Jestin Coler, a fake news creator, made around $8,000 distributing one completely false story about Hillary Clinton through social media. But the story is much deeper than that. Is he all that much different from today’s mainstream news media at least in the form of manipulating news for income? The answer is …
Fake news creator does not believe he influence the election
One of the first things fake news creator Jestin Coler did was to admonish the mainstream news media in his interview with MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff. Coler has a point. What he is doing is at best shady. But he is not a credentialed journalist. His stories are from a satirical site. We should be more concerned about mainstream journalists migrating into the realm of entertainment for the benefit of their corporate masters.
In the preamble to the piece, Jacob Soboroff pointed out a Buzzfeed study that showed fake news stories getting more traction than ‘real’ news stories.
In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found.
During these critical months of the campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. Within the same time period, the 20 best-performing election stories from 19 major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook
Coler stated that he intentionally made his site similar to Huffington Post, one of the most visited news sites on the Internet. He gave Soboroff examples of fake news stories including one on Ebola that did very well on his satirical site. What Soboroff failed to mention was the disclaimer on the website that says it is satire. The Onion does not quite have one.
A few weeks ago I wrote the piece “Mainstream Media just projecting with Facebook Fake News concern.”
The mainstream media is acting as if disinformation is a new problem. It is not. In fact, way before it was vogue on Facebook or other social media domains, it was rampant in print, on cable news and broadcast news. And I am not just talking Fox News even though they made it an art form.
One must not forget that New York Times reporter Judith Miller willfully allowed others to mislead her into writing the lies that led us into the Iraq War. She gave the Bush administration lie the cover of objective journalism that was not objective at all. Her lies were complicit in getting hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and thousands of American soldiers killed because it helped lay the framework to war on false pretenses.
Mainstream media were instrumental in a less than optimal Affordable Care Act. Why? They were pass through conduits for lies from the right. They knowingly allowed terms like ‘government takeover of healthcare,’ ‘throw grandma under the bus,’ ‘death panels,’ and other verifiable lies to become part of the lexicon. In other words, they were delivering ‘fake news’ on behalf of the right. Currently, they allow Paul Ryan’s lies to go mostly unchecked. Ryan is using the false claim that Obamacare made Medicare less solvent. He needs that talking point as a bridge to not only dismantling Obamacare but to give a plausible reason for privatizing Medicare.
We should be much more concerned about how and what the mainstream news media reports. Historically their reporting is more consequential. Correcting mainstream news media fallacies is more difficult given their established nature. Crowdsourcing will eventually filter independent fake news all things being equal. Given the normalization of President-Elect Donald Trump, one should hold little hope.
Coler made thousands of dollars promoting sensationalized satire (lies) on his site. The mainstream news media made hundreds of millions if not billions. Will they tell the truth about efficacy or danger of drugs manufactured by companies that advertise on their networks? Will they risk losing access to governmental departments by being harshly critical of lies by our government?
I am not a proponent of fake news. Even if it originates from a satirical site, there is just something wrong with the potential confusion. Moreover, there are characters out there promoting fake news as real for political or some other reasons.
Coler’s last statement illustrates how the derelict media failed; Now they are attempting to discredit social media.
“I am glad you guys are here now talking about it,” Jestin Coler said. “But you should’ve been talking about this years ago.”
Zuckerberg was probably right when he said that north of 99% of the news on Facebook is real. The problem is Facebook is so big that 1% is a lot of disinformation. A real news media would have inoculated Americans years ago from this type of deception.