Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
I can see that. The "fake news" thing is a culture war right now. Each side is fighting to pin that label to the other side. Reasoning like the type you explained gets lost in the noise of battle.
From a historical perspective, this is somewhat revisionist. What happened was mainstream journalists broke a story about people writing fake news and distributing it through social media sites. That is: fake news with no quotes. Like, people were just totally making shit up and spreading it all over the place. The right (conservative media and Trump himself) being the cunning folk that they are, adopted this to fit their own narrative that the MSM is all fake bullshit that should totally be ignored and just tried to pin the stink on them. Sort of a "No fake news! No fake news! You're fake news!"

I should be clear that the MSM was not trying to pin fake news on large conservative media outlets: not Fox News, not Breitbart, not Infowars. There was no cultural war in their eyes. They were just breaking a story about people making shit up and proliferating it on the internet.

Now, if we're talking about what's going on right now, I obviously can't speak for every member of the left (and there are a lot of idiots) but I still don't even mean to remotely imply a left-news versus right-news thing when I say fake news. To emphasize again, for as shitty as that story was I linked, that does not make Infowars fake news. It means they're nothing more than a rumor mill (a shitty one at that, and that's saying something), but there's still an important distinction between making shit up and passing along things you've heard on the grapevine.

Which brings me to my next point:

Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
Some call them fake because of how readily they reports on things that support their narrative that end up being fake. Perhaps a way of thinking of it is that different media organizations that engage in fakery do so in different ways.
The difference goes beyond different kinds of fakery. Even when CNN runs away too fast with a story that has a questionable basis and even when it eventually proves to be false, it does not mean they fabricated information. Fabricated information has--at best--zero value. It's simply untrue bullshit. Speculative information from questionable sources still has value. It is insider knowledge that often proves to be true. As two people who play games of imperfect information, we should both be able to level on this point pretty easily.

This is also an easily understood concept in sports journalism, perhaps because it's much more of a closed system and perhaps because the stakes are smaller. No matter what year it is, I can guarantee you that on July 31st, I will be on MLBTradeRumors.com. Pretty much everything that's posted on there is unnamed, single-sourced information, and quite a lot of the more nascent information proves to be misleading or outright wrong. And yet, I'm there every year. And yet, I routinely have a better beat of who's going where than people who wait for AP to break the news.

Adam Schefter's probably a better example because he both Tweets breaking stories while they're still in the rumor phase, and he writes legitimate sports journalism. Just because he's been wrong a few times about Frank Gore signing with the Eagles (or whatever) doesn't mean that I should shout FAKE NEWS and X out of a totally story he wrote that gives multiple reputable, named sources.

Maybe I'm off in the weeds at this point. Point is, CNN still sucks, I still have no intention of using them for anything, but you can't shut down your critical thinking faculties and dismiss everything that comes from them.