Sometimes fake news is obvious. Sometimes, it’s more subtle. For example, it’s not hard to tell that conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Alex Jones’s recent “reporting” on talking human/pig/gorilla hybrids is pretty obviously and entertainingly fake.
Slightly more believable-looking are fake news stories with clear ideological bents. In a piece from last month, the Huffington Post’s Alex Kaufman highlights a Daily Caller story that falsely blames offshore wind turbines for whale deaths, using the impacts of the construction process to support its claim. As Kaufman points out, construction on the turbines ended last year. The whale died a few weeks ago. See the problem?
But politically-biased press aren’t the only game in town, and the mainstream media isn’t totally innocent of falling for fake news. Sometimes, aggregators like Yahoo will pick up a fake story. For example, Alex Kaplan at Media Matters points out that lYahoo ran a made up story last week claiming the UN chief said Trump was right about the Paris Agreement. The supposed quote appears to only exist in the mind of the headline writer, as it doesn’t appear in the story, or anywhere else. Because it’s fake.
What’s worse, though, is when otherwise trusted sources actively promote or disseminate the sort of denial we expect from the Daily Caller and Alex Jones. Rebecca Leber and Jeremy Schulman explored this problem in a recent piece for Mother Jones, and created a timeline of mainstream media’s climate-denying fake news. It’s a great illustration of how the fossil fuel industry has gamed media to prey on their instinct for (false) balance, controversy and lies-as-opinions. And sadly, based on the example of Bret Stephens being hired by NYT and now MSNBC, it doesn’t look like this is going to come to an end any time soon.
But don’t worry, dear reader. You can continue to count on us to highlight this fake news and call out the denial and false balance. Especially because we’ll be staying far, far away from all the weird, supposedly brain-boosting “medicinal” products sold at Alex Jones’ InfoWars store--which is apparently the same type of stuff sold at Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop website.
Actually, maybe all those exotic herbs and mushrooms explain the human-pig-gorilla hybrids Jones was so worked up about...
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