So what's the difference between that guy and the Onion? Both make money selling fake news, as do the tabloids.
One is a joke, the other is fraud.
Do you think everyone knows the Onion is satire?
In one case, you have the intent of humor, not at all immoral by itself, though perhaps tasteless from time to time. The other case you have the intent to deceive, to fake reality with the goal of changing people actions: deeply immoral.
And for the record:
I never heard the Clinton story before this... I find most the news is written for emotional engagement and actually doesn't help to inform me in any important way, so why stress myself out with it? I read very little news... haven't watched a local news broadcast in decades. The recent election was the perfect display of this deficiency.
For the Onion, there are documented instances of people taking it seriously... but what can I say? There are documented instances of people doing and believing just about everything. I don't bother with them anymore than I do with "the news".
Here's a blurb. Real news, tabloid, Onion, or fake news?
>Roger Stone — the D.C. insider who's exposed some of Washington's deepest secrets — was targeted for assassination! That's the shocking claim by the popular author and consultant to Donald Trump, who says that even the Center for Disease Control determined that he was poisoned! He's now gone public with his story of feeling stricken with a “routine stomach virus” in Dec. 2016 — before suddenly becoming exceedingly ill.”
I guess the point I'm trying to make is this fake news phenomenon is nothing new. The only difference is one guy was able to make such a large splash.
I think satire falls into that group of endeavors where when you fail so thoroughly, you're automatically out of the group. An executioner who only non-fatally botches executions is another example.
>If you have a hard time telling the difference, I do not think it is their problem.
Perhaps there isn't much difference.
It's just politics man, everyone is full of beans. The second you become tribal, you're the sucker.
But seriously: intent. To just name one.
The Onion presents itself as satire [0]; ChristianTimesNewspaper.com didn't. Bill Clinton can't sue The Onion for libel all the times they've made fun of his infidelities. But he could make a case for ChristianTimesNewspaper, which chased pageviews by purporting to be truth. Otherwise, who would visit that site when you can find bucketfuls of blog posts calling Clinton a rapist?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/the-onion...
> The Onion office in New York confirmed that the tweet was not a hack, saying: “This is satire. That’s how it works.”
I'm not trying (hah), I'm trying to have a discussion about this (not) new phenomenon of fake news and examples of where we are more accepting of it.
I went to the Onion (haven't in years, not my type of humor) and it's obvious to me they are trying to be satirical. It's pretty over the top.
But how about the other group I mentioned, the tabloids? They make money by deception and they do it intentionally. They also write articles about political figures.
I guess why this matters is that Google banned this guy's site from their ad network and cost his domain property to lose $100K in value, when they same derision isn't extended to tabloids which do essentially the same thing.
I think the biggest difference between this guy and the tabloids is that over time, we recognize the tabloid brands as being full of beans, but when individuals do it, we have no frame of context, no prior body of work to examine. That will be dangerous at first, but liberating in time when people start to realize how much horse manure is out there (and not just from the hard right types).
The elephant in the room is of course Fox News. They've been publishing fake news as real since Bill Clinton. Drudge too. Limbaugh since the 80s. The danger in this is who decides what news is fake? How about that Trump dossier? Is that fake news? There is certainly no proof any of it happened and most of it is impossible to prove. Should Google ban Buzzfeed and NBCNews from their advertising network?
They'll wilfully misrepresent, obfuscate, stretch, massage the truth – whatever you want to call it. They'll add insane opinions. But they don't fabricate complete events such as the one from the article. (Druge IIRC, has actually broken a few important stories).
Buzzfeed, similarly, made abundantly clear that they could not verify anything in that document. And they, or at least the "mainstream media", did sit on it for months and didn't publish it (even though it'd been more useful to their supposed agenda) before the election. What allowed them to publish was the (undisputed) fact that Obama & Trump were briefed on it.
(Note that I'm not actually a big fan of this fake-news debate, at least the part about making it illegal etc. Even though I believe the difference is pretty obvious when discussed in sane company, it plays so obviously into the narrative of this new counterculture that it's probably going to make them stronger rather than weaker)
I'm wondering why the NYT would even push a piece like this. I'm not sure it's even newsworthy. This has been going on since our inception (check out Andrew Jackson's election). Are they trying to cast it against their own reputation? Are they worried about it?
Another factor is simply that there's probably nothing that gets a democrats blood pressure to rise quite as much as simply not accepting facts. The first time you're saying "Russia's invasion of Ukraine made me really nervous" and your uncle says "Yeah, you should know that this Ukraine doesn't exist, it's just George Soros' plot to declare martial law in Arkansas" you really get to know how your dog feels when he kinda tilts his head and looks at you.
And as soon as the right wing noticed that reaction, they couldn't get enough of it. It's so easy. Just deny the existence of oxygen, or satellites, or the accuracy of unemployment numbers – anything, basically. You'll give ten Harvard PhDs heart attacks with half a sentence of work.
That does, however, require a view the right wing that is a bit more pessimistic than I'm completely willing to subscribe to, yet. Because those people would more or less knowingly be destroying any actual discourse, and harming themselves as much as anybody. I'm not sure I can believe in such malice, although one essay that makes this case is somewhat believable. In that view, (parts of) the right wing have basically given up and are now only out to tear everything down (https://www.thenation.com/article/this-political-theorist-pr...).
Oh, and regarding the original question: the fake-news debate is happening, irregardless of weather that good or bad, and if this guy was really making 6-figures that's a valuable datapoint people should know, and it points at a possible counter-strategy of going after the sources of funding. So yeah, it's very far on the "publish" side of that debate. Also, journalists are quite proud of operating independent of the business side of their publications, so they would at least profess (and honestly believe) that they're not writing such an article in an effort to do anything but inform.