My last column dealt with trying to define the fake news controversy. (In Search of: Fake News). Since it was published, not only has the controversy not gone away, it has seemed to intensify, and what qualifies as fake still hasn’t gotten any easier to define. The reason for the glut of misleading stories and half-truths is a little easier to figure out.
Don Lemon of CNN tried to boil it down to its simplest form: fake news is news that media outlets publish knowing the facts of the story are not true. If only it were that simple, but the truth rarely is.
The problem lies in the way news works these days. Whether reporters want to admit it or not, ideology has become a top factor in the way news is presented. It’s a way that in the past would have been unthinkable.
Before cable news networks…
