Monday 27 March 2017

Tiptoeing Through the Fake-News Minefield

“Fake” used to be an easy word to define, one that most people would agree upon, no dictionary required. Then along came the fake news tsunami—and suddenly that certainty came crashing down, a mudslide of competing views wrestling their way down the slippery slope of semantics.

For the last few months, the phrase fake news has been used to describe everything from, well, news that are fake, to stories with a lot—or even just a hint, depending on who’s talking—of ideology stuck to their words, even if all the facts in the story are accurate.

And the maelstrom of heated public conversation around the issue has now claimed another casualty, as Harvard Library drew the ire of many when it included in their otherwise useful “Fake News Guide” a controversial list of “False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical ‘News’ Sources” which includes such sites as Think Progress (“a news site dedicated to providing … rigorous reporting and analysis from a progressive perspective”), The Onion, and the Tribune Herald (the latter two being satirical sites). Details and analysis in this article by Harvard’s own Nieman Lab, an “online reporting enterprise focused on the future of news and innovation.”



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fake news, harvard, harvard library, American Libraries, United States, libraries, academic libraries

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