This is just wrong news, not fake news. Fake news has become the buzzword du jour but missing in the current application of the term to everything is the main problem is not fake news stories, it's fake news sites.

Journalists are always going to be wrong some of the time and several factors have been ramping that error rate way up but this has been discussed at length for at least a decade now. But, for the most part, legitimate news sites at least try to vie for truth as one of the competing demands on the business.

What's genuinely new is sites whose entire business model is predicated on intentional dissemination of knowingly false stories as a major part of the media landscape. Alex Jones style journalism has always existed at the fringes of the media landscape but now are becoming the main news source of a significant proportion of the country and that's worrying.

Trying to label other things as "fake news" muddies the waters and distracts from the issue.

This is not fake news, but it's a great example of how the rush to be the first, with no verification, spreads misinformation of all kinds.

And this does not only happen to journalist, but normal people too. It is thus a good reminder to people to check before they retweet or share that article.

Agreed. Although in this case we don't if the initial report was fake or not. It's just unverifiable. It's entirely possible that some local cable tech decided to play a prank on a specific neighborhood where the tweeter lived. ...it wouldn't be the first time.

I'm sure the Russians had something to do with this.

This sudden moral panic is absurd. "Fake news" has existed for well over a hundred years: they're called tabloids. Pulp tabloids were never a problem until a certain presidential election embarassed the polling industry and everyone started looking for a scapegoat.

If there's anything to take away from this, it's that the DNC et. al did not learn their lesson and we're going to be stuck with four more miserable years under Trump come 2020. You cannot attempt fix the outcome of a primary election and still expect everyone to like you.

The number one issue here is that news organizations have been gutted over the last twenty years due to a variety of factors.

CNN under Ted Turner used to have a world-class news team, they'd check sources, they'd investigate the veracity of any claims, they'd get boots on the ground to do their own research. They wouldn't hesitate to get actual experts on the air, people with qualifications relevant to the situation at hand.

They also had the luxury of being able to dig into a story before "breaking" it, there was time to get everything lined up. Now we're in an unrelenting hurricane where something pops up on Twitter and literally five minutes later CNN is parroting it as if it's news.

There's no budget for fact checking. There's no time. There's no buffer against the stream of half-truths, propaganda, and pure bullshit pouring out of this thing we call the internet.

There used to be a substantial difference between The Washington Post and Weekly World News. Today that gap has shrunk to the point where pseudo-news stories end up being published without adequate fact checking and retractions come way too late, if they ever do at all.

CNN's coverage of the first Gulf War was respectable, they had people in Baghdad observing the situation on the ground. Even their September 11 coverage was pretty good, though they were working on their home turf. By the time complex geopolitical struggles like the insurgency in Iraq or the constantly shifting nature of ISIS emerged they had no ability whatsoever to present a coherent story.

Now I wouldn't trust CNN to report on something as numerically simple as the election. They have "experts" on the air that are so obviously political shills it's ridiculous: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/10/14/video-cnn-has-trump-...

It's almost as if people don't care for actual news any more. They're tired of eating their vegetables.

Tabloids, for all their problems, are not as bad as fake news. They do have standards, they're just low, and are willing to go on hearsay sometimes. Yet most of what they publish is verifiable, if spun.

Fake news is outright fabricated.

Like Weekly World News? The line between that and tabloid news was razor thin, if there was one at all.

They usually make up shit about celebrities and see what sticks, then beat that drum until people tire of it.

The thing with Weekly World News is, literally none of it is real. It's all imaginary. And people know that. There's not a single sane person in the US who thinks WWW is a truthful source of news. And I'm not saying "sane" as in "agrees with my point of view" but the literal legal definition of sane. No one with a valid drivers license, who lives on their own without supervision, holds down a steady job, and has responsibilities beyond tying their own shoes believes WWW is news. It's pure entertainment. No one thinks pro wrestling is real either, even though they present it as being real. The "pretend to be real" thing is just part of the entertainment value. It's playing the straight man in a comedy routine.

But my mom, who has a doctorate degree in a medical profession and is a director at a medical organization, firmly believes in everything and anything that's mentioned in a tweet that is aired on CNN. Or posted on Facebook overlaid on a picture of a Minion.

Tabloids don't give everybody a voice and a place to vent frustration and constant outrage (liberals I'm looking at you). I am 100% confident we were better off watching the evening news with Walter Cronkite. At least American's respected Walter and the news was the news, not personal outrage or even worse intentionally false information.

"To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could." - Walter Cronkite, definitely opinion.

I amended my comment, since I know that Walter did give opinion. That was not the spirit of my comment.

> At least American's respected Walter and the news was the news, not personal outrage or even worse intentionally false information.

From the Verge article: CNN has also released a statement: “The RCN cable operator in Boston aired inappropriate content for 30 minutes on CNN last night. CNN has asked for an explanation.” But that still doesn’t really verify that anything occurred.

Well, CNN was either calling its own content "inappropriate" or they were saying that something occurred. Is the Verge so interested in promoting this "fake news" meme that they won't even believe CNN's own statement that "inappropriate content" was aired on CNN?

This quote from the article seems to answer your question:

> Even if porn was aired on CNN, it’s clear that a lot of publications ran with a story based on tweets from one person before verifying the facts.

They are condemning the race to be first at the expense of verification. "Fake news" might be an annoying buzz word, but I strongly support the main point of their article: journalistic integrity requires checking your source.

Edit: However, I guess we both will agree with how shalmanese described the situation above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13041290)

There were one thread here at HN about it that took some time until the first posts went on discrediting the news.

That's the point of theverge: one reports it because another site did it and nobody wants to be the one who didn't have any headline about such event. Which site wants to be the last one to publish something?

Source checking takes a time, being left out of the event costs too much...

(disclaimer: I did comment on the previous thread)

More importantly: Being wrong costs nothing, being late costs everything.

I'm not sure what can be done to increase the costs for being wrong, but as a whole humanity does need to find a way to solve that.

Same thing with security breaches today. Unless the attacker destroys the data or steals money, there's no downside to a company getting hacked. Target and Home Depot are still in business, doing the same thing they were doing beforehand. Hell, even Linode, a company whose customers should know better, is still happily humming along after they not only had one but two breaches, and tried to hide the fact that they were compromised rather than disclosing it.

If its just their customers being impacted, the businesses don't care. What will it take for companies will get the hint that there's actual losses being sustained from their actions, even if they themselves are not seeing the losses?

It's called externalities, and they're everywhere. Exxon Mobile doesn't pay for the damage their oil causes to the environment. Factories don't pay for the smog they create. Carly Fiorina never went to jail over lies that incited a shooting spree. Home Depot still processes credit cards. The Independent is still reporting the news based off tweets.

The biggest challenge in the world right now, bigger than anything else we've faced as a species, is how to make sure someone pays for their own externalities. As we become more connected and more global, our lies and our byproducts aren't just hurting those around us. They're hurting the entire world.

Ironically, this article ends with a banner from Outbrain, whose main product is fake news and misleading headlines.

People has discovered you can make ridiculous claims and if your webpage looks half-way legit most people will believe it. The average reader of news is incredibly stupid.

And these people can vote and have children... Shudder.

God forbid those proles vote, or -- horror of horrors -- have one of the most fulfilling human experiences! They should all be disenfranchised and sterilized.

He may have been being sarcastic, but if you add three words it becomes less of a war crime and more of a solid plan for the future: "without an education". Yes, everyone should be able to vote and should be able to have kids. Everyone should have a good solid education that teaches critical thinking, too.

If someone is uneducated, that's everyone's problem, specifically because they do vote and do have kids. We shouldn't take that away from them, however we should do a better job at not producing uneducated citizens in the first place.

Detection of sarcasm is not one of your skills, apparently.

Conveying sarcasm may not be one of yours.

This fake news phenomena is simply the natural progression. Media has always been caught between the need for speed and the need for quality, with each outlet at any moment falling somewhere on the spectrum between those two goals. Too much of one extreme usually spelled the disaster for the outlet, either because it became too elitist, or if became too ridiculous. And starting a new media outlet represented significant effort and cost, and the distribution channels (print, TV, radio) were relatively expensive.

In the era when the media channels themselves are extremely cheap (i.e. the Internet), the extremes are not as dangerous as they used to be, and risking going to extremes became much more valuable. However, with the cost of channels gone, the cost of quality becomes a much more significant burden, and optimising for speed became much easier, at the cost of quality. Add on top of that the willingness of various groups to pay for the costs of such media (optimised for speed as opposed to quality), it is clear where such abundance comes from.

Note: By "media quality" I mean an amalgamate of different elements like topics covered, quality of writing/reporting, production quality, amount of research etc.

So fake news spreads via real news sites now. Should the rolling stone be blacklisted for fake news like the uva rape hoax ?

Where is the line essentially?

I'm not advocating blacklisting news agencies, but I would strongly suggest everyone take a critical look at their own sources of news, and then at everything they report.

I told a joke at work a few years back, "hey did you hear Betty White dyed?" The obvious joke is she "dyed" as in changed her hair color, but it sounds like "died". Someone overheard me and it wasn't long before I heard people mourning one of their favorite celebrities.

News agencies are exactly like that.

Unclear. Was the story accurate?

All the CNN porn stories' sources trace back to one single tweet by one user on Twitter. That's the only original source we have on the CNN porn thing ever happening.

According to these articles, there was porn on CNN over large parts of the east coast, for 30 minutes. 30 minutes of porn on CNN in significant parts of the US, on Thanksgiving evening, and only one person noticed it and decided to post anything about it online? That smells very suspicious.

Thanks. According to Snopes, the story is False [1]. It's pretty ridiculous that "credible" news sources can write a story like this and then take no responsibility when it's wrong. I don't think it's enough to just correct a story after the fact. There should be a fine or search engine punishment, or something along these lines.

For instance, I read this story earlier on Variety and it was presented as fact. If you go back to the same url [2] the story and headline have completely changed.

Previous Headline: Cable Operator Snafu in Boston Leads to Porn Airing on CNN...

Current Headline: CNN, RCN Deny Reports of Porn Airing on Channel in Boston

[1]: http://www.snopes.com/cnn-half-hour-porn/ [2]: http://variety.com/2016/legit/news/cnn-porn-boston-rcn-cable...

> According to Snopes, the story is False.

But according to the content page, Snopes does't know. It's probably or most likely false but CNN and RCN are still investigating, so we don't know for certain.

But just as some news are keen to run with any rumour as news, Snopes seems keen to mark rumours as False as quickly as possible for the same reason; put content online that gets clicks.

What is the content page?

It feels like news should run with [unverified] tags until multiple sources are found.

Nobody actually watches CNN.