Comment by extra88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by extra88 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The sentence before the ones you quoted is:

> At issue is the publication of news that is false or misleading.

Initially in the election, "fake news" was a term primarily used to refer to stories and sites that were complete fabrications, created to make money from ads and for political ends. Use of the term quickly expanded to include more long-standing practitioners of distortion, like Breitbart.

The whole point of this article is that "fake news" can have real consequences so the supposed successes of Steve Bannon has nothing to do with the veracity of the publications headlines and stories.

Here's just one example of a fake Breitbart headline:

>Condemned as "fake news" by some media pundits, the Breitbart article was headlined: “Revealed: 1,000-man mob attack police, set Germany’s oldest church alight on New Year’s Eve.” However, according to local journalists, there was no mob and the St Reinold Church – which is not Germany’s oldest – did not catch fire. Local police said the night was “rather average to quiet” and the number of incidents in Dortmund on New Year’s Eve had decreased to 185, down from 421 in 2015/16. The brief fire on scaffold netting near the church was reportedly caused accidently by a wayward firework.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/breitbart-new...

>Here's just one example of a fake Breitbart headline

But it starts to get a bit confusing when you actually look at the accusations and rebuttals, especially when you look at the fleshed out indy article [0]

Accusation : "The right-wing American website, which enjoyed a meteoric rise to prominence in 2016, claimed a 1,000-strong mob chanting “Allahu Akbar” set fire to the country’s oldest church in Dortmund."

Rebuttal :"Mr Bandermann on the other hand, in a Q&A-style response published the following day, said that from between 6.45pm and 1.30am, groups of young foreign men formed a large group of 1,000 people. He said the fire at the church only set light to netting surrounding the building and lasted just 12 minutes." ... "He said that saying Allahu Akbar is as normal as saying ‘Amen’ in church,"

So which is fake news? On the facts, the Independent agrees (although through semantics "church netting on fire, not the church" "group" not "mob") with the Breitbart article.

If they both agree on the facts, but spin them different ways, how do you determine which is "fake news"?

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/edited-1038-...

edit: They did actually issue a correction for something they got wrong in the article

"Correction: This article states St. Reinold’s Church is the oldest in Germany. We are happy to clarify that accolade belongs to the Trier Cathedral."

Replying to the deadpost:

>They've literally _never_ accidentally reported in a direction that was opposite their editorial spin.

You won't find any news outlet who will err two ways.

If that's the logic you use to indict an organization as "fake news" then you could apply that example to just about every major news publisher.

My point is that conflating Breitbart with The Onion for sake of studying propaganda trends is extremely sloppy. I not trying to be an apologist for Breitbart which is pretty blatantly right-wing propaganda and has been forced to retract stories in the past.

I despise Breitbart but I agree that there's a really sad irony when readers of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Economist point at others and never look at themselves.

The PropOrNot scandal was a disaster, but its victims remain blissfully unaware.

They justified it because right-wing propaganda apologists often claim their outrageous deceptions are satire. For the purposes of studying the dissemination of stories that are not true, lumping the Breitbart with The Onion makes sense to me.

If maliciously misreporting a few things a week is your bar for fake news, then just about every publication out there is guilty.

http://reason.com/blog/2015/08/03/time-smears-charles-koch-i...

Whataboutism. Downvoted.

The difference is that responsible organizations wind up firing people who cross the line.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com