Instead of targeting stories that are completely false, however, the Left applies the label of “fake news” to outlets that report factual stories but draw political conclusions from them — in other words, they call everything with which they disagree “fake news.”
They obviously are, and it’s why conservatives have warmed to President Trump’s labeling left-leaning outlets such as CNN “fake news” even if CNN isn’t actually reporting anything factually false but merely drawing convenient leftist inferences from overblown coverage of core facts. Nonetheless, the Harvard guide, written by “social justice” professor Melissa Zimdars of Merrimack College, purports to compile a handy-dandy list of fake-news sites to avoid. The list provides ten different ways to label the stories on such sites:
- fake news (actual fake news)
- satire
- extreme bias (“sources that come from a particular point of view and may rely on propaganda, decontextualized information, and opinions distorted as facts”)
- conspiracy theory
- rumor mill
- state news
- junk science (“sources that promote pseudoscience, metaphysics, naturalistic fallacies, and other scientifically dubious claims”)
- hate news
- clickbait
- proceed with caution (“sources that may be reliable but whose contents require further verification”)
- political (“sources that provide generally verifiable information in support of certain points of view or political orientations”)
- credible (“sources that circulate news and information in a manner consistent with traditional and ethical practices in journalism”)
“The Trump Dystopian Nightmare: Nuclear War, Climate Change, and a Clash of Civilizations Are All on the Horizon.”
The list doesn’t mention Barack Obama’s favorite outlet, Vox; it doesn’t mention Slate or Salon, either.
Here are a few tips for determining reliability of information — tips that we all (including me) fail to use consistently but that could prove handy:
It’s far more likely that the real fake news is that the Left is capable of policing fake news honestly, rather than merely determining that sources they hate must be ruled out of the news realm entirely.
Source: National Review