Every time this topic comes up, we have to tediously explain the difference, not because the difference is hard to understand, but because people seize on the name "fake news" as an excuse to attack the media. There's nothing wrong with media criticism, but you shouldn't write it in a way that obscures to readers what these stories are actually about --- webspam farms running entirely fabricated stories.
I'm really surprised this even has to be spelled out, TBH. IT goes to a point where I feel people are intentionally obfuscating the issue.
While occasionally people are duped by The Onion, the site itself doesn't pretend to be posting real stories. Believing this is akin to believing the fakier news, which is basically the tabloids of old. Lizard people, celebrity "news" and gossip and the like. A certain subset of folks have always gone for that stuff, but I like to think that more of them read it for the giggles. The main reason any of this gets into mainstream is lack of fact checking by the real news folks.
But the other breed, the serious fake news, is the real problem. Even otherwise intelligent folks can't really sort out if they are real or not because it is just so freaking plausible. Their goal is to be believed, and reaffirm some suspicions and beliefs people have. Even worse, some of these sites will mix in factual stuff with their fakes. These are the ones that, "seem to be seeing this as an opportunity for a power play". In a sense, any news organisation that caters to any political party - fox news to an extent, and the more insidious players (occupydemocrats, for example) - are guilty of just this. Twist, lie, and misrepresent are part of the game.
Stories in the mainstream press can be slanted, or even false --- stories are retracted all the time! That doesn't make them "fakenews". Fakenews sites are spam, fabricated out of whole cloth.
Only later did they issue a quiet retraction. This is par for the course for US media organizations.
1. CNN misapprehended Spencer's comment, which wasn't about whether Jewish people are human, but instead whether members of the mainstream media are. The story wasn't fabricated --- it was misreported. Again: the media does not have to be perfect for us to reasonably talk about "fakenews", which is webspam consisting of entirely fabricated stories.
2. Here's something you will not see happening on fakenews sites:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3961672/CNN-Jake-Tap...
Look! A retraction!
PS:
It's worth adding that part of the uproar over this CNN chyron is because Spencer is in fact a white supremacist and does in fact have strong anti-Semitic views, and CNN was in part being accused of amplifying those views.
The continued insistence that any discussion of fakenews include litigation of all the flaws of all other news media is a form of trolling, meant to prevent us from discussing the phenomenon of fakenews.
Even though they aren't claiming these claims are true, its at the very least, incredibly misleading. They spend most of the article talking about how Putin has poisoned people in the past, and talking up the Drs credentials. There should be a disclosure that the claims are unsubstantiated. Or it should never have been posted.
That said the Washington post did some of the best reporting this election season.
It's true that headlines like these cause people to become certain about what is an unsubstantiated idea. But it's also within the realm of possibility that Putin did try to poison Clinton. It would be far from the most egregious thing he's ever tried to do, and (as the story describes) he's done it before.
They didn't report it as fact. They reported it as, "This respected guy is saying this thing."
Read the Podesta wikileaks if you haven't already.
The things on your parenthetical list have all been extensively covered in mainstream media. The key is to include newspapers among your sources, instead of just mostly TV news sites which tend to be less broad and less deep.
Rational analysis should not care of the source of information, but about its veracity.
Alas people are not that great at this, hence propaganda works.
You can mislead without lying. Veracity is not sufficient.
tl;dr - I agree with you. NYT has some street cred, Breitbart has negative of that, that's why people should require more evidence for Breitbart's claims than for NYT's, and yes, we should take bias into account, but that's different, sort of orthogonal effect.