It becomes a finer line when you have the Washington Post reporting (more accurately reporting an "expert" claim) that hillary Clinton may have been poisoned on 9/11 by Putin.
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.
They didn't report it as fact. They reported it as, "This respected guy is saying this thing."
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.