Journalism

[Commentary] Fake news has been dominating real news since 2016’s US presidential election. Its effect has been debated and politicized, and in the process, the term itself has lost its original meaning and become something of a partisan insult. But an underlying question still needs answering: Can people distinguish legitimate sources of information from fake ones?

A majority of Americans are confident that they can, according to surveys. But it might be more difficult than it seems in an increasingly fragmented media landscape, with countless information sources tailored to every ideological taste. To find out how well-informed people can tell true from false, I conducted a study on a sample of about 700 undergraduates at the University of British Columbia. These were primarily political science students interested in current events, who said they frequently read and watch news, on and offline. I thought that they would easily spot fake news websites. I was wrong.

[Dominik Stecula is a PhD candidate in political science and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia.]

Republicans and Democrats offer starkly different assessments of the impact of several of the nation’s leading institutions – including the news media, colleges and universities and churches and religious organizations – and in some cases, the gap in these views is significantly wider today than it was just a year ago.

The national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted June 8-18 among 2,504 adults, finds that partisan differences in views of the national news media, already wide, have grown even wider. Democrats’ views of the effect of the national news media have grown more positive over the past year, while Republicans remain overwhelmingly negative. About as many Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents think the news media has a positive (44%) as negative (46%) impact on the way things are going in the country. The share of Democrats holding a positive view of the news media’s impact has increased 11 percentage points since last August (33%). Republicans, by about eight-to-one (85% to 10%), say the news media has a negative effect. These views have changed little in the past few years. While a majority of the public (55%) continues to say that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country these days, Republicans express increasingly negative views. A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58%) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45% last year. By contrast, most Democrats and Democratic leaners (72%) say colleges and universities have a positive effect, which is little changed from recent years.

President Donald Trump tweeted July 10 that former FBI Director James Comey “leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION” when he provided the New York Times with information about his meetings with the president. There’s no evidence that is true. The president’s tweet apparently came from a segment on Fox & Friends, which was a misleading interpretation of a report from the Hill newspaper on the contents of Comey’s memos. "James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media. That is so illegal!" the President tweeted.

The Hill said that, based on interviews with unnamed “officials familiar with the documents,” more than half of Comey’s memos contained classified information. Because of this, the circumstances of the creation and storage of the memos that did contain classified information could have run afoul of FBI protocols. But the report does not claim that Comey actually leaked classified information to the New York Times or anyone else. The president retweeted this misleading Fox & Friends video concerning these allegations less than 10 minutes before his outburst.

[Commentary] What might have been, decades ago, a compact between an audience and a trusted source of information—we’ll tell you who this gif-making guy is if you need us to—sours into something repugnant. At the same moment the president claims that the press is dangerous, has too much power … a press outlet (out of an overabundance of corporate caution) does something that looks like a dangerous abuse of power. This inversion plunks us all into the darkest possible timeline—the one where a president can “jokingly” hint at violence against reporters and his adherents feel empowered to threaten it more overtly.

On July 7, President Trump spent more than two hours with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, at the meeting of the G20 countries in Hamburg, and afterward Putin (as Machiavellian a leader as anyone could ask for) joked about the journalists who hurt the president. Presidents have more power than reporters (especially in Russia, where 82 journalists have been killed since 1993, most of them covering politics, corruption, and crime). But the fix is now in: The president says you can’t trust the press and the press says you can’t trust the president. If Machiavelli is right, that’s a recipe for an apocalypse.

Apparently, China’s government has told telecommunications carriers to block individuals’ access to virtual private networks by Feb. 1, thereby shutting a major window to the global internet. Beijing has ordered state-run telecommunications firms, which include China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, to bar people from using VPNs, services that skirt censorship restrictions by routing web traffic abroad. The clampdown will shutter one of the main ways in which people both local and foreign still manage to access the global, unfiltered web on a daily basis.

In keeping with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “cyber sovereignty” campaign, the government now appears to be cracking down on loopholes around the Great Firewall, a system that blocks information sources from Twitter and Facebook to news websites such as the New York Times and others.

A group of news organizations will begin an effort to win the right to negotiate collectively with the big online platforms – Facebook and Google -- and will ask for a limited antitrust exemption from Congress in order to do so.

It’s an extreme measure with long odds. But the industry considers it worth a shot, given its view that Google and Facebook, regardless of their intentions, are posing a bigger threat economically than President Trump is (so far) with his rhetoric. That’s how David Chavern, the chief executive of the News Media Alliance, put it. The Alliance, the main newspaper industry trade group, is leading the effort to bargain as a group. But it has buy-in across the spectrum of its membership, bringing together competitors like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, as well as scores of regional papers like The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, which face the gravest threats.

Rachel Maddow says someone tried to dupe her into airing a bogus scoop about collusion between President Trump's campaign and Russia, presumably intending to debunk the story later and tarnish Maddow's reputation in the process. Having avoided the trap, the MSNBC host hopes to serve as a cautionary tale for others in the media. “Heads up, everybody,” Maddow said on the air July 6. “Somebody for some reason appears to be shopping a fairly convincing fake NSA document that purports to directly implicate somebody from the Trump campaign in working with the Russians on their attack on the election. It is a forgery.”

National security officials across the federal government say they are seeing new restrictions on who can access sensitive information, fueling fears in the intelligence and security community that the Trump administration has stepped up a stealthy operation to smoke out leakers. Officials at various national security agencies also say they are becoming more concerned that the administration is carefully tracking what they’re doing and who they’re talking to — then plotting to use them as a scapegoat or accuse them of leaks.

One US official voiced concern over even talking to their superiors about a benign call from a reporter. The agency this official works for had started limiting staff’s access to information, they said, and it would make it far easier to figure out who was talking to people in the media. There was suspicion, the official said, that the agency was even tracking what they printed, to keep tabs on what information they were accessing. A half dozen officials across the national security community described to Politico a series of subtle and no-so-subtle changes that have led to an increasingly tense and paranoid working environment rooted in the White House’s obsession with leaks. President Donald Trump has regularly vented about his intense frustration with anonymously sourced stories, and has specifically targeted federal government entities, including intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI and the State Department.

President Donald Trump waved off critics and the "Fake News Media" on July 7 as he prepared to meet with world leaders at the annual Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany. "I will represent our country well and fight for its interests! Fake News Media will never cover me accurately but who cares! #MAGA," he wrote in an early morning tweet, using an abbreviation for his campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again." "My experience yesterday in Poland was a great one. Thank you to everyone, including the haters, for the great reviews of the speech!" the President tweeted.

CBS News had it wrong when it reported that AT&T's DirecTV was cheating customers with "bait and switch" tactics and overcharges over the past two years, AT&T told a group of Democratic senators who raised questions about the story. "Contrary to what is suggested in the story, AT&T is fully committed to honoring its deals, offers, and promotions—and AT&T meets that commitment every day.”