The List of Fake News Sites

New York Magazine reported:

"As Facebook and now Google face scrutiny for promoting fake news stories, Melissa Zimdars, a communication and media professor from Merrimack College in Massachusetts, has compiled a handy list of websites you should think twice about trusting. “Below is a list of fake, false, regularly misleading, and otherwise questionable ‘news’ organizations that are commonly shared on Facebook and other social media sites,” Zimdars explains. “Many of these websites rely on ‘outrage’ by using distorted headlines and decontextualized or dubious information in order to generate likes, shares, and profits.” (Click here to see the list.)

Be warned: Zimdars’s list is expansive in scope, and stretches beyond the bootleg sites (many of them headquartered in Macedonia) that write fake news for the sole reason of selling advertisements. Right-wing sources and conspiracy theorists like Breitbart and Infowars appear alongside pure (but often misinterpreted) satire like the Onion and The New Yorker’s Borowitz Report."

For consumers seeking "hard" news (e.g., the raw who, what, when, and where something happened), some sources: Associated Press (AP), Reuters, and United Press International (UPI). What sources do you use for "hard" news?

Comments

[Joe Moore]

I clicked on the link and I see a bunch of text about methods and updates but NO LIST OF SITES.
Is there something wrong with my browser?

[George]

Everyone:

Nothing is wrong with your browser. It seemed simpler to let readers follow the embedded links above, rather than re-create the explanatory Google document about how the list was compiled:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3VAL6pLkT53V_81ZyitM/preview

And, that Google document contains a link to full list, which is still being updated:
http://d279m997dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/2016/11/Resource-False-Misleading-Clickbait-y-and-Satirical-%E2%80%9CNews%E2%80%9D-Sources-1.pdf

Sorry for the confusion,

George
Editor
http://ivebeenmugged.typepad.com

[Chanson de Roland]

Of course, there is the problem that Google and Facebook themselves are fake news sites, as both have been caught red-handed biasing their news site and/or search to favor the political views of their senior managers and/or their business interests. Google biased its search result in favor of Hillary Clinton and is now being prosecuted in the EU for biasing its search results to favor its products and/or partners. Facebook got caught biasing its trending news against conservative news and opinion. So both Google and Facebook are fake news sites.

And there is the problem that one man's fake news is another man's news. Which raises the question of what is news and what isn't? That is not such an easy question to answer. Merely being accurate as to the facts isn't enough, because one must decide which facts are relevant, and how to report those facts and with what relevant context to give a complete yet unbiased report so that people who occupy any point of the political spectrum would get fair, complete, and accurate news that fully informed them and that fairly represent all points of view. Yet such news would by turns both please and offend all readers equally and has the further disadvantages of favoring no person, issue, or party, while informing the people with something like the truth. No one does that kind of news reporting any more, if anyone ever did, and certainly not Google and Facebook, nor the establishment press (e.g., New York Times, ABC News, NPR, et al.) that presumably Professor Zimdars would approve of.

So what does a reader do to obtain fair, accurate, and complete reporting? I've found no better answer than this: One is faced with the arduous task of reading newspapers from all across the political spectrum. Personally, I read everything, from Fox News to NPR, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, et al. The Editor gives some good sources, supra, that report the raw news, which others only re-report or blog about and/or provide misrepresentative glosses of. The Editor certainly give us a good start. To his list, supra, I would also add McClatchy's DC bureau report at http://www.mcclatchydc.com/.

But getting the real news today is an arduous and time consuming process, because no one's news is all the news that is fit to print and that should be printed to give the best approximation of the truth.

So, as Edward R. Murrow, used to say: Goodnight and good luck.