Consuming Media in the Era of “Fake News”

by Madison Rafter

I’d like to start with a hearty disclaimer: I hate the term ‘fake news’, but it serves its purpose. Everybody understands the words “fake” and “news” individually, so it makes sense that the words together would make just as much sense, right?

Wrong.

The news we consider “fake news” isn’t fake, it’s alternative. It’s alternative because it’s not the news that we want to here and it’s different from our expectations, either in political bias or content coverage. Now yes, sometimes articles have cited sources that are either a) not credible, b) completely partisan, or c) all of the above and more. Articles with improper sources should not be trusted (obviously), but they don’t fall under the category of “fake” -- misleading, perhaps, but not fake.

An example of fake news would be articles that create evidence from nothing. Articles like this are less common in mainstream media, but they still exist. Articles that have nitpicked their sources to create a thread of logic that appears logical, but is not supported by other sources, can fall under this category. The news company producing the article, or the author, can simply be trying to propagate their own agendas. But these can have exceptions too, because although an opinion might be in the minority or the story may only be run by one newspaper, that doesn’t inherently discredit the story or the opinion it holds.

Take the Watergate Scandal under President Richard Nixon in the 1970s. Although the Washington Post had a major anonymous source with a high-up government position, their reporting on the Watergate break-in and the resulting coverup proved to be essentially flawless. Or the Iran-Contra Affair during the Reagan administration and the subsequent reporting on that scandal, in which the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran in order to fund a guerilla group known as the Contras.

Now take the 2012 Attack in Benghazi and the media coverage from conservative outlets (i.e. Fox News) versus liberal outlets (CNN) about Secretary of State Clinton’s involvement and the coverup, all of which later led to Clinton’s polarizing private email scandal. Or the gunwalking tactics used by the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives) during Operation Fast and Furious and the coverup of a border patrol agent’s death by the Obama Administration.

All of these events are centered around either conservative or liberal political matters and were covered by media outlets with biases on both sides, but political biases did not keep the truth from getting out. The articles published in the wake of these incidents weren’t “fake news”, they were partially biased. Like every form of media we consume these days–from news broadcasts to Buzzfeed articles–they are biased.

Please let me repeat. Everybody is biased.

If you go up to a person from the Midwest and ask them about their accent, they’ll tell you, “I don’t have an accent. What’re you talking about?” Find a person from New York and ask them about their accent. Oh, they don’t have one? A person from San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or Santa Barbara will claim they don’t have an accent either. None of these people sound the same, so they must sound different, but isn’t that the very definition of an accent?

Just like everybody has an accent, everybody has a political bias, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not. Major news outlets are the biggest offenders in not acknowledging their own bias in reporting facts, we can all admit that. But if I were to ask you right now to write a factual essay on President Trump’s administration without inserting your own opinions through selectively curating your own facts presented, would you be able to do it? If you said yes, don’t lie. To you, it may appear as if there is no bias within your piece, but to others it might as well be a shining beacon into your political views. A piece reflects its author.

You didn’t write this paper with harmful intentions (assumedly). You didn’t intend to portray your reporting as a political opinion, but rather to express the facts you have gathered. It’s not your responsibility how the audience interprets what they call “fake news”, is it? Regardless of how debatable your answer to that question is, the article in question was not “fake news” since it was not written with the intent to mislead others and push an agenda– it was a piece of writing accompanied by facts that some people didn’t agree with. It wasn’t fake, it was biased.

Fake news and partisan bias are two completely different beasts. One is malicious, and the other is just a natural expression of journalism. So stop focusing on how every outlet is reporting the wrong news and start thinking about why you think that news is wrong.