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There have been quite a few instances of "fake news" stories about famous people making donations, such as to hurricane victims, that the famous people have sai

There have been quite a few instances of "fake news" stories about famous people making donations, such as to hurricane victims, that the famous people have said were not true and they don't know where they came from. No one seems to benefit from these stories, and they don't seem click-baity enough to have been made-up for the ad impressions, so the goal seems to be to erode public trust in the news. When it thus appears that there are active efforts to achieve this (perhaps by countries seeking to boost receptiveness to their influence operations), I don't think the news media deserves all of the blame for the decline in trust.

themitigating 4y ago
Whether or not that is the case why does it matter? Every person, business, organization, and government lies. What matters is the frequency, how serious the lies are, and what is done about them. If someone says they don't trust some news network because they lied or have an agenda where are they getting their information from? A person on Facebook who could also lie and have an agenda. Making trust a binary value is the greatest manipulation tactic ever. More importantly if your news network is mostly opinions then you're less likely to run afoul of that low threshold of trust.