back in August. http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/understanding-the-role-of-russian-propaganda-in-the-us-election http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/underst...
  - hrxn 10y ago
    All news is fake news, we get it..
  - tshaddox 10y ago
    When you have a "nuh uh, YOU'RE the one that's fake" situation between two apparently reputable news sources, on a topic with which you have no personal experience or expertise, how are you supposed to figure out which ones are fake? The instances of so-called "fake news" that I have seen are quite easy for me to "verify" as fake with relative confidence: it's generally an explicitly partisan source with a shady-looking website making an outlandish claim that is not corroborated by any traditional news outlet. The situation you've just described sounds much more difficult for me to verify.
- whybroke 10y ago
  An exact opposite equally excellent article from the same publication calling out the FUD we know as 'Fake News' And this one avoids words like 'shameful' and 'disgusting' https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/laura-ingraham-lifezette/ https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/laura-ingraham-lifezette...
michaelchisari 10y ago
Because this is the first election where "spirit cooking" and "pizzagate" conspiracies were put on equal footing with foreign policy and economic positions.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- bloaf 10y ago
  http://history1800s.about.com/od/leaders/a/electionof1828.htm http://history1800s.about.com/od/leaders/a/electionof1828.ht... >The supporters of Andrew Jackson began spreading a rumor that Adams, while serving as American ambassador to Russia, had procured an American girl for the sexual services of the Russian czar. The attack was no doubt baseless, but the Jacksonians delighted in it, even calling Adams a “pimp” and claiming that procuring women explained his great success as a diplomat.
- Zahreddine 10y ago
  When MSM pushes false/sponsored narratives to start wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and Libya as part of "foreign policy", I can see why "pizzagate" gets equal validity.
  - acdha 10y ago
    Don't play the false equivalence game: it's part of the problem. Pizzagate had nothing other than fever dreams. In contrast, all of the wars you talked about were based on real things. The Iraq war was started on falsehoods but the media was reporting what government officials were saying and attributed those claims to them. They should have been more skeptical, yes, but that's a completely different level of discussion compared to a bunch of trolls and gullible people free-associating completely unfettered by reality.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>Mainstream outlets move in lockstep with each other and these are the final, desperate death throes of an outdated and superfluous institution. So far, non-mainstream outlets have proven a whole lot worse. Call me a small-c conservative, but I'm going to keep supporting civil society over the conspiracy theorists.
m_mueller 10y ago
I recommend the following Planet Money episode if you want to know a bit of the economic background of fake news. They even got a fake news publisher to speak. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/12/02/504155809/episode-739-finding-the-fake-news-king http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/12/02/504155809/episo...
- trendia 10y ago
  I thought this episode was rather funny, because they found that a right wing fake news site was actually run by a liberal who wanted to prove there was right wing fake news (and that it would be shared on social media, which they ensured by spreading it themselves). It turned out to be rather profitable for him.
  - Laforet 10y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
  - m_mueller 10y ago
    Yep, that's why I recommend it - I didn't want to spoil it though ;).
  - makomk 10y ago
    The part I found hilarious is that there was one particular quote from the NPR coverage which spread like wildfire on social media - the one about how he tried to write fake news for liberals, but it just didn't catch on. Except that when I went looking for more information, one of the first successes I found reference to - via the Denver Post's article[1] about the FBI agent suicide fake - was "ATLANTA OFFICER KILLS BLACK WOMAN, INJURES CHILD, FOLLOWING BREASTFEEDING ARGUMENT"[2]. The site used was even stuffed full of the kind of conservative-targeted fake news that liberals mock conservatives for believing, and it still worked. A self-confessed fake news creator made a dubious yet flattering claim about liberals not believing fake news because they were too smart, which fell apart upon a brief check, and liberals everywhere believed it. Brilliant. [1] http://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/05/there-is-no-such-thing-as-the-denver-guardian/ http://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/05/there-is-no-such-thing-... [2] http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/the-news-hole/bcpnews-someone-revived-the-baltimore-gazette-to-spread-fake-bullshit-20160923-story.html http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/the-news-hole/bcpnews-someone...
olalonde 10y ago
This commercial used to air in Canada in the late 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TijcoS8qHIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TijcoS8qHIE
- dghughes 10y ago
  And grown adults bombarded the organization qith phone valls asking where to buy a house hippo.
raisedbyninjas 10y ago
Supermarket tabloids can't go viral, so their impact and and lucrative adsense payout isn't there. The president elect is a birther and anti-vaxxer. Bannon had a leadership role in Trumps campaign. His cabinet is a clown-car of conspiracy peddlers. Google and Facebook are taking action to squelch fake news. Fake news is a subject of interest to many influential individuals and organizations. If it weren't covered by mainstream news it would be irresponsible.
- hrxn 10y ago
  I see, already falling for it..
justinlaster 10y ago
>So how did this fervor over "fake news" coalesce so quickly and uniformly? Do you honestly not see the difference between creating fake stories about celebrities and then creating fake stories about people in the government, stories that end up having far reaching real world effects? >of an outdated and superfluous institution. Oh brother. If anything this last year has proven exactly why the publication and editing model should flourish for quite some time. Because as of this year, I guess whatever makes you feel better is clearly more valued over what is actually true (see all the reports from Breitbart and company, especially in regards to the Clinton emails, or even global warming), especially with people who believe that "fake news" is just some kind of conspiracy theory accessory for the "MSM" to keep their grip on the industry. "Fake news" is just yellow journalism by another name, and "fake news" is "uniformly" being talked about because it became readily apparent over the course of this last year that people believe and act on the information presented from yellow journalism. And _apparently_ for some people any action taken to correct yellow journalism is decried as censorship. Truth is not oppression.
- soft_dev_person 10y ago
  > And _apparently_ for some people any action taken to correct yellow journalism is decried as censorship. No, but automatic removal of fake news is censorship, since all of us in here should know that determining truth by algorithms is really an unsolvable problem in _very many important cases_. It could/would probably be reduced to a source credibility score, but credibility is subjective.
  - justinlaster 10y ago
    Using facebook as an example, Facebook had editors and then got slammed with the completely useless "bias" label because they sought stories from actual, reasonably credible sources. Their algorithm was not responsible for removing content, their editors were. Until they got rid of those editors because of "bias" and "censorship." Then fake stories/yellow journalism flourished on Facebook's trending news feed for quite some time during the election.
    - 10y ago
Spooky23 10y ago
The Enquirer was bullshit news, not fake. They always sourced their stories and were often sued, but rarely lost.
tw04 10y ago
It coalesced when the "MSM" managed to get the election outcome in the US so comically wrong. The only possible reason for the mistake was "fake news". It turns out "fake news" has been a driving force since roughly the time twitter arrived. I can only hope the (in theory) REAL media will eventually give up on "first is best" and instead focus on ACTUAL REPORTING. Relaying what twitter has to say about a world event is borderline useless. Put someone on the ground and tell me what's REALLY going on instead of "twitter reports say..."
- grzm 10y ago
  Have you read Ryan Holiday's "Trust Me I'm Lying"? I found it a great read on the current media situation.
- throwaway7312 10y ago
  That's not what this is about. It erupted across every news channel precisely as Pizzagate did. If you searched on Google News for "Pizzagate", what you would get was "FAKE NEWS!" "FAKE NEWS!" "FAKE NEWS!" The MSM hasn't been this desperate since it was shrieking to high heaven there was no chance in any universe in which Donald Trump could possibly win the US election. Whether this is because the MSM is desperate to cover up this issue - like the Pizzagate investigators allege - or there is some other coordinated motive at play (like not losing control of the narrative), its obvious the campaign is coordinated and aimed at some specific desired outcome, one way or the other. Pizzagate itself is just a mountain of circumstantial evidence. Circumstantial evidence is not necessarily evidence of a crime, and often leads people looking at it to jump to incorrect conclusions. But trying to sweep it under the rug with frantic cries of "FAKE NEWS!!1!" does nothing but make conspiracy theories grow. There are some extremely strangely-worded emails that came out of John Podesta's Wikileaks. All kinds of bizarre pictures on Comet Ping Pong's Instagram. They use code words identified by the FBI as pedophile code words - but it could be coincidence. One of the neighboring pizza restaurants to Comet Ping Pong had an FBI-identified pedophile symbol in its logo (since removed) - but it could be coincidence. What a real journalist would do is say, "Huh. There's a lot of odd circumstantial evidence here. Let's get to the bottom of this and either rule it out or see what questions are still on the table." What the MSM is doing instead is taking down articles on high level pedophile rings, like this one that no longer exists on NY Times: http://archive.is/uq4oF http://archive.is/uq4oF Then trying to tar and feather anyone who asks questions as a "Fake News" personality. I don't know if there's any merit to the claims around Comet Ping Pong and the Podestas. It could just be some people are REALLY into pizza and when they talk about having small children in pools as entertainment those kids are there to sing Christmas carols or something. But the MSM's frantic efforts to drown it out by screaming about "fake news" is the Streisand Effect in action. They're giving anyone who wants to believe in a conspiracy even more reason to think there is some deep cover up that extends to the highest levels, and giving this thing legs it wouldn't have if John Podesta broke his tweet silence and just said, "This is all ridiculous and none of it is true," or the MSM did an investigative piece that conclusively explained away the things the Internet sleuths pursuing Pizzagate are hoisting up as evidence of a conspiracy.
CM30 10y ago
Yeah, fake news is a narrative being pushed by the mainstream media to try and discredit alternative news sources (like say, popular YouTube channels, independent blogs and social media profiles) as well as to solidify their role as 'gatekeepers'. Heck, it's basically the non gaming equivalent of the 'gamers are dead' stories that become suspiciously widespread after GamerGate took off.
jonathanstrange 10y ago
> The term "fake news" has exploded in just under a month That's a rather normal phenomenon, sometimes when someone coins a new term, everybody else jumps on the bandwagon.Sometimes the term makes it into the fixed inventory of the language, sometimes the fad goes away. That's as true for "fake news" as it is for "abso-fucking-lutely" or "glashole". > Mainstream outlets move in lockstep with each other and these are the final, desperate death throes of an outdated and superfluous institution. What an utter nonsense! You must have been brainwashed by social media and shitty blogs that sell opinions as news. There is a fairly good reason why mainstream outlets "move in lockstep with each other": They let one and the same reality dictate their news rather than making it up like the online trolls from St. Petersburg. I'd be rather worried if they didn't "move in lockstep" and each of them was reporting something else as news...

gnarbarian 10y ago

The whole FUD campaign regarding "Fake News" is comically hypocritical in my opinion. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent article calling them out for it: https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactured-fake-news-that-msnbc-personalities-spread-to-discredit-wikileaks-docs/ https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactur... Edit: Ironically, that post was doing great until it got flagged. Edit 2: It has been unflagged Edit 3: Flagged again.

sydd 10y ago
Great article. Although I wonder why it fails to criticize Trump's side...
- xkcd-sucks 10y ago
  Probably because the people that read the intercept already think poorly of trump, and the article had a word limit
- gnarbarian 10y ago
  You could also say the opposite about every Washington Post article released since the election.
- andrepd 10y ago
  I can't fathom why an article calling the fake news phenomenon an FUD campaign would fail to critizice Trump's side... Seriously though, the article is comically bad. It oozes bile and anger and it's so comically and blatantly one-sided it's almost funny in a so-bad-that-it's-good way.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
leephillips 10y ago
Greenwald's "excellent" piece is itself fake news. It deliberately misrepresents the reporting done by Kurt Eichenwald about the leaked emails. We know it's deliberate because he's distorted the story the same way in the past and it's been pointed out to him. Eichenwald did not claim that the leaked information was false, but showed, to a high degree of certainty, that Trump campaign staffers were working with Russian disinformation operatives. It was an amazing story.
- gnarbarian 10y ago
  "showed, to a high degree of certainty, that Trump campaign staffers were working with Russian disinformation operatives." Can you show me what warrants a high degree of certainty for that claim? Because as far as I know there is no evidence for this beyond the tenuous circumstantial nature of Clinton's dirty laundry helping Trump, and a Trump presidency is less likely to start a war with Russia.
  - leephillips 10y ago
    I was talking about Eichenwald's reporting that is pointed to by Greenwald. You're quoting my reference and commenting on it without having read it.
  - RCortex 10y ago
    Not the piece above, but here it is. This article has a lot of links/sources on how Trump's campaign statements and Russian propaganda are almost word-for-word identical, and in general complementary. This is from back in August. http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/understanding-the-role-of-russian-propaganda-in-the-us-election http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/underst...
- hrxn 10y ago
  All news is fake news, we get it..
- tshaddox 10y ago
  When you have a "nuh uh, YOU'RE the one that's fake" situation between two apparently reputable news sources, on a topic with which you have no personal experience or expertise, how are you supposed to figure out which ones are fake? The instances of so-called "fake news" that I have seen are quite easy for me to "verify" as fake with relative confidence: it's generally an explicitly partisan source with a shady-looking website making an outlandish claim that is not corroborated by any traditional news outlet. The situation you've just described sounds much more difficult for me to verify.
whybroke 10y ago
An exact opposite equally excellent article from the same publication calling out the FUD we know as 'Fake News' And this one avoids words like 'shameful' and 'disgusting' https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/laura-ingraham-lifezette/ https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/laura-ingraham-lifezette...

michaelchisari 10y ago

Because this is the first election where "spirit cooking" and "pizzagate" conspiracies were put on equal footing with foreign policy and economic positions.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bloaf 10y ago
http://history1800s.about.com/od/leaders/a/electionof1828.htm http://history1800s.about.com/od/leaders/a/electionof1828.ht... >The supporters of Andrew Jackson began spreading a rumor that Adams, while serving as American ambassador to Russia, had procured an American girl for the sexual services of the Russian czar. The attack was no doubt baseless, but the Jacksonians delighted in it, even calling Adams a “pimp” and claiming that procuring women explained his great success as a diplomat.
Zahreddine 10y ago
When MSM pushes false/sponsored narratives to start wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and Libya as part of "foreign policy", I can see why "pizzagate" gets equal validity.
- acdha 10y ago
  Don't play the false equivalence game: it's part of the problem. Pizzagate had nothing other than fever dreams. In contrast, all of the wars you talked about were based on real things. The Iraq war was started on falsehoods but the media was reporting what government officials were saying and attributed those claims to them. They should have been more skeptical, yes, but that's a completely different level of discussion compared to a bunch of trolls and gullible people free-associating completely unfettered by reality.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

>Mainstream outlets move in lockstep with each other and these are the final, desperate death throes of an outdated and superfluous institution. So far, non-mainstream outlets have proven a whole lot worse. Call me a small-c conservative, but I'm going to keep supporting civil society over the conspiracy theorists.

m_mueller 10y ago

I recommend the following Planet Money episode if you want to know a bit of the economic background of fake news. They even got a fake news publisher to speak. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/12/02/504155809/episode-739-finding-the-fake-news-king http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/12/02/504155809/episo...

trendia 10y ago
I thought this episode was rather funny, because they found that a right wing fake news site was actually run by a liberal who wanted to prove there was right wing fake news (and that it would be shared on social media, which they ensured by spreading it themselves). It turned out to be rather profitable for him.
- Laforet 10y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
- m_mueller 10y ago
  Yep, that's why I recommend it - I didn't want to spoil it though ;).
- makomk 10y ago
  The part I found hilarious is that there was one particular quote from the NPR coverage which spread like wildfire on social media - the one about how he tried to write fake news for liberals, but it just didn't catch on. Except that when I went looking for more information, one of the first successes I found reference to - via the Denver Post's article[1] about the FBI agent suicide fake - was "ATLANTA OFFICER KILLS BLACK WOMAN, INJURES CHILD, FOLLOWING BREASTFEEDING ARGUMENT"[2]. The site used was even stuffed full of the kind of conservative-targeted fake news that liberals mock conservatives for believing, and it still worked. A self-confessed fake news creator made a dubious yet flattering claim about liberals not believing fake news because they were too smart, which fell apart upon a brief check, and liberals everywhere believed it. Brilliant. [1] http://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/05/there-is-no-such-thing-as-the-denver-guardian/ http://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/05/there-is-no-such-thing-... [2] http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/the-news-hole/bcpnews-someone-revived-the-baltimore-gazette-to-spread-fake-bullshit-20160923-story.html http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/the-news-hole/bcpnews-someone...

olalonde 10y ago

This commercial used to air in Canada in the late 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TijcoS8qHIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TijcoS8qHIE

dghughes 10y ago
And grown adults bombarded the organization qith phone valls asking where to buy a house hippo.

raisedbyninjas 10y ago

Supermarket tabloids can't go viral, so their impact and and lucrative adsense payout isn't there. The president elect is a birther and anti-vaxxer. Bannon had a leadership role in Trumps campaign. His cabinet is a clown-car of conspiracy peddlers. Google and Facebook are taking action to squelch fake news. Fake news is a subject of interest to many influential individuals and organizations. If it weren't covered by mainstream news it would be irresponsible.

hrxn 10y ago
I see, already falling for it..

justinlaster 10y ago

>So how did this fervor over "fake news" coalesce so quickly and uniformly? Do you honestly not see the difference between creating fake stories about celebrities and then creating fake stories about people in the government, stories that end up having far reaching real world effects? >of an outdated and superfluous institution. Oh brother. If anything this last year has proven exactly why the publication and editing model should flourish for quite some time. Because as of this year, I guess whatever makes you feel better is clearly more valued over what is actually true (see all the reports from Breitbart and company, especially in regards to the Clinton emails, or even global warming), especially with people who believe that "fake news" is just some kind of conspiracy theory accessory for the "MSM" to keep their grip on the industry. "Fake news" is just yellow journalism by another name, and "fake news" is "uniformly" being talked about because it became readily apparent over the course of this last year that people believe and act on the information presented from yellow journalism. And _apparently_ for some people any action taken to correct yellow journalism is decried as censorship. Truth is not oppression.

soft_dev_person 10y ago
> And _apparently_ for some people any action taken to correct yellow journalism is decried as censorship. No, but automatic removal of fake news is censorship, since all of us in here should know that determining truth by algorithms is really an unsolvable problem in _very many important cases_. It could/would probably be reduced to a source credibility score, but credibility is subjective.
- justinlaster 10y ago
  Using facebook as an example, Facebook had editors and then got slammed with the completely useless "bias" label because they sought stories from actual, reasonably credible sources. Their algorithm was not responsible for removing content, their editors were. Until they got rid of those editors because of "bias" and "censorship." Then fake stories/yellow journalism flourished on Facebook's trending news feed for quite some time during the election.
  - 10y ago

Spooky23 10y ago

The Enquirer was bullshit news, not fake. They always sourced their stories and were often sued, but rarely lost.

tw04 10y ago

It coalesced when the "MSM" managed to get the election outcome in the US so comically wrong. The only possible reason for the mistake was "fake news". It turns out "fake news" has been a driving force since roughly the time twitter arrived. I can only hope the (in theory) REAL media will eventually give up on "first is best" and instead focus on ACTUAL REPORTING. Relaying what twitter has to say about a world event is borderline useless. Put someone on the ground and tell me what's REALLY going on instead of "twitter reports say..."

grzm 10y ago
Have you read Ryan Holiday's "Trust Me I'm Lying"? I found it a great read on the current media situation.
throwaway7312 10y ago
That's not what this is about. It erupted across every news channel precisely as Pizzagate did. If you searched on Google News for "Pizzagate", what you would get was "FAKE NEWS!" "FAKE NEWS!" "FAKE NEWS!" The MSM hasn't been this desperate since it was shrieking to high heaven there was no chance in any universe in which Donald Trump could possibly win the US election. Whether this is because the MSM is desperate to cover up this issue - like the Pizzagate investigators allege - or there is some other coordinated motive at play (like not losing control of the narrative), its obvious the campaign is coordinated and aimed at some specific desired outcome, one way or the other. Pizzagate itself is just a mountain of circumstantial evidence. Circumstantial evidence is not necessarily evidence of a crime, and often leads people looking at it to jump to incorrect conclusions. But trying to sweep it under the rug with frantic cries of "FAKE NEWS!!1!" does nothing but make conspiracy theories grow. There are some extremely strangely-worded emails that came out of John Podesta's Wikileaks. All kinds of bizarre pictures on Comet Ping Pong's Instagram. They use code words identified by the FBI as pedophile code words - but it could be coincidence. One of the neighboring pizza restaurants to Comet Ping Pong had an FBI-identified pedophile symbol in its logo (since removed) - but it could be coincidence. What a real journalist would do is say, "Huh. There's a lot of odd circumstantial evidence here. Let's get to the bottom of this and either rule it out or see what questions are still on the table." What the MSM is doing instead is taking down articles on high level pedophile rings, like this one that no longer exists on NY Times: http://archive.is/uq4oF http://archive.is/uq4oF Then trying to tar and feather anyone who asks questions as a "Fake News" personality. I don't know if there's any merit to the claims around Comet Ping Pong and the Podestas. It could just be some people are REALLY into pizza and when they talk about having small children in pools as entertainment those kids are there to sing Christmas carols or something. But the MSM's frantic efforts to drown it out by screaming about "fake news" is the Streisand Effect in action. They're giving anyone who wants to believe in a conspiracy even more reason to think there is some deep cover up that extends to the highest levels, and giving this thing legs it wouldn't have if John Podesta broke his tweet silence and just said, "This is all ridiculous and none of it is true," or the MSM did an investigative piece that conclusively explained away the things the Internet sleuths pursuing Pizzagate are hoisting up as evidence of a conspiracy.

CM30 10y ago

Yeah, fake news is a narrative being pushed by the mainstream media to try and discredit alternative news sources (like say, popular YouTube channels, independent blogs and social media profiles) as well as to solidify their role as 'gatekeepers'. Heck, it's basically the non gaming equivalent of the 'gamers are dead' stories that become suspiciously widespread after GamerGate took off.

jonathanstrange 10y ago

> The term "fake news" has exploded in just under a month That's a rather normal phenomenon, sometimes when someone coins a new term, everybody else jumps on the bandwagon.Sometimes the term makes it into the fixed inventory of the language, sometimes the fad goes away. That's as true for "fake news" as it is for "abso-fucking-lutely" or "glashole". > Mainstream outlets move in lockstep with each other and these are the final, desperate death throes of an outdated and superfluous institution. What an utter nonsense! You must have been brainwashed by social media and shitty blogs that sell opinions as news. There is a fairly good reason why mainstream outlets "move in lockstep with each other": They let one and the same reality dictate their news rather than making it up like the online trolls from St. Petersburg. I'd be rather worried if they didn't "move in lockstep" and each of them was reporting something else as news...