This bears no resemblance to reality... You can disagree with the “fake news” narrative, but you should have the decency to attack a good faith interpretation of it, not whatever straw man you’re alluding to.

Here’s the gist, just in case you are actually confused: there are some sites both large and small, from shady operations in the balkans to infowars, that publish stories completely made up. One example might be the child abuse enterprise run by Hillary Clinton from the basement of a pizzeria.

As we all know, that pizzeria didn’t even have a basement. So we can agree, hopefully, that this was an insane conspiracy theory.

Such stories were/are extensively shared on social media in the run up to the last election. And while they may not have been decisive, it’s hard to argue that they had no effect whatsoever. At the very least, they fed the cynicism and distrust already rotting in the core of society.

That’s the idea of „fake news“. You can dispute that it has any effect. You can argue that some good comes out of this free-for-all. But note that traditional media publishers simply play no role in this. To make this about some perceived failure of the New York Times takes quite a lot of logical gymnastics.

This is exactly what I mean. If it was on some obscure webpage, noone would know about it but main stream media copy-paste news like this just because they know people will click on it, not bothering to check if it is true or not. For the newssite that is less interesting as long as they get clicks. Of course this does not mean there are responsible journalists that does fact checking on everything, they just get less with time.