Well, that's actually a pretty interesting example to look at. For one, the dossier concerned contained a lot of accusations to do with members of Trump's team travelling to Eastern Europe to meet with Russian contacts, suspect financial transactions and the like - you yourself are doing it a disservice by describing it only as rumours of a "piss orgy".
But irrespective of that, the dossier had been known about for months. But the media organisations didn't report on it, specifically because they couldn't verify the information contained within it. But then Buzzfeed decided to publish it anyway, and at that point any responsible news organisation is left in a pretty impossible position - either don't report on the thing everyone is talking about, or report unsubstantiated accusations.
Sometimes it feels like the media is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn't. Report unsubstantiated rumour? You're biased! Hold back information because it isn't verified? You're biased!
1000 * 0 is still 0.
If the Trump campaign had ordered a dossier of dirt on Hillary Clinton, and paid a respected former intelligence officer to provide it, would the claims made in it be credible?
Let's take one of the big 'fake news' items from the recent election, the one regarding Hillary's health. What do you make of this article by a former secret service agent on Hillary Clinton's health:
http://ijr.com/opinion/2016/09/260018-protected-hillary-clin...
None of the facts in that article are in disrepute either, and it's also from a respected secret service agent.
So are the questions it poses about Hillary's health more or less credible than the Trump dossier, and is it fake news or not?
The definition of fake news is getting stretched to include controversial news.
"Fake news" is fiction being sold as news on websites that look credible.
Flat out making stuff up, and polluting the media stream with it in order to manipulate people.
This is the easy case to solve. As people actually try to grapple with this, "fake news" will evolve, it will add parts of the truth to it dodge this 0th level definition.
A dossier actually compiled but unverified is still not fake news - it's a shady bad practice circa 1990. Unfortunately we're dealing with much worse problems today.
I mean that's the whole sub-prime mortgage problem all over again. Take a shitty product and wrap it in layers of respectability until people don't know any better.
When there is also evidence to suggest much of the contents of the dossier came from a 4-chan prank, it's hard to see where the difference is.
1) fake news: a recent phenomenon where fraudulent/fictional/completely made up literature is peddled as legitimate news. This is then distributed on steroids via social media. It uses unsuspecting people to transmit this.
Bias in news. This is an older problem and involves how news is presented and what spin is put. In the worst case it is deliberate in order to support an agenda.
There was a lot of anti-Trump news that basically matches what you said above:
> "fake news" will evolve, it will add parts of the truth to it dodge this 0th level definition
* Trump kicked a mother and baby out of rally
* Trump mocked a reporter's disability
* Trump proposed building database of muslims
And the list goes on.
This goes well beyond the realm of media bias, and in to direct collusion between media and the campaign.
I have no problem calling that 'fake news', which is perhaps a descriptive approach rather than a prescriptive one.
On top of that trump himself courted controversy at a rate and scale never seen before.
That's why this election was faced with drama unlike elections before them.
A lot of stuff listed above is sadly the regular calumny inflicted upon candidates. Iirc someone got kicked out of the race because of a bad photo op.
But These are all things that are problematic- without being fake news.
> * Trump mocked a reporter's disability
Do you deny that these things happened?
Has any other candidate - of any party - ever done anything like this?
Is the media supposed to pretend that it didn't happen?
This is where the "the facts have a well known liberal bias" joke comes from
For the first one, the mother who was supposedly 'kicked out' denies it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/...
For the second one, he was not mocking the reporter's disability. He was mocking the reporter for pulling a story and the impersonation he did is Trump's standard impersonation for a flustered, bumbling person. There is multiple video of him doing the exact same action to able bodied people - from Ted Cruz to military generals, and all sorts of others.
Not only that, but the reporter's disability is nothing like the action Trump did. The reporter actually has frozen/locked up joints e.g. almost the exact opposite of what Trump did.
So, either Trump knew of the reporter's disability and wasn't mocking it (completely different actions), or he didn't know of the reporter's disability (and therefore couldn't have been mocking it).
In either situation, Trump wasn't mocking the reporter's disability.
Unfortunately a freeze frame from the video of Trump's movement matches a still photo of the journalist, hence the belief that he was mocking the reporter's disability.
And this is why people say the media has a well known Trump bias.
I agree with you broadly, though. To me, fake news has absolutely no mooring in reality whatsoever and is pure clickbait - usually without political motive beyond getting angry people to click.
And that (apparently) can trace its origins to a 4-chan prank?
Personally, I do not.
http://gizmodo.com/4chan-idiots-claim-they-invented-the-trum...
You mean the ones contained in a dossier which accurately predicted several Trump related events that were not publicly known to be in planning at the time it was written, but were verifiable to have occurred as predicted before it was published?
Seems to me that it was plenty newsworthy.
BTW, it also reported that part of the carrot side of the carrot-and-stick blackmail and bribery by Russia was that Trump was promised a bribe of a share of Rosneft coincidentally the same size that was just sold off, on credit, to buyers concealed by various cutouts.
Gonna need more hard evidence before being concerned about this.
Occam's razor, but I'm guessing that was autocorrect.
Anyway, no, because there is no incentive for him to do what you are suggesting.
If however you believe his goal is to destabilise U.S. politics, then there is large incentive and zero downside for him to fake a sale of 19% of the company.
When did the people pushing the N Clinton conspiracies every say "this may or not be true..."???
So, your statement is disingenuous, at best.
Fallacy of gray. Just because you can't ask for perfect doesn't mean you can't ask for better.
I've addressed this elsewhere, but there is definitely cases where this can be done.
No, Tom Cruise is not moving to Buffalo, Missouri[1].
No, there is no attempt by lawmakers to legislate the disposal of unused semen[2].
Etc, etc. Some of these are satire, but some are just complete deliberate fakes.
This is a different class of problem to "OMG Hillary is a Nazi/OMG Trump bought Pizza" opinion spam.
"The White House has announced today at 7h30, through speaker ..., a piece of legislation that, quote: ~first paragraph summary of the legislation~.
You can read the full text here.
On the opinion of Bla bla, this legislation is innefective etc etc.
Disclaimer: Bla bla is not related to any of the mentioned organizations, though he declares he tends to agree with the opinion of former president Obama on most issues. You can read more about this commenter here."
Please, describe to me how someone can convey pure unadulterated facts in language, without imposing an "interpretation" on them.
It's an absurd fantasy. There's no possibility for a disembodied, perfectly objective voice conveying facts. So yes, in a sense, every news org favors a certain interpretation of the facts. But these subtle variations used to be accepted as par for the course.
The root cause of the widespread distrust of media is the turn on the right towards a form of Orwellian doublespeak in their media outlets, beginning in the 90s and ramping up heavily in the Bush years. You see it's most virulent expression in the way Trump speaks: he accuses the interim AG of "betrayal" for acting on her conscious. Or the way he talks about returning government "to the people" while staffing his cabinet with billionaires. It badly subverts the ability of people on the left and the right to meaningfully speak to one another, because our words no longer signify the same thing.