Russian influence, "fake news," and the news media..... who is really to blame?

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. The reason "fake news" has become a thing has to do with

the existence of a phenomenon called confirmation bias. People want to read things that reinforce what they already believe so they seek out sources that give them what they want. In the olden days your town probably had one newspaper (and maybe there was a morning edition and an evening one - I remember that from the early '60s), local news broadcasts in the evening from maybe three stations, followed by a half-hour national news broadcast - Walter Cronkite or the Huntley-Brinkely report. Then there was the late evening local news. The Iran hostage crisis in 1979 created another news show, Nightline. In those days news sources were limited to these, making it difficult for people to choose only those they agreed with. And both print and broadcast media were willing to fund news reporting.

CNN appeared in the 80s and really took off during the first Gulf War, and was soon followed by other cable stations, notably FOX. Reagan eliminated the fairness doctrine in the 80s, and news programs, especially cable and most especially FOX, started picking political sides. Then along came the internet, which made it easy to filter out information people didn't agree with; fake news was the inevitable results. Interestingly, one purveyor of fake news said it was much easier to sell it to right-wingers, who ate it up without ever bothering to confirm even the most absurd stories, while liberals wouldn't bite nearly as easily.

But even so, it's the human tendency toward confirmation bias that has made fake news a big thing.