Thanks. I'm legitimately quoting, but also prefer use of more specific terms like "tripled" or "fives times more expensive" etc. than common dramatic headlines words like "crushed", "slammed", "blasted", "surged".
If I went and lifted the NYT CSS files and registered some intentionally misleading domain / company name like "Times of New York", I could go around saying whatever I want and a good number of people would believe it. Fake news is worse than wrong, its divorced from reality. There never was a journalist trying to get it right to begin with. Fake news is a click farm in Macedonia, not a news outlet that made a mistake.
See also: "deep state" (which has now been bastardized to mean "shadow government").
Sure, buying the genuine watch supports the IP holders and gives you bragging rights, but both the genuine and the fake are bad choices when you're looking for a high-quality, durable and precise watch.
> There never was a journalist trying to get it right to begin with.
By this standard, regular news would be fake news too. You don't get manipulative language in the article when someone is trying to "get it right" - it only shows up when someone is trying to get it wrong, on purpose.
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[0] - I.e. what computing hardware and home appliance vendors do all the time.
Fake news is like the man at the store told you it wasn't ticking because it just needs to be wound up, wouldn't let you take it out of the box, and you got home with it to find the dials are painted on and the inside is a few coins glued together. Whatever legitimate gripes one may have about Rollex cutting corners, it would be laughable to pretend like the time on their dials is just as useless as the ones painted on the fake watch and really its all just an opinion which one is "real".
What do you call something that looks deceptively like a watch but is actually just a prop? I'd call it a fake watch. What do you call a website that looks deceptively like a news organization but is actually just outrage headlines made from mad libs for clicks? I sure wouldn't call it real news.